NCJ Number
242297
Date Published
2010
Length
40 pages
Annotation
This essay examines racial, social, and criminal justice in America.
Abstract
Imprisonment rates for Black Americans have long been five to seven times higher than those for White. The immediate causes are well known: high levels of Black imprisonment resulting in part from higher Black than White arrest rates for violent crime and vastly higher Black drug arrest rates. Drug arrest disparities result from police decisions to concentrate attention on drugs Black sell and places where they sell them. Prison disparities are aggravated by laws prescribing sentences of unprecedented severity for offenses for which Blacks are disproportionately arrested. Those practices and policies were shaped by distinctive sociological, psychological, and political features of American race relations. Work on the psychology of American race relations shows that many White Americans resent efforts made to help Black Americans overcome the legacy of racism; that stereotypes of Black criminality support Whites' attitudes toward drug and crime control policy; and that statistical discrimination, colorism, Afro-American feature bias, and implicit bias cause Black offenders to be treated especially severely. Sociological work on racial stratification shows that Whites support policies that maintain traditional racial hierarchies. Contemporary drug and crime control policies are components of the Republican Southern Strategy, shaped by and exacerbating those phenomena to use crime as a "wedge issue" to appeal to Whites' racial anxieties and resentments. (Published Abstract)