How racist attitudes barely hide beneath the surface of 'tough on crime' policies.
April 21, 2010

For decades, journalists, scholars and activists seeking to understand the soaring number of people locked up in U.S. prisons over the past 40 years have uncovered -- or just looked clearly enough to see -- overwhelming evidence of systemic racism at every level of the criminal justice system. Yet, there has been a wide reluctance to name racism as one of the primary factors fueling the prison boom; as sentences have gotten longer and parole granted less often, even the starkest racial statistics -- like the fact that African Americans and Latinos make up 70 percent of the incarcerated population -- have often been treated as an unfortunate byproduct of the war on drugs.

Now, two criminologists have concluded, in a new study investigating public attitudes behind harsh sentencing, that the warehousing of African Americans and other minorities is no accident. Rather, "racial resentments are inextricably entwined in public punitiveness." In other words, racism and the rise of "tough on crime" policies go hand in hand.

James Unnever of the University of South Florida-Sarasota and Francis Cullen of the University of Cincinnati acknowledge the "lengthy roster" of previous studies on race and the U.S. prison system; yet theirs manages to contribute something crucial to the current debate: "… [G]iven the large body of research that documents a substantive association between punitiveness and racial animus," they write, "it is somewhat disconcerting that theories of the mass-incarceration movement do not place race and racism at the center of their explanation for why the United States imprisons so many of its citizens."

This conclusion echoes the work of civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander, who, in the introduction to her new book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, admits that even she was once skeptical of how central racism was to the rise of the modern American prison system. "Quite belatedly, I came to see that mass incarceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow."

Alexander argues that the U.S. prison system has so sweepingly and consistently targeted African American men that it has effectively created a new racial caste system. That most Americans would deny such a caste system exists speaks to how insidious it is. "Like an optical illusion," she writes, "one in which the embedded image is impossible to see until its outline is identified -- the new caste system lurks invisibly within the maze of rationalizations we have developed for persistent racial inequality."

Unnever and Cullen's study makes it that much easier to see what Alexander describes.

According to a 2006 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, African Americans make up an estimated 15% of drug users, but they account for 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted and 74% of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Or consider this: The U.S. has 260,000 people in state prisons on nonviolent drug charges; 183,200 (more than 70%) of them are black or Latino.

What a pile of it! Let's see...you commit murder, armed robbery, sell significant volumes of drugs, repeatedly beat people up, commit extortion, steal cars or whatever is not nailed down, and you want to blame whitey because you are in jail or prison? Oh, and we're also responsible for black on black, asian on asian, and latin on latin crime. Eat my shorts.

If the police put as much resources toward busting trust fund brats for cocaine possession as they did towards busting minorities for crack possession, you might not see as many minorities in the prisons.

More than one in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year and the federal government $5 billion more, according to a report released yesterday.

With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second, according to a study by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Students at Yale Law School on Friday released an analysis showing that more than half of the tickets East Haven police issued along two main roads went to Hispanic drivers, even though Hispanics make up less than 6 percent of the population.

Their report comes as the police department faces a federal investigation into bias allegations.

The report, aided by Yale statisticians, also said East Haven police officers substantially underreported the number of tickets issued to Hispanic drivers by reporting most of them as white. It cited one officer as reporting virtually all of his tickets were issued to white drivers and none to Hispanics, although nearly 80 percent of his tickets were issued to Hispanic drivers.