Fourteen Examples of Systemic Racism in the US Criminal Justice System Published on Monday, July 26, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
by Bill Quigley
The biggest crime in the U.S. criminal justice system is that it is a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people.
Saying the US criminal system is racist may be politically controversial in some circles. But the facts are overwhelming. No real debate about that. Below I set out numerous examples of these facts.
The question is – are these facts the mistakes of an otherwise good system, or are they evidence that the racist criminal justice system is working exactly as intended? Is the US criminal justice system operated to marginalize and control millions of African Americans?
Information on race is available for each step of the criminal justice system – from the use of drugs, police stops, arrests, getting out on bail, legal representation, jury selection, trial, sentencing, prison, parole and freedom. Look what these facts show.
One. The US has seen a surge in arrests and putting people in jail over the last four decades. Most of the reason is the war on drugs. Yet whites and blacks engage in drug offenses, possession and sales, at roughly comparable rates – according to a report on race and drug enforcement published by Human Rights Watch in May 2008. While African Americans comprise 13% of the US population and 14% of monthly drug users they are 37% of the people arrested for drug offenses – according to 2009 Congressional testimony by Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project.
Two. The police stop blacks and Latinos at rates that are much higher than whites. In New York City, where people of color make up about half of the population, 80% of the NYPD stops were of blacks and Latinos. When whites were stopped, only 8% were frisked. When blacks and Latinos are stopped 85% were frisked according to information provided by the NYPD. The same is true most other places as well. In a California study, the ACLU found blacks are three times more likely to be stopped than whites.
Three. Since 1970, drug arrests have skyrocketed rising from 320,000 to close to 1.6 million according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice.
African Americans are arrested for drug offenses at rates 2 to 11 times higher than the rate for whites – according to a May 2009 report on disparity in drug arrests by Human Rights Watch.
Four. Once arrested, blacks are more likely to remain in prison awaiting trial than whites. For example, the New York state division of criminal justice did a 1995 review of disparities in processing felony arrests and found that in some parts of New York blacks are 33% more likely to be detained awaiting felony trials than whites facing felony trials.
Five. Once arrested, 80% of the people in the criminal justice system get a public defender for their lawyer. Race plays a big role here as well. Stop in any urban courtroom and look a the color of the people who are waiting for public defenders. Despite often heroic efforts by public defenders the system gives them much more work and much less money than the prosecution. The American Bar Association, not a radical bunch, reviewed the US public defender system in 2004 and concluded “All too often, defendants plead guilty, even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights or what is occurring…The fundamental right to a lawyer that America assumes applies to everyone accused of criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the US.”
Six. African Americans are frequently illegally excluded from criminal jury service according to a June 2010 study released by the Equal Justice Initiative. For example in Houston County, Alabama, 8 out of 10 African Americans qualified for jury service have been struck by prosecutors from serving on death penalty cases.
Seven. Trials are rare. Only 3 to 5 percent of criminal cases go to trial – the rest are plea bargained. Most African Americans defendants never get a trial. Most plea bargains consist of promise of a longer sentence if a person exercises their constitutional right to trial. As a result, people caught up in the system, as the American Bar Association points out, plead guilty even when innocent. Why? As one young man told me recently, “Who wouldn’t rather do three years for a crime they didn’t commit than risk twenty-five years for a crime they didn’t do?”
Eight. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in March 2010 that in the federal system black offenders receive sentences that are 10% longer than white offenders for the same crimes. Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project reports African Americans are 21% more likely to receive mandatory minimum sentences than white defendants and 20% more like to be sentenced to prison than white drug defendants.
Nine. The longer the sentence, the more likely it is that non-white people will be the ones getting it. A July 2009 report by the Sentencing Project found that two-thirds of the people in the US with life sentences are non-white. In New York, it is 83%.
Ten. As a result, African Americans, who are 13% of the population and 14% of drug users, are not only 37% of the people arrested for drugs but 56% of the people in state prisons for drug offenses. Marc Mauer May 2009 Congressional Testimony for The Sentencing Project.
Eleven. The US Bureau of Justice Statistics concludes that the chance of a black male born in 2001 of going to jail is 32% or 1 in three. Latino males have a 17% chance and white males have a 6% chance. Thus black boys are five times and Latino boys nearly three times as likely as white boys to go to jail.
Twelve. So, while African American juvenile youth is but 16% of the population, they are 28% of juvenile arrests, 37% of the youth in juvenile jails and 58% of the youth sent to adult prisons. 2009 Criminal Justice Primer, The Sentencing Project.
Thirteen. Remember that the US leads the world in putting our own people into jail and prison. The New York Times reported in 2008 that the US has five percent of the world’s population but a quarter of the world’s prisoners, over 2.3 million people behind bars, dwarfing other nations. The US rate of incarceration is five to eight times higher than other highly developed countries and black males are the largest percentage of inmates according to ABC News.
Fourteen. Even when released from prison, race continues to dominate. A study by Professor Devah Pager of the University of Wisconsin found that 17% of white job applicants with criminal records received call backs from employers while only 5% of black job applicants with criminal records received call backs. Race is so prominent in that study that whites with criminal records actually received better treatment than blacks without criminal records!
So, what conclusions do these facts lead to? The criminal justice system, from start to finish, is seriously racist.
Professor Michelle Alexander concludes that it is no coincidence that the criminal justice system ramped up its processing of African Americans just as the Jim Crow laws enforced since the age of slavery ended. Her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness sees these facts as evidence of the new way the US has decided to control African Americans – a racialized system of social control. The stigma of criminality functions in much the same way as Jim Crow – creating legal boundaries between them and us, allowing legal discrimination against them, removing the right to vote from millions, and essentially warehousing a disposable population of unwanted people. She calls it a new caste system.
Poor whites and people of other ethnicity are also subjected to this system of social control. Because if poor whites or others get out of line, they will be given the worst possible treatment, they will be treated just like poor blacks.
Other critics like Professor Dylan Rodriguez see the criminal justice system as a key part of what he calls the domestic war on the marginalized. Because of globalization, he argues in his book Forced Passages, there is an excess of people in the US and elsewhere. “These people”, whether they are in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib or US jails and prisons, are not productive, are not needed, are not wanted and are not really entitled to the same human rights as the productive ones. They must be controlled and dominated for the safety of the productive. They must be intimidated into accepting their inferiority or they must be removed from the society of the productive.
This domestic war relies on the same technology that the US uses internationally. More and more we see the militarization of this country’s police. Likewise, the goals of the US justice system are the same as the US war on terror - domination and control by capture, immobilization, punishment and liquidation.
What to do?
Martin Luther King Jr., said we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.
A radical approach to the US criminal justice system means we must go to the root of the problem. Not reform. Not better beds in better prisons. We are not called to only trim the leaves or prune the branches, but rip up this unjust system by its roots.
We are all entitled to safety. That is a human right everyone has a right to expect. But do we really think that continuing with a deeply racist system leading the world in incarcerating our children is making us safer?
It is time for every person interested in justice and safety to join in and dismantle this racist system. Should the US decriminalize drugs like marijuana? Should prisons be abolished? Should we expand the use of restorative justice? Can we create fair educational, medical and employment systems? All these questions and many more have to be seriously explored. Join a group like INCITE, Critical Resistance, the Center for Community Alternatives, Thousand Kites, or the California Prison Moratorium and work on it. As Professor Alexander says “Nothing short of a major social movement can dismantle this new caste system.”
Bill is Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. He is a Katrina survivor and has been active in human rights in Haiti for years with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. Quigley77@gmail.com
The manufactured anger driving the birthers and health care town halls is the same white rage that has divided poor white people from poor black people for all of our history.
Insert: rollingrock, in listening to Limbaugh's conspiracy rant in the video of my other reply, one couldn't help but wonder .. HEY!, the angry whites, of the Republican Tea party creation, didn't secretly listen to Bill Ayres and Rev. Jeremiah Wright, did they? LOL, no they didn't, so how come they are so angry? Limbaugh didn't touch on the fact that they vociferously hate the USA today, did he.
* By: Kai Wright | Posted: August 12, 2009 at 6:23 AM
Getty image.
If ever there was a “teachable moment” about race in modern America, now is it. With the birthers and the reparations conspiracy theories and the Nazi imagery at health care meetings, someone’s gotta explain why all these white folks are wilding out. We need an articulate, impassioned race man to clarify things. But not Al Sharpton; I say pass the mic to Jim Webb.
Remember way back when Webb, a Democratic senator from Virginia and the voice of Appalachia’s neglected white yeoman, was sniffing around a veep nod? In the midst of that media moment, he hit on an idea we’d do well to dwell upon. “Black America and Scots-Irish America are like tortured siblings,” Webb patiently explained .. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/21/jim-webb-speaks-out-on-ra_n_102915.html .. to Pat Buchanan in a May 2008 Morning Joe appearance on MSNBC. “There’s a saying in the Appalachian mountains. … ‘If you're poor and white, you’re out of sight.’”
Webb went from there into a bizarre attack on all the nonwhite and nonblack people who he believes have hijacked affirmative action. But his core message is deeply relevant to today’s tumult. Poor whites have always gotten screwed in America, Webb told us, and they’re terribly angry about it. Whoever directs that rage harnesses a powerful political tool.
Which brings us to both the profiteering right-wing media and the aimless Republican Party stuck in its tail wind. Both have decided their survival in America’s new multiracial reality depends upon a very old playbook: pursue narrow financial and political gain by exploiting the justified anxieties of working-class whites.
As a result, we all feel like we’re living through a Saturday Night Live skit. Each day brings another twisted punch line. More than half of Republicans aren’t convinced Obama’s a citizen? Huh? Fox host Glenn Beck actually attracts viewers by proclaiming Obama has “a deep-seated hatred of whites”? Health reform as Holocaust? Really?
Most commentators try to make sense of it by harking back to Nixon and the GOP’s “Southern strategy,” when it consolidated regional power by stoking reactionary fear of the civil rights movement. That’s true as far as it goes. But years earlier Martin Luther King described it more broadly. .. http://www.kaiwright.com/new_more.php?id=372_0_29_0_M .. “The Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow,” he explained, summing up the region’s history in a sentence. “And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than a black man.”
The white aristocracy is still serving that gamy old bird. All that’s changed is the waiter. Gone are thugs like Bull Conner and the local elites whose power they protected. In are stooges like Beck and the corporate media elites they enrich. Rupert Murdoch may have decided that the feud between his guy Bill O’Reilly and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann hurts News Corp.’s bottom line, but you’ll see no such restriction on demagoguery. And Rush Limbaugh brags .. http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_031109/content/01125110.guest.html .. that 2009 revenue is “through the roof.”
These loud-mouthed robber barons bedevil national Republicans. But the party knows the fear and anger they stoke is nonetheless as useful as ever in the heat of battle, because convincing poor whites to hurt themselves remains a powerful tool for blocking reform. The ugly mobs of GOP operatives-turned-grass-roots activists at this summer’s town hall meetings are only incidentally fighting health care reform. Their real purpose is to show how frustrated whites can direct their anger at Democrats. Feeling poor, white and out of sight? It’s because that black guy’s trying to reshape America without you. Get him!
Fox’s Glenn Beck said it best: “Everything that is getting pushed through Congress, including this health care bill, are transforming America, and they’re all driven by President Obama’s thinking on one idea: reparations.” And Limbaugh, back in November: .. http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/435392/rush_and_reparations .. “The objective is an expanding welfare state. And the objective is to take the nation’s wealth and return to it to the nation’s quote, ‘rightful owners.’ Think reparations. Think forced reparations.” (Your lips to God’s ears, Rush.)
That sounds absurd, but it’s a heck of a lot easier to assert than, say, explaining that a small, white aristocracy has spent centuries robbing America, poor whites included. Slavery made a tiny sliver of Southern whites extremely wealthy, while preventing most from making a living. Reconstruction floundered, at least in part, because lawmakers freaked out when white laborers started talking about getting rights, too. A century later, during the Bush years, worker productivity shot up 20 percent, the wealthiest 400 Americans became $670 billion wealthier—and median wages fell.
Webb wants Democrats to finally free the poor white mind from the grip of its self-defeating fear. “If this cultural group could get at the same table with black America, you could rechange populist American politics,” he told Morning Joe viewers. “Because they have so much in common in terms of what they need out of government.”
Webb wasn’t the first to make the point, but he’s been the only one to get away with it. In the 2004 primary, Howard Dean got maligned by fellow Dems .. http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/11/01/elec04.prez.dean.confederate.flag/ .. for saying it; Obama tried and failed to make the point during the great “bitter” debate of 2008. The anxieties of poor whites have become the third rail of Democratic politics.
But Democrats cannot avoid the conversation. Indeed, poor white anxiety will only grow as the nation becomes ever more demonstrably multiracial. Either profiteering white elites like Limbaugh will whip them into violence, or someone will finally figure out how to build the populist coalition of Webb’s dreams.
surely you jest. That's a two hour assignment, involving multiple pages, just to start to answer your question. I can't even dignify it as an undertaking today. You can hear it in his rants nearly everyday (the few times nowadays that I get caught listening to his agenda are when I'm out in the rural mountains of Kentucky, or somewhere else in the stix, with a car that picks up only rightwing media), and he fanaticizes the truth, even when he is truthful, which often he is not. You should know that he is only an entertainer, unfortunately much of his audience thinks that he speaks the Gospel, and that is ludricrous. He is an opiniated, accusatory, blowhard that has always been factually challenged. I wouldn't criticize someone as much for listening to Rush, as I would someone whom actually believes all the stuff that he spews. Suffice it to say for now that when 75% of the rightwing cannot acknowledge that the President was born an American citizen, based on lies that work on innate fears and misconceptions about Black people..that is racist! I hear it all over the rightwing media, and it is a bald-faced LIE..and I know that even you know it, whether or not you want to acknowledge it. For one, it should have never been an issue. But regardless, the proof was in the birth announcement of Barrack Obama in the Honolulu newspaper. Unless a person thinks that there was a conspiracy 49 years ago the day he was born..total ridiculousness and inane. How about calling him a Muslim, or a terrorist, while we are at war with these elements? Fox and Friends was good at that on a 24 hour cycle. Now they call the President a racist? Because they JUDGE everything he does through a black/white lens! And this New Black Panther Party paranoia (you mean both memebers! Everyday? You call that news, or racial hype? Acorn? Hannity demagoguing a guy that actually reported the info that those dress-up pimp clowns came strutting in with? And you believed that bullshit? Or is it all about suppressing the minority vote? Read about actual election fraud instead, not conjured up fantasies....http://www.kentucky.com/2010/03/26/1197075/jury-convicts-all-8-defendants.html ..this is all total unpatriotic bullshit. Do you know anything about acquaintances and friends of McCain http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-k-wilson/john-mccains-terrorist-co_b_133326.html , and the Bush family Saudi connections? You would equate them to a college professor with a bad past from the turbulent 60s?..how about the radical pastors on the far right, the ones you may call the base of the GOP? Were they any more patriotic then Jeremiah Wright, a highly decorated Marine Corps Veteran?..Did you really empathize with the struggle of the Black movement in America during the civil rights movements when MLK preached non-violence? Do you empathize with the CURRENT judicial struggles of all lower wage earners in this country? They can't buy themselves justice the way Rush Limbaugh did on drug charges. Shit like this happened(s) everyday, thank God for DNA. You know how many good lives get wasted in this country? You can call me a libtard or any name you can use to radicalize your elements..still, I love America just as much as anyone else you know, I just want to make it a better place to live for all, and our Democracy is not threatened one iota by my Progressive brethren. We are trying to save it from collapse, and your average working middle class person is getting shafted by the policies in this country that are fiercely advocated by the Right Elite and big money that controls the system. That is in every area you can speak of, healthcare, housing..looks at the 401Ks ..holy cow! 1999 drug arrests Tulia gained notoriety following a drug sting in July 1999 that rounded up 46 people, forty of whom were African Americans. The remaining detainees were White people known to have ties within the Black community, and in fact lived in the "Black" part of town. Nearly one in three of Tulia's Black males was arrested, about 15% of the town's Black population.[5][6] All charges were based on the word of undercover officer Tom Coleman, a so called "gypsy cop" who made his living traveling through impoverished rural Texas offering to work undercover cheaply for short periods of time for underfunded police departments. Coleman claimed to have made over one hundred drug buys in the small town. He never recorded any of the sales, but claimed to have written painstaking notes on his leg under his shorts and upper arm under his shirt sleeve when nobody was looking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulia,_Texas
We are a Nation at War..and you think continuing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy are a form of sacrifice? How big do you think that Chinese credit card is? To me this is treasonous (OK, that's a strong word..I dig it) I certaintly cannot call it patriotic, or even fiscally sound! The upper 2% saw their income TRIPLE from 2004 to 2009..from an average of $2 million to over $7 million! Income Taxes have been reduced for 50 years for them! What about OTHER taxes and fees being imposed higher and higher to suck the disposable income of the middle class?
Nowadays, one doesn't even have to sound like a "racist" to act like one! As the middle class in this country disappears, so will everything American. The playing field is more askew than ever. The markets are controlled and manipulated to a higher degree than ever before. Sure, everybody can still pursuit the American Dream, some will still work hard and achieve it (though they will need to be luckier than ever before. Still, even many more will work hard and not achieve even a small part of what was once at least within the mainstream grasp if the issues are decided continuously against the average person. I don't know exactly where you stand. But I know exactly how this country will sink..and I called it in 2000, and I'm calling it again for 2010..this House that we call America will collapse unless the problems we faced are tackled in forthright manner, and are taken seriously by the political challengers on the Right..don't worry about me, cause I'm not holding my breath either..
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