Rejecting the Wrongs of Yesterday: A Multifaceted Approach to Eliminating Racial Disparities in the Arkansas Criminal Justice System (original) (raw)

An Unjust Burden: The Disparate Treatment of Black Americans in the Criminal Justice System

2018

The evidence for racial disparities in the criminal justice system is well documented. The disproportionate racial impact of certain laws and policies, as well as biased decision making by justice system actors, leads to higher rates of arrest and incarceration in low-income communities of color. However, there is no evidence that these widely disproportionate rates of criminal justice contact and incarceration are making us safer. This brief presents an overview of the ways in which America's history of racism and oppression continues to manifest in the criminal justice system, and a summary of research demonstrating how the system perpetuates the disparate treatment of black people. The evidence presented here helps account for the hugely disproportionate impact of mass incarceration on millions of black people, their families, and their communities

And Justice for Some: Race, Crime, and Punishment in the US Criminal Justice System

Canadian Journal of Political Science, 2010

How has the criminal justice system~CJS! responded to racial diversity in the United States? Criminologists and sociologists have led the way in studying the reality of how Blacks are treated relative to Whites by law enforcement and the courts. There is now an extensive literature documenting the far greater likelihood of Blacks being arrested, sentenced and incarcerated compared to Whites, and a fairly contentious literature attempting to sort out the degree to which these racial disparities in outcomes are traceable to racial discrimination in the justice system. Far less attention, however, has been paid to studying perceptions of the fairness of the justice system in the eyes of Blacks and Whites, as well as the political consequences of these perceptions. We maintain that the huge race gap in these fairness perceptions, which is the focus of this paper, is critically important for a variety of reasons. As we will argue below, most Whites fail to see discrimination in the justice system and consequently believe the system is, for the most part, colour-blind and fair. Because they attribute racial disparities in justice outcomes to the greater criminality of Blacks, they are highly supportive of a slew of punitive policies as the best way to deal with crime. Most African Americans, on the other hand, see discrimination in virtu

Racialized Mass Incarceration: Poverty, Prejudice, and Punishment.

This essay maintains that the United States has developed a new, decidedly punitive law and order regime that at its core features racialized mass in-carceration. We will show that over the past thirty years the United States has gone on an incarceration binge, a binge that has fallen with radically disproportionate severity on the African American community. The rise of the racialized mass incarceration society is attributable to the simultaneous processes of urban socioeconomic restructuring that produced intensifi ed ghetto poverty and severe social disadvantage and dislocations through the 1980s to the present, on the one hand, and a series of social policy actions (and nonac-tions) that made jail or prison among the primary responses to urban social distress, on the other hand. During this time, social policy took this deeply punitive turn in substantial measure as a result of the effects of anti-black racism in American culture and public opinion. One result of these circumstances is a serious problem of legitimacy for the criminal justice system in the eyes of many Americans, especially but not exclusively African Americans.

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

Harvard Law Review, 2018

Since Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in 2014,1 the problem of police violence against African Americans has been a relatively salient feature of nationwide discussions about race. Across the ideological spectrum, people have had to engage the question of whether, especially in the context of policing, it’s fair to say that black lives are undervalued. While there is both a racial and a political divide with respect to how Americans have thus far answered that question, the emergence of Black Lives Matter movements2 has made it virtually impossible to be a bystander in the debate. Separate from whether racialized policing against African Americans is, in fact, a social phenomenon, is the contestable question about solutions: Assuming that African Americans are indeed the victims of overpolicing, meaning that by some metric they end up having more interactions with the police and more violent encounters than is normatively warranted, what can we do about it? And here, the...

The Mass Criminalization of Black Americans: A Historical Overview

Annual Review of Criminology

This review synthesizes the historical literature on the criminalization and incarceration of black Americans for an interdisciplinary audience. Drawing on key insights from new histories in the field of American carceral studies, we trace the multifaceted ways in which policymakers and officials at all levels of government have used criminal law, policing, and imprisonment as proxies for exerting social control in predominantly black communities from the colonial era to the present. By underscoring this antiblack punitive tradition in America as central to the development of crime-control strategies and mass incarceration, our review lends vital historical context to ongoing discussions, research, and experimentation within criminology and other fields concerned about the long-standing implications of institutional racism, violence, and inequity entrenched in the administration of criminal justice in the United States from the top down and the ground up. Expected final online publi...

CRIMINOLOGY: THE AFRICAN AMERICAN IMAGE

A modern thought concerning the criminal justice system often suggests the system is broken and is in desperate need of repair from the systemic racism that continues to be a part of the system. This assumption provokes the thought that the system was not coupled with radical principles in its birth. This grave misnomer concerning the makeup of the criminal justice system is exhausting. Historical findings in the criminal justice system have shown that the criminal justice system is not broken; rather it has been designed this way from its inception. The United States criminal justice system was created in a manner to control minority groups, namely the African American community. African Americans make up 13% of the United States of America, they account for 29% of arrest, 39% of prisoners in the state and federal facilities, 42% of death penalty cases, and 37% of executions. African Americans experience the full measure of the criminal justice system when they are offenders of breaking the law. Higginbotham noted his findings in his book Shades of Freedom: Radical Politics and the Presumptions of the American Legal Process (1996). Higginbotham found that White Americans ascribe very little justice to African Americans while turning a blind eye to their own criminality. The United States of America has devalued African American life through the justice system's inability to provide justice to those when victimized. Disappointingly, the United States Constitution initially deemed African Americans only 3/5th human. This tenet of our nation's government denied the divine personhood of all people of color. The savage caricature of African American males began during the TransAtlantic Slave Trade. The savage was the drawn up fear of the minds of White males that would later become a reality. Fear of the savage caricature created by the very same males that claimed superiority provoked the argument that African American males can only be kept in check through the oppression of slavery. Anti-black propaganda was spread throughout the nation through posters, so-called scientific journals, and crime novels. The construct of eugenics that gave life to the methods of Leopold and Hitler found its foundation here in the United States of America. Charles Carrol in his book, The Negro a Beast, attempted to propose the false idea that African Americans were not descendants from Adam, and were therefore not a part of the human family. Interethnic relations would produce beasts without souls and is the sole reason why God gave His Son to be sacrificed: To save the world from the sins of man's partnering with Negroes. It was these very images and thoughts that produced the structural makeup that shaped the US criminal justice system. The system is not in need of reform; the system was never right from its establishment. The US criminal justice system is a reflection of its society and African Americans have held a historic mistrust of the criminal justice system. During the TransAtlantic Slave Trade Era, African Americans were deemed inferior by White, Anglo-Saxons and were forced into slave labor to support the Southern economy. Efforts made to escape this existence prompted slave owners to employ the use of slave patrollers. This led to slave codes that fully embraced criminal law and settled almost every aspect of the life of the slave. These laws were only created for African Americans, and their breaking of the said laws came with grave consequences. The applications of these laws supported and promoted the ideology of Black inferiority and White Superiority. Historical race relations in the United States served as the central component in criminal justice failures.

The color of punishment: African Americans, skin tone, and the criminal justice system

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2018

Public debate and scholarly research has largely concentrated on the vast array of disparities between blacks and whites in their treatment by and experiences with the criminal justice system. Nevertheless, a growing body of research shows that African Americans' life chances are internally stratified by gradational differences in their skin tone. This study brings together research on race, color, and the criminal justice system by using nationally-representative data to examine whether (and to what extent) skin tone is associated with policing and punishment among African Americans. I find that skin tone is significantly associated with the probability of having been arrested and/or incarcerated, net of relevant controls. Further analyses, using a sub-sample of whites drawn from the same nationally-representative survey, show that disparities in policing and punishment within the black population along the colour continuum are often comparable to or even exceed disparities between blacks and whites as a whole.