Anti-racism in Criminology: An Oxymoron or the way Forward (original) (raw)
Related papers
Black Lives Matter in Criminology? Let’s Prove It
Race and Justice
This essay examines the the academic journey—graduate school to full professor—of an African American professor of criminology and criminal justice. The essay discusses the how criminology and criminologists address race issues and offers a wish list of strategies designed to address problematic practices and racial pitfalls within criminology programs.
10 LECTURES ON RACE AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE IN THE UNITED STATES 2017 Lecture 1 INTRODUCTION
This course offers a critical examination of race, ethnicity, and the administration of justice in the United States. This introduction is the first in a series of 10 lectures assigned as required reading. These essays supplement required articles, books, and audio-video material. They provide background, and they situate the readings in theoretical and historical contexts that are not found in the readings themselves. The lectures assigned in the first part of the course (lectures 2-6) critique the title of the course by examining the ordinary meanings of each word, and its use and meanings in the academic disciplines of criminology sociology, anthropology, among others. For example, lecture 2 examines meanings of the word 'race,' lecture 3 examines 'ethnicity, lecture 4 'administration,' lecture 5 'justice,' and lecture 6 the relationships among them—the 'and' and 'of.' While this approach may at first seem simplistic, the critiques of these words reveal a host of hidden assumptions, biases, and tendentious uses according to various political and economic interests. Race, for instance, means different things to different people at different times and according to their respective positions in society. In the last part of the semester the remaining lectures discuss the relationships among race, class, and gender; the politics of race; a critique of criminal justice studies and its treatment of racial issues; and finally the role of criminal justice apparatuses (police, courts, and prisons) in maintaining the social order that stratifies people according to race. As with the five lectures in the first part of the semester, the last lectures place each topic in historical context, and they use theoretical frameworks to explain the history and current conditions. The Argument of the Course Most analyses of the relationships among race, ethnicity, and the administration of justice use a cause and effect, linear logic. For instance, some would say that an abiding racism among the dominant White ruling class results in a maladministration of justice in which Black Americans are targeted for punitive measures by the criminal justice apparatus—i.e., cops, courts, and corrections. My argument, in contrast, is that racial categories are inseparable from the criminal justice apparatuses. They define and condition each other. Racial categories are what they are—Black, White, Latinx, Native, and so on—because of the history of justice administration, and conversely racial categories define and condition the criminal justice apparatuses. Cops are organized in certain ways and act in certain ways because of the way race is defined in the United States, and racial categories are shaped by police actions. Mine is a dialectical argument, not dependent on cause and effect linearity. Dialectical thinking comes across as abstruse so I use a short history to illustrate.
Critical Criminology (Syllabus) | Fall 2023 | Department of Sociology @ SUNY-BINGHAMTON
2023
This course adopts a sociological perspective to examine criminological issues, offering a critical approach to the study of crime, law, and social control. It will emphasize the relationship between structural inequalities along race, class, and gender lines and the institutionalized mechanisms of social and political control. Students will explore the theoretical foundations of critical criminology through case studies from both the United States and the Global South. Placing criminological issues within the broader context of social change, selected topics include policing and mass incarceration, political repression and social justice movements, moral panics and racialization, state crimes against democracy, current issues in immigration, and the militarization of law enforcement.
A call to dismantle systemic racism in criminal legal systems
Law and Human Behavior, 2022
Objectives: In October 2021, APA passed a resolution addressing ways psychologists could work to dismantle systemic racism in criminal legal systems. The present report, developed to inform APA's policy resolution, details the scope of the problem and offers recommendations for policy and psychologists to address the issue by advancing related science and practice. Specifically, it acknowledges the roots of modern-day racial and ethnic disparities in rates of criminalization and punishment for people of color as compared to White people. Next, the report reviews existing theory and research that helps explain the underlying psychological mechanisms driving racial and ethnic disparities in criminal legal systems (e.g., endorsement of negative stereotypes, explicit and implicit bias). It also elucidates how racially disparate treatment generates downstream negative mental health consequences for people of color. Conclusions: Evidence-based recommendations to work toward eliminating systemic racism in the criminal legal systems include (a) rigorous measurement and analysis of disparities; (b) targeted changes in policy, practice, and law; (c) increased access to culturally aware and competent services and interventions; (d) the proliferation of education and training programs regarding racial bias; (e) increased attention to issues of intersectionality; and (f) promotion of diversity and fair-mindedness among criminal legal actors.
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.
Gibril Sesay, 2016
The United States law enforcement agencies have been subjected to extreme cynicism by the African-American minority group over alleged police malpractices that targeted Africans or people of color on trivial infractions that often resulted in extreme police brutalities, imprisonment, and harassment by law enforcement personnel across the nation. From Rodney King and Amadu Diallo to Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri. Black men in America are constantly being beaten, murdered, and treated unjustly by law enforcement that had sworn to protect and serve them is “raising concerns about how police treat citizens” Ross (2013). Police brutalities against African-Americans under the color of the law have become disconcerting as State penitentiaries are filling up with African American men, creating fatherless and dysfunctional homes in African Communities. According to Taylor (2013) “The idea that killable bodies are in fact (re)produced by the law is fundamental to understanding how the deadly side of bio-politics manifests and mobilizes itself against African Americans”.