Estimated Reading Time: 20 minutes
In The Very Good Gospel, Lisa Sharon Harper wrote, "The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University discovered that implicit bias impacts every level of the justice system, from first encounters with police to the decision whether to arrest, shoot, or release a detained person. Implicit bias impacts the booking process, the quality and content of legal defense, judge selection, a jury's perceptions of the defendant, and sentencing" (Harper, 2016, p.151).
I am continuing in the systemic racism series here on the Broadening the Narrative blog. To learn more about this series, you can read the first six posts on the BtN blog. Today’s post addresses systemic racism in the justice system. I will include the data and history behind the current disparities in the justice system, provide action steps, and link recommended resources for further exploration and education.
In The Very Good Gospel, Lisa Sharon Harper wrote, "The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University discovered that implicit bias impacts every level of the justice system, from first encounters with police to the decision whether to arrest, shoot, or release a detained person. Implicit bias impacts the booking process, the quality and content of legal defense, judge selection, a jury's perceptions of the defendant, and sentencing" (Harper, 2016, p.151).
I am continuing in the systemic racism series here on the Broadening the Narrative blog. To learn more about this series, you can read the first six posts on the BtN blog. Today’s post addresses systemic racism in the justice system. I will include the data and history behind the current disparities in the justice system, provide action steps, and link recommended resources for further exploration and education.
Data
Let’s look at policing, sentencing, and incarceration data.
Policing
Policing
In the Washington Post article “What Data on 20 Million Traffic Stops Can Tell Us About ‘Driving While Black,’” John Sides interviewed Frank Baumgartner, Derek Epp, and Kelsey Shoub about their book “Suspect Citizens.” Their research led to the following results:
- “We found that, compared to their share in the population, blacks are almost twice as likely to be pulled over as whites — even though whites drive more on average, by the way. We also discovered that blacks are more likely to be searched following a stop. Just by getting in a car, a black driver has about twice the odds of being pulled over, and about four times the odds of being searched. Hispanic drivers, overall, are no more likely than whites to be pulled over, but much more likely to be searched.”
- “Contraband hit rates are 36, 33 and 22 percent for whites, blacks and Hispanics, respectively. So, yes, whites are more likely to be found with contraband. Note that all contraband hits do not lead to arrest, as many ‘hits’ are very small amounts. But our general point is that the stereotyping that seems to be widely used — based on race, age and gender — puts young men of color at a distinct disadvantage. They are over-targeted, statistically speaking.”
According to “The Ultimate White Privilege Statistics & Data Post”:
- “Young black boys/men, ages 15-19, are 21 times more likely to be to be shot and killed by the police than young white boys/men.
- Black [people] are less than 13% of the U.S. population, and yet they are 31% of all fatal police shooting victims, and 39% of those killed by police even though they weren’t attacking.
Elise Hansen reported in the CNN article “The Forgotten Minority in Police Shootings,” "Native Americans are killed in police encounters at a higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...For every 1 million Native Americans, an average of 2.9 of them died annually from 1999 to 2015 as a result of a ‘legal intervention,’ according to a CNN review of CDC data broken down by race. The vast majority of these deaths were police shootings. But a few were attributed to other causes, including manhandling. That mortality rate is 12% higher than for African-Americans and three times the rate of whites.”
Sentencing
On the Ben & Jerry’s website, the “7 Ways We Know Systemic Racism is Real” article cites researchers that found, “Overall, black students represent 16% of student enrollment and 27% of students referred to law enforcement. And once black children are in the criminal justice system, they are 18 times more likely than white children to be sentenced as adults...Blacks make up 13% of the population, they represent about 40% of the prison population. Why is that? Perhaps because if a black person and a white person each commit a crime, the black person has a better chance of being arrested. It’s also true that, once arrested, black people are convicted more often than white people. And for many years, laws assigned much harsher sentences for using or possessing crack, for example, compared to cocaine. Finally, when black people are convicted, they are about 20% more likely to be sentenced to jail time, and typically see sentences 20% longer than those for whites who were convicted of similar crimes. And as we know, a felony conviction means, in many states, that you lose your right to vote. Right now in America, more than 7.4% of the adult African American population is disenfranchised (compared to 1.8% of the non-African American population).”
In the Vox article "Report: Black Men Get Longer Sentences for the Same Federal Crime as White Men," German Lopez wrote, “If you’re convicted of a federal offense, on average you will serve more time — for the exact same crime — if you’re black than if you’re white. That’s the conclusion of a new report by the US Sentencing Commission, which found that black men got 19.1 percent longer sentences for the same federal crimes as white men between fiscal years 2012 and 2016. This was after accounting for several variables, including criminal history, whether someone pleaded guilty, age, education, and citizenship."
And when it comes to the death penalty, the Death Penalty Information Center reports that black people make up 41.56% of those on death row. Latinos constitute 13.47%, white people are 42.1%, and the category of “other” is 2.87%. For context, according to the U.S. Census Bureau statistics by race that I accessed on April 18, 2020, black people are 13.4% of the population, Hispanic or Latino are 18.3%, and white people are 76.5%.
Incarceration
Regarding the race of the imprisoned, the Federal Bureau of Prisons last updated the data I accessed on April 18, 2020 on April 11, 2020. Asians were 1.5% of the inmate population, black people were 37.6%, Native Americans were 2.3%, and white people were 58.6%. I will add to the U.S. Census Bureau statistics by race cited above that Asians are 5.9% of the population.
John Gramlich wrote in the Pew Research Center article, “The Gap Between the Number of Blacks and Whites in Prison is Shrinking”:
- “At the end of 2017, federal and state prisons in the United States held about 475,900 inmates who were black and 436,500 who were white – a difference of 39,400, according to BJS.”
- “The gap between white and Hispanic imprisonment also narrowed between 2007 and 2017, but not because of a decrease in Hispanic prisoners. Instead, the number of white prisoners fell while the number of Hispanic inmates increased slightly. At the end of 2017, there were 100,000 more white inmates than Hispanic inmates (436,500 vs. 336,500), down from an inmate difference of 169,400 in 2007 (499,800 white inmates vs. 330,400 Hispanic inmates).”
- “Another way of considering racial and ethnic differences in the nation’s prison population is by looking at the imprisonment rate, which tallies the number of prisoners per 100,000 people. In 2017, there were 1,549 black prisoners for every 100,000 black adults – nearly six times the imprisonment rate for whites (272 per 100,000) and nearly double the rate for Hispanics (823 per 100,000).”
History
What’s the explanation for the disparities in the data? The dehumanizing answer would be something along the lines of, “Well, people of color just commit more crimes.” This betrays a bias that the speaker views people of color as more criminal than white people.
A more comprehensive and balanced answer would reach back into the past to determine how our present has been impacted. Dr. Gary Potter wrote a six-part series titled “The History of Policing in the United States.” The series can be read on the Eastern Kentucky University Police Studies Online page.
- “In the Southern states the development of American policing followed a different path. The genesis of the modern police organization in the South is the ‘Slave Patrol’ (Platt 1982). The first formal slave patrol was created in the Carolina colonies in 1704 (Reichel 1992). Slave patrols had three primary functions: (1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside of the law, if they violated any plantation rules. Following the Civil War, these vigilante-style organizations evolved in modern Southern police departments primarily as a means of controlling freed slaves who were now laborers working in an agricultural caste system, and enforcing ‘Jim Crow’ segregation laws, designed to deny freed slaves equal rights and access to the political system.“ (Part 1)
- “More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a response to ‘disorder.’ What constitutes social and public order depends largely on who is defining those terms, and in the cities of 19th century America they were defined by the mercantile interests, who through taxes and political influence supported the development of bureaucratic policing institutions. These economic interests had a greater interest in social control than crime control.” (Part 1)
- “The modern police force not only provided an organized, centralized body of men (and they were all male) legally authorized to use force to maintain order, it also provided the illusion that this order was being maintained under the rule of law, not at the whim of those with economic power. Defining social control as crime control was accomplished by raising the specter of the ‘dangerous classes’... This underclass was easily identifiable because it consisted primarily of the poor, foreign immigrants and free blacks (Lundman 1980: 29). This isolation of the ‘dangerous classes’ as the embodiment of the crime problem created a focus in crime control that persists to today, the idea that policing should be directed toward ‘bad’ individuals, rather than social and economic conditions that are criminogenic in their social outcomes...Early American police departments shared two primary characteristics: they were notoriously corrupt and flagrantly brutal. This should come as no surprise in that police were under the control of local politicians...Walker goes so far as to call municipal police ‘delegated vigilantes,’ entrusted with the power to use overwhelming force against the ‘dangerous classes’ as a means of deterring criminality.” (Part 2)
- “In the post-Civil War era, municipal police departments increasingly turned their attention to strike-breaking. By the late 19th century union organizing and labor unrest was widespread in the United States...The use of public employees to serve private economic interests and to use legally-ordained force against organizing workers was both cost-effective for manufacturing concerns and politically useful, in that it confused the issue of workers rights with the issue of crime (Harring 1981, 1983)...Early police officers began carrying firearms even when this was not department policy despite widespread public fear that this gave the police and the state too much power. Police departments formally armed their officers only after officers had informally armed themselves. The use of force to effect an arrest was as controversial in the 1830s and 1840s as it is today. Because the police were primarily engaged in enforcing public order laws against gambling and drunkenness, surveilling immigrants and freed slaves, and harassing labor organizers, public opinion favored restrictions on the use of force. But the value of armed, paramilitary presence, authorized to use, indeed deadly force, served the interests of local economic elites who had wanted organized police departments in the first place... In addition to strike-breaking they frequently engaged in anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic violence, such as attacking community social events on horseback, under the pretense of enforcing public order laws. Similarly, the Texas Rangers were originally created as a quasi-official group of vigilantes and guerillas used to suppress Mexican communities and to drive the Commanche off their lands.” (Part 3)
- “By the end of the 19th century municipal police departments were firmly entrenched in the day-to-day political affairs of big-city political machines. Police provided services and assistance to political allies of the machine and harassed, arrested and interfered with the political activities of machine opponents...Politicians also employed and protected the many white-youth gangs that roamed the cities, using them to intimidate opponents, to get out the vote (by force if necessary), and to extort ‘political contributions’ from local businesses. At the dawn of the 20th century, police were, at least de facto, acting as the enforcement arm of organized crime in virtually every big city. Police also engaged in and helped organize widespread election fraud in their role as political functionaries for the machine. In return, police had virtual carte blanche in the use of force and had as their primary business not crime control, but the solicitation and acceptance of bribes. It is incorrect to say the late 19th and early 20th century police were corrupt, they were in fact, primary instruments for the creation of corruption in the first place.” (Part 4)
- “The advent of Prohibition (1919-1933) only made the situation worse. The outlawing of alcohol combined with the fact that the overwhelming majority of urban residents drank and wished to continue to drink not only created new opportunities for police corruption but substantially changed the focus of that corruption. During prohibition lawlessness became more open, more organized, and more blatant...By the end of prohibition, the corrupting of American policing was almost total. The outrages perpetrated by municipal police departments in the ensuing years inevitably brought cries for reform. Initially, reform efforts took the form of investigative commissions looking into both police and political corruption. As is the case today, these commissions usually were formed in response to a specific act of outrageous conduct by the police. And, like today, those commissions upon investigating the specific incident in their charge, uncovered widespread corruption, misfeasance and malfeasance.” (Part 4)
- “Commissions, while shedding light on the extent of corruption and serving to inform the public, have little lasting impact on police practices. As external organizations they report, recommend and dissolve. The police department continues on as a bureaucratic entity resistant to both outside influence and reform...Other attempts to reform policing have come from within the ranks of the departments themselves. Reform police commissioners and chiefs, often appointed in the wake of one or another scandals, made efforts to change the nature of the police bureaucracy itself...Similarly, reform-minded police executives began to try to restructure the department itself, making it more bureaucratic, with an internal clear chain-of-command...Rather than spreading through an entire department, narcotics and prostitution operators could now corrupt a smaller, more discreet unit and still maintain a high level of immunity from police interference with their illegal businesses.” (Part 5)
- “By the 1950s, police professionalism was being widely touted as a better way to improve police effectiveness and reform policing as an institution...Professionalism antagonized tensions between the police and the communities they served and created rancor and dissension within the departments themselves. The crime control tactics recommended by the professionalism movement, such as aggressive stop and frisk procedures, created widespread community resentment, particularly among young, minority males who were most frequently targeted. Police professionalism and the military model of policing became synonymous with police repression. Furthermore, as Walker points out ‘a half century of professionalization had created police departments that were vast bureaucracies, inward looking, isolated from the public, and defensive in the face of any criticism’ (Walker 1996). In addition professionalization had done nothing to rectify racist and sexist hiring practices that had been in effect since police departments had been created in the 1830s.” (Part 5)
- “A highly authoritarian police bureaucracy not only isolated itself from the public, but from the very police officers whose conduct it was trying to control. By the mid-1960s police officers had responded with an aggressive and widespread police unionization campaign...reduced municipal tax bases, caused primarily by the exodus of white, affluent executives and professionals to the suburbs in the 1970s; a prolonged economic recession in the 1970s and early 1980s; and fiscal mismanagement in many cities, led to layoffs of police and other municipal workers, and rollbacks in benefits. In fact, unions became an attractive scapegoat for municipal problems. Politicians, administrators and the media all blamed demands by public workers for the financial straits in which the cities had been floundering. Despite the fact that the fiscal crisis had been caused by much larger social and economic trends, blaming police and other workers allowed police administrators and politicians to once again reorganize the police. This reorganization has been dubbed the ‘Taylorization of the police’ by historian Sydney Harring (1981)... Over the years science became synonymous with professionalism for many police executives. The use of fingerprints, serology, toxicology chemistry and scientific means for collecting evidence were emphasized as part of a professional police force. In terms of technological advancements, new ways of maintaining police record systems and enhancing police communications, such as the police radio, became priorities. The emphasis was on efficiency and crime-fighting, with the social work aspects of policing deemphasized and discouraged. The hope was also that the professional, scientific crime-fighters would be less susceptible to corruption. It is therefore a further irony of policing that in Philadelphia new communications technologies were put to use in establishing what is arguably the first ‘call girl’ system in the United States, calling out for prostitutes using police communications systems.” (Part 5)
- “By the 1960s, massive social and political changes were occurring in the United States. The civil rights movement was challenging white hegemony in the South and racist social policies in the North. The use of professional police forces to suppress the Civil Rights movement, often by brute force did irreparable damage to American policing. From 1964 to 1968 riots, usually sparked by police brutality or oppression, rocked the major cities in the United States. Police handling of large demonstrations against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s was also controversial...National commissions created to investigate riots and political instability frequently and universally pointed to the police as a source of social tension. The police and criminal justice system response was twofold. First in 1968, as part of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, large sums of federal money were made available for rather cosmetic police-community relations programs, which were mostly media focused attempts to improve the police image. By the 1980s many police departments had begun to consider a new strategy, community policing. Community policing emphasized close working relations with the community, police responsiveness to the community, and common efforts to alleviate a wide variety of community problems, many of which were social in nature.” (Part 6)
- “From the beginning American policing has been intimately tied not to the problem of crime, but to exigencies and demands of the American political-economy...As we look to the 21st century, it now appears likely that a new emphasis on science and technology, particularly related to citizen surveillance; a new wave of militarization reflected in the spread of SWAT teams and other paramilitary squads; and a new emphasis on community pacification through community policing, are all destined to replay the failures of history as the policies of the future.” (Part 6)
When it comes to the administration of the death penalty, in the Third Edition of the report Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror by the Equal Justice Initiative, researchers found that “More than eight in ten American lynchings between 1889 and 1918 occurred in the South, and more than eight in ten of the nearly 1400 legal executions carried out in this country since 1976 have been in the South. Modern death sentences are disproportionately meted out to African Americans accused of crimes against white victims; efforts to combat racial bias and create federal protection against racial bias in the administration of the death penalty remain thwarted by familiar appeals to the rhetoric of states' rights; and regional data demonstrates that the modern death penalty in America mirrors racial violence of the past. As contemporary proponents of the American death penalty focus on form rather than substance by tinkering with the aesthetics of lethal punishment to improve procedures and methods, capital punishment remains rooted in racial terror - ‘a direct descendant of lynching’” (Equal Justice Initiative, 2017, p.64).
As Bryan Stevenson, the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, stated in the CNN article by the same name, “Slavery didn't end in 1865, it just evolved.” In the HuffPost article, “The Evolution: Slavery To Mass Incarceration,” Aristotle Jones explicated, “The United States called by some the land of the free and the home of the brave, leads the world in incarceration, with over 2 million people behind bars; that is a 500 percent increase over the past 40 years. Moreover, the United States has just five percent of the world population, yet holds approximately 25 percent of its prisoners...If history is any guide, it will show that mass incarceration is no mistake or policy mishap, but a system evolved from America’s greatest sin: slavery. Slavery was abolished in 1865 with the end of the Civil war and passing of the 13th amendment. The racial caste in the United States should have ended as well. However, the idea of race as a marker of value continued. After reconstruction, the majority of whites during this time believed newly freed African Americans were too lazy to work, which surged legislators to pass the black codes. This was essentially a system of white control. These codes varied from state to state, but were rooted from slavery, and they foreshadowed Jim Crow laws to come...Clearly, the black codes intentions were to treat and see African-Americans as property, not persons. Furthermore, the black codes were intended to secure a steady supply of cheap labor, and continued to assume the inferiority of the freed slaves.Over time, the black codes were overturned, and federal legislation protecting newly freed slaves was passed during the Reconstruction Era...With the passage of these legislations and the protection of federal troops, black advancement started to take place...With the help of the Ku Klux Klan and their violent campaign of terrorism, conservatives kept their promise of redeeming the south, federal troops retreated, and African-Americans once again found themselves, stuck, in the abyss of white supremacy. Again, history seemed to be repeating itself and vagrancy laws where ‘mischief’ and ‘insulting gestures’ were crimes enforced disproportionately against blacks. Aggressive enforcement of these ‘criminal offenses’ birthed convict leasing, which in turn helped rebuild the south, and supplied labor for farming, rail road, mining, and logging. During convict leasing, prisoners were contracted under the legal status of laborers and were sold to the highest private bidder...During convict leasing, incarceration grew ten times faster than the general population, and ‘prisoners became younger and blacker, and the length of their sentences soared,’ says David Oshinsky author of Worse Than Slavery. Although convict leasing ended, Michelle Alexander argues, ‘The criminal justice system was strategically employed to force African-Americans back into a system of extreme repression and control, a tactic that would continue to prove successful for generations to come.’ During this time as well Jim Crow was thriving and the idea of race inferiority remained...Today a dark cloud of guilt is disproportionately assigned to many people of color who are arrested, convicted of crimes, and sent to prison. Black men between the ages of 18 to 35, their prime years to learn and grow, have a one and three chance of going to prison in their lifetime.”
In summary, slavery became convict leasing which became mass incarceration, with black people disproportionately targeted and more directly impacted.
- “We found that, compared to their share in the population, blacks are almost twice as likely to be pulled over as whites — even though whites drive more on average, by the way. We also discovered that blacks are more likely to be searched following a stop. Just by getting in a car, a black driver has about twice the odds of being pulled over, and about four times the odds of being searched. Hispanic drivers, overall, are no more likely than whites to be pulled over, but much more likely to be searched.”
- “Contraband hit rates are 36, 33 and 22 percent for whites, blacks and Hispanics, respectively. So, yes, whites are more likely to be found with contraband. Note that all contraband hits do not lead to arrest, as many ‘hits’ are very small amounts. But our general point is that the stereotyping that seems to be widely used — based on race, age and gender — puts young men of color at a distinct disadvantage. They are over-targeted, statistically speaking.”
According to “The Ultimate White Privilege Statistics & Data Post”:
- “Young black boys/men, ages 15-19, are 21 times more likely to be to be shot and killed by the police than young white boys/men.
- Black [people] are less than 13% of the U.S. population, and yet they are 31% of all fatal police shooting victims, and 39% of those killed by police even though they weren’t attacking.
Elise Hansen reported in the CNN article “The Forgotten Minority in Police Shootings,” "Native Americans are killed in police encounters at a higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...For every 1 million Native Americans, an average of 2.9 of them died annually from 1999 to 2015 as a result of a ‘legal intervention,’ according to a CNN review of CDC data broken down by race. The vast majority of these deaths were police shootings. But a few were attributed to other causes, including manhandling. That mortality rate is 12% higher than for African-Americans and three times the rate of whites.”
Sentencing
On the Ben & Jerry’s website, the “7 Ways We Know Systemic Racism is Real” article cites researchers that found, “Overall, black students represent 16% of student enrollment and 27% of students referred to law enforcement. And once black children are in the criminal justice system, they are 18 times more likely than white children to be sentenced as adults...Blacks make up 13% of the population, they represent about 40% of the prison population. Why is that? Perhaps because if a black person and a white person each commit a crime, the black person has a better chance of being arrested. It’s also true that, once arrested, black people are convicted more often than white people. And for many years, laws assigned much harsher sentences for using or possessing crack, for example, compared to cocaine. Finally, when black people are convicted, they are about 20% more likely to be sentenced to jail time, and typically see sentences 20% longer than those for whites who were convicted of similar crimes. And as we know, a felony conviction means, in many states, that you lose your right to vote. Right now in America, more than 7.4% of the adult African American population is disenfranchised (compared to 1.8% of the non-African American population).”
In the Vox article "Report: Black Men Get Longer Sentences for the Same Federal Crime as White Men," German Lopez wrote, “If you’re convicted of a federal offense, on average you will serve more time — for the exact same crime — if you’re black than if you’re white. That’s the conclusion of a new report by the US Sentencing Commission, which found that black men got 19.1 percent longer sentences for the same federal crimes as white men between fiscal years 2012 and 2016. This was after accounting for several variables, including criminal history, whether someone pleaded guilty, age, education, and citizenship."
And when it comes to the death penalty, the Death Penalty Information Center reports that black people make up 41.56% of those on death row. Latinos constitute 13.47%, white people are 42.1%, and the category of “other” is 2.87%. For context, according to the U.S. Census Bureau statistics by race that I accessed on April 18, 2020, black people are 13.4% of the population, Hispanic or Latino are 18.3%, and white people are 76.5%.
Incarceration
Regarding the race of the imprisoned, the Federal Bureau of Prisons last updated the data I accessed on April 18, 2020 on April 11, 2020. Asians were 1.5% of the inmate population, black people were 37.6%, Native Americans were 2.3%, and white people were 58.6%. I will add to the U.S. Census Bureau statistics by race cited above that Asians are 5.9% of the population.
John Gramlich wrote in the Pew Research Center article, “The Gap Between the Number of Blacks and Whites in Prison is Shrinking”:
- “At the end of 2017, federal and state prisons in the United States held about 475,900 inmates who were black and 436,500 who were white – a difference of 39,400, according to BJS.”
- “The gap between white and Hispanic imprisonment also narrowed between 2007 and 2017, but not because of a decrease in Hispanic prisoners. Instead, the number of white prisoners fell while the number of Hispanic inmates increased slightly. At the end of 2017, there were 100,000 more white inmates than Hispanic inmates (436,500 vs. 336,500), down from an inmate difference of 169,400 in 2007 (499,800 white inmates vs. 330,400 Hispanic inmates).”
- “Another way of considering racial and ethnic differences in the nation’s prison population is by looking at the imprisonment rate, which tallies the number of prisoners per 100,000 people. In 2017, there were 1,549 black prisoners for every 100,000 black adults – nearly six times the imprisonment rate for whites (272 per 100,000) and nearly double the rate for Hispanics (823 per 100,000).”
History
What’s the explanation for the disparities in the data? The dehumanizing answer would be something along the lines of, “Well, people of color just commit more crimes.” This betrays a bias that the speaker views people of color as more criminal than white people.
A more comprehensive and balanced answer would reach back into the past to determine how our present has been impacted. Dr. Gary Potter wrote a six-part series titled “The History of Policing in the United States.” The series can be read on the Eastern Kentucky University Police Studies Online page.
- “In the Southern states the development of American policing followed a different path. The genesis of the modern police organization in the South is the ‘Slave Patrol’ (Platt 1982). The first formal slave patrol was created in the Carolina colonies in 1704 (Reichel 1992). Slave patrols had three primary functions: (1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside of the law, if they violated any plantation rules. Following the Civil War, these vigilante-style organizations evolved in modern Southern police departments primarily as a means of controlling freed slaves who were now laborers working in an agricultural caste system, and enforcing ‘Jim Crow’ segregation laws, designed to deny freed slaves equal rights and access to the political system.“ (Part 1)
- “More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a response to ‘disorder.’ What constitutes social and public order depends largely on who is defining those terms, and in the cities of 19th century America they were defined by the mercantile interests, who through taxes and political influence supported the development of bureaucratic policing institutions. These economic interests had a greater interest in social control than crime control.” (Part 1)
- “The modern police force not only provided an organized, centralized body of men (and they were all male) legally authorized to use force to maintain order, it also provided the illusion that this order was being maintained under the rule of law, not at the whim of those with economic power. Defining social control as crime control was accomplished by raising the specter of the ‘dangerous classes’... This underclass was easily identifiable because it consisted primarily of the poor, foreign immigrants and free blacks (Lundman 1980: 29). This isolation of the ‘dangerous classes’ as the embodiment of the crime problem created a focus in crime control that persists to today, the idea that policing should be directed toward ‘bad’ individuals, rather than social and economic conditions that are criminogenic in their social outcomes...Early American police departments shared two primary characteristics: they were notoriously corrupt and flagrantly brutal. This should come as no surprise in that police were under the control of local politicians...Walker goes so far as to call municipal police ‘delegated vigilantes,’ entrusted with the power to use overwhelming force against the ‘dangerous classes’ as a means of deterring criminality.” (Part 2)
- “In the post-Civil War era, municipal police departments increasingly turned their attention to strike-breaking. By the late 19th century union organizing and labor unrest was widespread in the United States...The use of public employees to serve private economic interests and to use legally-ordained force against organizing workers was both cost-effective for manufacturing concerns and politically useful, in that it confused the issue of workers rights with the issue of crime (Harring 1981, 1983)...Early police officers began carrying firearms even when this was not department policy despite widespread public fear that this gave the police and the state too much power. Police departments formally armed their officers only after officers had informally armed themselves. The use of force to effect an arrest was as controversial in the 1830s and 1840s as it is today. Because the police were primarily engaged in enforcing public order laws against gambling and drunkenness, surveilling immigrants and freed slaves, and harassing labor organizers, public opinion favored restrictions on the use of force. But the value of armed, paramilitary presence, authorized to use, indeed deadly force, served the interests of local economic elites who had wanted organized police departments in the first place... In addition to strike-breaking they frequently engaged in anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic violence, such as attacking community social events on horseback, under the pretense of enforcing public order laws. Similarly, the Texas Rangers were originally created as a quasi-official group of vigilantes and guerillas used to suppress Mexican communities and to drive the Commanche off their lands.” (Part 3)
- “By the end of the 19th century municipal police departments were firmly entrenched in the day-to-day political affairs of big-city political machines. Police provided services and assistance to political allies of the machine and harassed, arrested and interfered with the political activities of machine opponents...Politicians also employed and protected the many white-youth gangs that roamed the cities, using them to intimidate opponents, to get out the vote (by force if necessary), and to extort ‘political contributions’ from local businesses. At the dawn of the 20th century, police were, at least de facto, acting as the enforcement arm of organized crime in virtually every big city. Police also engaged in and helped organize widespread election fraud in their role as political functionaries for the machine. In return, police had virtual carte blanche in the use of force and had as their primary business not crime control, but the solicitation and acceptance of bribes. It is incorrect to say the late 19th and early 20th century police were corrupt, they were in fact, primary instruments for the creation of corruption in the first place.” (Part 4)
- “The advent of Prohibition (1919-1933) only made the situation worse. The outlawing of alcohol combined with the fact that the overwhelming majority of urban residents drank and wished to continue to drink not only created new opportunities for police corruption but substantially changed the focus of that corruption. During prohibition lawlessness became more open, more organized, and more blatant...By the end of prohibition, the corrupting of American policing was almost total. The outrages perpetrated by municipal police departments in the ensuing years inevitably brought cries for reform. Initially, reform efforts took the form of investigative commissions looking into both police and political corruption. As is the case today, these commissions usually were formed in response to a specific act of outrageous conduct by the police. And, like today, those commissions upon investigating the specific incident in their charge, uncovered widespread corruption, misfeasance and malfeasance.” (Part 4)
- “Commissions, while shedding light on the extent of corruption and serving to inform the public, have little lasting impact on police practices. As external organizations they report, recommend and dissolve. The police department continues on as a bureaucratic entity resistant to both outside influence and reform...Other attempts to reform policing have come from within the ranks of the departments themselves. Reform police commissioners and chiefs, often appointed in the wake of one or another scandals, made efforts to change the nature of the police bureaucracy itself...Similarly, reform-minded police executives began to try to restructure the department itself, making it more bureaucratic, with an internal clear chain-of-command...Rather than spreading through an entire department, narcotics and prostitution operators could now corrupt a smaller, more discreet unit and still maintain a high level of immunity from police interference with their illegal businesses.” (Part 5)
- “By the 1950s, police professionalism was being widely touted as a better way to improve police effectiveness and reform policing as an institution...Professionalism antagonized tensions between the police and the communities they served and created rancor and dissension within the departments themselves. The crime control tactics recommended by the professionalism movement, such as aggressive stop and frisk procedures, created widespread community resentment, particularly among young, minority males who were most frequently targeted. Police professionalism and the military model of policing became synonymous with police repression. Furthermore, as Walker points out ‘a half century of professionalization had created police departments that were vast bureaucracies, inward looking, isolated from the public, and defensive in the face of any criticism’ (Walker 1996). In addition professionalization had done nothing to rectify racist and sexist hiring practices that had been in effect since police departments had been created in the 1830s.” (Part 5)
- “A highly authoritarian police bureaucracy not only isolated itself from the public, but from the very police officers whose conduct it was trying to control. By the mid-1960s police officers had responded with an aggressive and widespread police unionization campaign...reduced municipal tax bases, caused primarily by the exodus of white, affluent executives and professionals to the suburbs in the 1970s; a prolonged economic recession in the 1970s and early 1980s; and fiscal mismanagement in many cities, led to layoffs of police and other municipal workers, and rollbacks in benefits. In fact, unions became an attractive scapegoat for municipal problems. Politicians, administrators and the media all blamed demands by public workers for the financial straits in which the cities had been floundering. Despite the fact that the fiscal crisis had been caused by much larger social and economic trends, blaming police and other workers allowed police administrators and politicians to once again reorganize the police. This reorganization has been dubbed the ‘Taylorization of the police’ by historian Sydney Harring (1981)... Over the years science became synonymous with professionalism for many police executives. The use of fingerprints, serology, toxicology chemistry and scientific means for collecting evidence were emphasized as part of a professional police force. In terms of technological advancements, new ways of maintaining police record systems and enhancing police communications, such as the police radio, became priorities. The emphasis was on efficiency and crime-fighting, with the social work aspects of policing deemphasized and discouraged. The hope was also that the professional, scientific crime-fighters would be less susceptible to corruption. It is therefore a further irony of policing that in Philadelphia new communications technologies were put to use in establishing what is arguably the first ‘call girl’ system in the United States, calling out for prostitutes using police communications systems.” (Part 5)
- “By the 1960s, massive social and political changes were occurring in the United States. The civil rights movement was challenging white hegemony in the South and racist social policies in the North. The use of professional police forces to suppress the Civil Rights movement, often by brute force did irreparable damage to American policing. From 1964 to 1968 riots, usually sparked by police brutality or oppression, rocked the major cities in the United States. Police handling of large demonstrations against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s was also controversial...National commissions created to investigate riots and political instability frequently and universally pointed to the police as a source of social tension. The police and criminal justice system response was twofold. First in 1968, as part of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, large sums of federal money were made available for rather cosmetic police-community relations programs, which were mostly media focused attempts to improve the police image. By the 1980s many police departments had begun to consider a new strategy, community policing. Community policing emphasized close working relations with the community, police responsiveness to the community, and common efforts to alleviate a wide variety of community problems, many of which were social in nature.” (Part 6)
- “From the beginning American policing has been intimately tied not to the problem of crime, but to exigencies and demands of the American political-economy...As we look to the 21st century, it now appears likely that a new emphasis on science and technology, particularly related to citizen surveillance; a new wave of militarization reflected in the spread of SWAT teams and other paramilitary squads; and a new emphasis on community pacification through community policing, are all destined to replay the failures of history as the policies of the future.” (Part 6)
When it comes to the administration of the death penalty, in the Third Edition of the report Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror by the Equal Justice Initiative, researchers found that “More than eight in ten American lynchings between 1889 and 1918 occurred in the South, and more than eight in ten of the nearly 1400 legal executions carried out in this country since 1976 have been in the South. Modern death sentences are disproportionately meted out to African Americans accused of crimes against white victims; efforts to combat racial bias and create federal protection against racial bias in the administration of the death penalty remain thwarted by familiar appeals to the rhetoric of states' rights; and regional data demonstrates that the modern death penalty in America mirrors racial violence of the past. As contemporary proponents of the American death penalty focus on form rather than substance by tinkering with the aesthetics of lethal punishment to improve procedures and methods, capital punishment remains rooted in racial terror - ‘a direct descendant of lynching’” (Equal Justice Initiative, 2017, p.64).
As Bryan Stevenson, the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, stated in the CNN article by the same name, “Slavery didn't end in 1865, it just evolved.” In the HuffPost article, “The Evolution: Slavery To Mass Incarceration,” Aristotle Jones explicated, “The United States called by some the land of the free and the home of the brave, leads the world in incarceration, with over 2 million people behind bars; that is a 500 percent increase over the past 40 years. Moreover, the United States has just five percent of the world population, yet holds approximately 25 percent of its prisoners...If history is any guide, it will show that mass incarceration is no mistake or policy mishap, but a system evolved from America’s greatest sin: slavery. Slavery was abolished in 1865 with the end of the Civil war and passing of the 13th amendment. The racial caste in the United States should have ended as well. However, the idea of race as a marker of value continued. After reconstruction, the majority of whites during this time believed newly freed African Americans were too lazy to work, which surged legislators to pass the black codes. This was essentially a system of white control. These codes varied from state to state, but were rooted from slavery, and they foreshadowed Jim Crow laws to come...Clearly, the black codes intentions were to treat and see African-Americans as property, not persons. Furthermore, the black codes were intended to secure a steady supply of cheap labor, and continued to assume the inferiority of the freed slaves.Over time, the black codes were overturned, and federal legislation protecting newly freed slaves was passed during the Reconstruction Era...With the passage of these legislations and the protection of federal troops, black advancement started to take place...With the help of the Ku Klux Klan and their violent campaign of terrorism, conservatives kept their promise of redeeming the south, federal troops retreated, and African-Americans once again found themselves, stuck, in the abyss of white supremacy. Again, history seemed to be repeating itself and vagrancy laws where ‘mischief’ and ‘insulting gestures’ were crimes enforced disproportionately against blacks. Aggressive enforcement of these ‘criminal offenses’ birthed convict leasing, which in turn helped rebuild the south, and supplied labor for farming, rail road, mining, and logging. During convict leasing, prisoners were contracted under the legal status of laborers and were sold to the highest private bidder...During convict leasing, incarceration grew ten times faster than the general population, and ‘prisoners became younger and blacker, and the length of their sentences soared,’ says David Oshinsky author of Worse Than Slavery. Although convict leasing ended, Michelle Alexander argues, ‘The criminal justice system was strategically employed to force African-Americans back into a system of extreme repression and control, a tactic that would continue to prove successful for generations to come.’ During this time as well Jim Crow was thriving and the idea of race inferiority remained...Today a dark cloud of guilt is disproportionately assigned to many people of color who are arrested, convicted of crimes, and sent to prison. Black men between the ages of 18 to 35, their prime years to learn and grow, have a one and three chance of going to prison in their lifetime.”
In summary, slavery became convict leasing which became mass incarceration, with black people disproportionately targeted and more directly impacted.
Action Steps
Complete additional research on the topic of systemic racism in the justice system. Obviously there is more to explore than I could possibly cover in a single blog post. For example, I didn’t address the school-to-prison-pipeline, money bail, or trials. Much of the research I found highlighted black and Hispanic populations, but I will link additional resources at the end of the post to include other ethnic groups and topics I did not discuss.
Have action that follows your research and reflection.
Complete additional research on the topic of systemic racism in the justice system. Obviously there is more to explore than I could possibly cover in a single blog post. For example, I didn’t address the school-to-prison-pipeline, money bail, or trials. Much of the research I found highlighted black and Hispanic populations, but I will link additional resources at the end of the post to include other ethnic groups and topics I did not discuss.
Have action that follows your research and reflection.
- Support policies at every level of government that will bring reform to the justice system. Write, email, call, and tag representatives and others in local, state, and federal political positions. In the HuffPost article, “The Evolution: Slavery To Mass Incarceration,” referenced above Aristotle Jones wrote, “Let’s remember that our work to undo the threads of slavery and act to address racism starts with the work of ending these institutional systems of control. I lead with Malcolm’s words, ‘any person who claims to have a deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars– caged.’ I agree! Reversing this system is hard and complicated. Nonetheless, the work must be done and it starts with you advocating for more justice in our justice system. These bills [The Sentencing Reform and Correction Act S.2123; the Sentencing Reform Act H.R.3713; and the Corrections and Recidivism Reduction Act H.R.759] are ready for leadership to bring them to the floor, but they need to hear from you.” (Aristotle Jones also explained, “The Sentencing Reform and Correction Act S.2123; the Sentencing Reform Act H.R.3713; and the Corrections and Recidivism Reduction Act H.R.759 take a first step to end mass incarceration at the federal level.”)
-Support reparations in your personal life and by the government. Support initiatives that seek to acknowledge wrongs done, repent of those wrongdoings, and intentionally repair the damage. I wrote a post about reparations in August titled “Reparations before Reconciliation.”
Vote, show up, and engage in meaningful ways to dismantle systems of oppression. Do all of this under the leadership of people of color.
What to Expect in Future Posts
At this time, I plan to address systemic racism as seen in surveillance, foster care, healthcare, the environment, media, military, politics, and the Christian church in future posts. I will give action steps for myself and readers and provide additional resources.
-Support reparations in your personal life and by the government. Support initiatives that seek to acknowledge wrongs done, repent of those wrongdoings, and intentionally repair the damage. I wrote a post about reparations in August titled “Reparations before Reconciliation.”
Vote, show up, and engage in meaningful ways to dismantle systems of oppression. Do all of this under the leadership of people of color.
What to Expect in Future Posts
At this time, I plan to address systemic racism as seen in surveillance, foster care, healthcare, the environment, media, military, politics, and the Christian church in future posts. I will give action steps for myself and readers and provide additional resources.
As I look at the Equal Justice Initiative calendar and read it to my kids, I see that every single day conveys at least one injustice, usually based on race. These are past and present injustices, spanning hundreds of years, demonstrating that racism in this country is not simply an individual problem. Rather, racism is a systemic problem, infecting institutions and structures. Further, this problem centers around justice, therefore it's a problem Godde is concerned about, which means I must be concerned. In my opinion, systemic racism is not solely a political issue but also a spiritual issue. I am called to love my neighbor, and one way I can do this is by joining the fight to dismantle systems of oppression so that all people can flourish.
“What is Systemic Racism? - Drug Arrests” with Jay Smooth
“What is Systemic Racism? - Incarceration” with Jay Smooth
“Is Racism Over Yet?” with Laci Green
The Next Question Video Web Series (Hosted and produced by Austin Channing Brown, Jenny Booth Potter, and Chi Chi Okwu)
“Social Justice Equity” lecture by Tim Wise
Justice In America “The 94% - Plea Deals”
Justice In America “School to Prison Pipeline”
Justice In America “The Privatization of Prisons”
Justice In America “Death Penalty”
Justice In America “Police Accountability”
Justice In America “Restorative Justice”
Justice In America “The Victims of Mass Incarceration”
Justice In America “Juvenile Justice”
Justice In America “Mariame Kaba and Prison Abolition”
Justice In America “How Democrats and Republicans Created Mass Incarceration”
Justice In America “Who Built Mass Incarceration? Prosecutors”
Justice In America “The New American Prosecutor”
“A Time Like This” by Micah Bournes
“Too Much?” by Micah Bournes
“Land of the Free” by Joey Bada$$
“Facts” by Lecrae
Articles
“New Data Reveals Milwaukee Police Stops Are About Race and Ethnicity” by Nusrat Choudhury
"The Case for Reparations" by Ta-Nehisi Coates
"The Racist Roots of America Policing: From Slave Patrols to Traffic Stops" by Connie Hassett-Walker (added June 5, 2020)
"The Case for Reparations" by Ta-Nehisi Coates
"The Racist Roots of America Policing: From Slave Patrols to Traffic Stops" by Connie Hassett-Walker (added June 5, 2020)
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon
Worse Than Slavery by David M. Oshinsky
So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo (Chapter 8 “What is the school-to-prison pipeline?”)
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo
#systemicracism #racismissystemic #racism #prejudicepluspower #dismantlewhitesupremacy #endracism #antiracism #antiracist #becomingantiracist #beingantiracist #endmassincarceration #justicesystemreform #endinequality #justice #loveyourneighbor #seekjustice #restorativejustice #lovemercy #walkhumbly #facethepast #healthefuture #equality #vote #showup #engage #blog #blogger #newblogpost #challengethenarrative #broadeningthenarrative
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