Race Essay ⋆ Criminal Justice Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Disparities across the criminal justice system with respect to race show the following: African Americans constitute 13 percent of the general population of the United States but account for 50 percent of homicide victims; African Americans are arrested for drug offenses at rates from two to 11 times higher than that for whites; and more than 50 percent of the prison population are racial or ethnic minorities. Likewise, there continues to be remarkable differences in black and white perceptions of fairness in the criminal justice system. In a 2008 Gallup Poll African Americans were more than three times more likely than whites to report they have no confidence that law enforcement will treat racial and ethnic minorities fairly. Furthermore, African Americans were more than two times more likely than whites to think that the criminal justice system is biased against African Americans. Other data collection efforts produced similar findings. More African Americans (81.6 percent) than whites (60 percent) believe that racial profiling by the police is widespread, and race is the best predictor of support for or opposition to the death penalty.

The meaning of racial disparities is more controversial. Historically, the criminal justice system, particularly law enforcement, played an integral role in the control and subjugation of African Americans and other minorities in the United States. Just as African American attitudes toward the criminal justice system are more likely to be influenced by published reports of racial discrimination than those of white Americans, past racial injustices dating to slavery and continuing with Jim Crow and the establishment of the Black Codes in both the northern and southern states, and violence perpetrated by law enforcement during the Civil Rights movement, may continue to influence perceptions of fairness. Hubert Williams and Patrick Murphy go one step further, suggesting that past racial policies influence present day practices of the police:

The fact that the legal order not only countenanced but sustained slavery, segregation, and discrimination for most of our nation’s history and the fact that the police were bound to uphold that order—set a pattern for police behavior and attitudes toward minority communities that has persisted until the present day. That pattern includes the idea that minorities have fewer civil rights, that the task of the police is to keep them under control, and that the police have little responsibility for protecting them from crime within their communities.

Questions still remain about the extent to which racial discrimination persists among law enforcement personnel and in the courts. To answer this question social scientists have developed various frameworks to analyze race discrimination and performed statistical analyses to determine the factors that explain racial disparities. But social scientists, too, have been questioned for defining African Americans primarily by their participation in criminal behavior. The perception of what Katheryn Russell-Brown refers to as the “criminal Blackman” seems to be firmly implanted in public views on crime, partly because of the disproportionate amount of street crime committed by African Americans as well as the media’s portrayal of crime and race. In addition, early social science research lacked objectivity when considering the relationship between race and crime; while biases in this research have been addressed, questions remain as to whether social science frameworks adequately address race problems in the criminal justice system and whether they contribute to an unfair depiction of race and deviancy.

The History of African Americans, the Law, and the Criminal Justice System

A historical analysis helps identify the extent to which race relations in the criminal justice system have improved over time, how past practices may impact trust in the current criminal justice system, and how racially based practices in the past may continue in a different context.

Historically, African Americans were subject to different laws than white Americans. The slave codes, which lasted from 1619 to 1865, were a means to control slaves and perpetuate the institution of slavery. Punishments differed according to the race of the victim and the race of the offender. For the crime of assault with intent to kill, a white man could receive from one to 10 years in prison. For the same crime, if the victim was white and the offender black, the prescribed penalty was whipping, mutilation, exile, or death. Thus, early on blacks did not receive equal treatment under the law. The earliest form of policing experienced by blacks were volunteer slave patrols whose responsibilities were to prevent slave insurrections and to return runaway slaves to their owners. With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, governors were given broad authority to conscript individuals into these patrols. Subsequent to the Civil War, Black Codes passed in the North and the South used vagrancy and loitering statutes to control the movement of free African Americans. Thus, throughout the United States, African Americans came in contact with law enforcement personnel who enforced laws based on the color of the offender’s skin.

In addition, African Americans were not afforded the same protections from the police as their white counterparts. As an example, a series of race riots broke out in Philadelphia in the spring and summer of 1918. The catalyst for the riots was African American migration from the south and the movement of blacks from overcrowded Philadelphia neighborhoods into those previously occupied by whites only. When white mobs attacked black homes, several police officers aided the mobs by disarming African American homeowners in the vicinity and telling them to stay inside because they would not be able to protect them from future mob activity; in the midst of the riots more blacks than whites were arrested. In his historical analysis of the urban black experience, Khalil Gibran Muhammad found that during the Philadelphia riots some police officers did rescue African Americans from mobs rather than arresting them. However, a form of racial profiling was in effect whereby blacks who were unarmed and failed to protect themselves were more likely to be rescued by the police; black resistance to white attacks was likely to be criminalized, particularly when self-defense was aided by a weapon.

The more infamous Jim Crow laws operating mainly in the South between 1877 and the mid-1960s provide further examples of the historical African American experience with the criminal justice system. As a means of regulating social relationships between blacks and whites and ensuring white supremacy, Jim Crow laws placed the police squarely in the middle of enforcing legalized discrimination. Eugene “Bull” Connor was the police commissioner in Birmingham, Alabama, in the early 1960s when the police tried to control thousands of peaceful demonstrators, including children, with high pressure fire hoses and police dogs. In 1963, when the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, an organizing site for African American social activism, was bombed, killing four young girls inside, a dispatcher in the Birmingham Police Department purportedly withdrew police protection from the church while the bomb was planted. In addition to Jim Crow laws, Jim Crow etiquette proscribed informal relationships between blacks and whites, which undermined fairness in the criminal justice system. For example, African Americans were never to assert or even intimate that a white person was lying, nor were they to impute dishonorable intentions to a white person. These proscriptions made it virtually impossible for black persons to defend themselves in court against white victims or to bring white offenders to justice. The impact of this informal code on the justice system was portrayed in Harper Lee’s fictional account of an innocent man accused of rape in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Racial Discrimination in the Current Criminal Justice System

Current research suggests that racial discrimination in the criminal justice system occurs within certain contexts but is not systemic. Thus, while some police officers are racist and abusive, they are rotten apples in a barrel that largely consists of a diverse group of officers who have been trained to treat all citizens equally and are bureaucratically constrained to do so. Research shows that police officers are not significantly more likely to display racist attitudes than the general public, and that when police officers do express prejudiced attitudes, it does not affect their behavior. When arrest patterns in discretionary situations are examined, police often enforce their authority rather than the law so that disrespectful offenders are more likely to be arrested than their more cooperative counterparts. In this context, higher rates of African American arrests result because blacks are more likely to be perceived as demonstrating disrespect than whites in police–citizen encounters.

Racial bias has been documented in highway traffic stops. In racial profiling lawsuits in Maryland and New Jersey, African Americans were disproportionately stopped not because of their driving or the condition of their cars, but because of race. New York City’s aggressive stop and frisk program has been credited with reducing the crime rate, but a disproportionate number of those stopped are minorities. New York’s mayor denied that the police stop people based on race and that the racial data are the result of minorities committing a disproportionate number of crimes. However, the data in a class-action court case against the city showed that in tens of thousands of cases officers reported stopping people on the basis of “furtive movement” with only 5.4 percent of the cases resulting in an arrest and 6 percent resulting in a summons. It appears that aggressive law enforcement programs designed to reduce crime or target particular types of crimes (e.g. drug trafficking) are more likely to result in racially questionable practices.

In the courts, race is not a factor in bail decisions when danger to the community is taken into consideration. While the courts have been diligent in overseeing racial discrimination in the selection of a jury pool, the selection of a jury is subject to discrimination due to the highly discretionary nature of the peremptory challenge. There is compelling evidence that prosecutors strike minorities from serving on juries because of their belief that they will be less willing than whites to convict black defendants. In the case of peremptory challenges, the U.S. Supreme Court has muddied the standards by which peremptory challenges can be defended as race neutral, making it difficult in practice to successfully challenge racially motivated peremptory strikes.

There are relatively few studies on prosecutorial discretion and charging decisions, and these show conflicting results. There seems to be some agreement that when it comes to charging decisions, factors such as social class, employment history, and family history are more influential than race, but that these factors may produce race effects. At the federal level racial and ethnic minorities have been targeted for drug offenses, and their families have suffered disproportionately from the War on Drugs. While federal prosecutors defend a race-neutral policy, research shows that state prosecutors, motivated by the comparatively harsh sentences for crack cocaine mandated by federal law, target African Americans and Latinos for transfer from their jurisdiction to the federal courts, a form of selective prosecution.

Studies on sentencing decisions yield findings similar to those on charging decisions. Minorities are sentenced more harshly if they are young, male, unemployed, and have less education. In addition, racial minorities are sentenced more harshly than whites if they remain in jail prior to trial, are represented by a public defender, are convicted at trial rather than by plea, and have more serious prior criminal records. The cumulative effect of these decisions is that minorities compose a disproportionate percentage of the prison population.

Racial minorities who victimize whites are sentenced more severely than any other race-of-offender/race-of-victim combination, and this includes the death penalty. In 1972 the Supreme Court (Furman v. Georgia) ruled the application of the death penalty unconstitutional as a result of data showing racial discrimination in sentencing. Gregg v. Georgia in 1976 ended the moratorium on the death penalty when Georgia and other states made procedural changes to reduce discriminatory sentencing. Studies of judges show little difference in sentencing behavior by color. In explaining racial disparity in the death penalty in particular, it is possible that community outrage is more likely to be reflected in jury decisions when the offender is black and the victim is white.

The Study of Racial Crime

Historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad demonstrates that statistical studies in the 1890s, 1900s, and 1910s tied the disproportionate number of crimes committed by African Americans migrants in northern cities to a racial/cultural explanation of crime. As a result, African American became defined by crime. Racial attitudes prevented social scientists from recognizing the relationship between urbanization, poverty, education, and crime; crime committed by African Americans was framed as excessive, unnatural, and proof that members of the race were culturally inferior. At the same time, social workers were willing to acknowledge the need of white immigrant groups for social support, but thought that native blacks needed only their freedom to succeed. Limited employment opportunities, lack of housing, the denial of social services, and other forms of racial discrimination were discounted in studies of the relationship between race and crime. Subsequently researchers associated with the Chicago School of criminology established the field of urban ecology, which advanced environmental theories of poverty and crime.

Present-day studies correct for the flaws of early research using more sophisticated multivariate analyses that account for environmental factors. However, social scientists continue to perpetuate the race-crime linkage by emphasizing and labeling certain offenses as black crime and failing to establish a commensurate category of white crime for offenses such as driving under the influence of alcohol, fraud, and other white-collar crimes. Also, racial biases may be evident in areas not examined in social science research. For example, Katheryn Russell-Brown identified 92 cases of racial hoaxes that occurred between 1987 and 2006. Racial hoaxes take place when someone fabricates or actually commits a crime and blames it on someone of another race. The fact that the public, the press, and initially even the police buy into racial hoaxes reinforces “deviant centuries old images of Blacks” and suggests that the connection between race, crime, and fairness in the criminal justice system continues to be problematic.

Bibliography:

Brunson, Rodney, ed. Racial Profiling. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2008.
King, Gilbert. Devil in the Grove. New York: Harper-Perennial, 2012.
Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Russell-Brown, Katheryn. The Color of Crime. 2nd ed. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
Walker, Samuel, Cassia Spohn, and Miriam Delone. The Color of Justice. 5th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2012.
Williams, Hubert and Patrick Murphy. “The Evolving Strategy of the Police: A Minority View.” In The Police and Society, Victor Kappeler, ed. Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 1990.

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