Crime and race/ethnicity

SIGNIFICANCE: One of the major issues associated with criminal justice in the United States is the relationship between race and crime. A large disparity exists between the proportion of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and other minorities in the general population and their proportion among those incarcerated in jails and prisons.

In the twenty-first century, Black Americans are incarcerated at a rate that is four to five times greater than White individuals and Hispanic individuals are incarcerated at more than two times the rate of White individuals. In addition, four in ten of those on death row are Black, and young Black men are far more likely than White individuals to be the victims of police brutality. Black individuals are also disproportionately represented among victims of crime. African Americans are three times more likely than White individuals and others to be victims of robbery and more than twice as likely to be victims of aggravated assault.

Statistics indicate that Asian Americans are underrepresented in both federal and state prisons. The American Indian or Alaska Native population typically makes up between 1 and 2 percent of the American prison population, and around 1 percent of individuals in prison identify as Asian, Native Hawaiian, or Other Pacific Islander. The majority of Asian American offenders are associated with nonviolent crimes, such as gambling or sex work. Different Indigenous American Nations have different relationships with US government agencies, which historically created problems both in defining and reporting crimes among Native Americans. While the percentage of Indigenous Americans is generally small with respect to the American population, crime and victimization disproportionately occur on reservations.

It is impossible to examine crime and punishment in the United States without addressing whether these disparities are the result of discrimination and whether such discrimination originates in the criminal justice system or if criminal justice simply mirrors the racism and inequality that exist in the larger society.

Stereotyping Crime

For many White Americans, “crime” means violent crime, and the typical offender is young, Black, and male. However, based on arrest statistics collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the Uniform Crime Reports, for all crimes except murder and robbery, the typical offender is White. As the National Crime Victimization Survey repeatedly confirms, the majority of crimes are intraracial, involving offenders and victims of the same race. However, politicians and the mass media have used sensationalism and misinformation to intensify the public’s fear of crime and to lead to policies that promise to be “tough” on crime but that tend to trap indigent minority youths in the criminal justice system.

Popular policies, such as three-strikes laws that mandate life sentences for three-time offenders, the abolition of parole, and mandatory sentences for relatively minor drug crimes, help account for the disparities between the percentage of minorities in the population and their percentage among imprisoned individuals. Although such policies may not have overt racist intentions, they result in perpetuating inequality based on race. Most of the three-strikes laws allow prosecutors to exercise tremendous discretion in determining which offenses qualify as a strike. Although many citizens may imagine that such policies will catch violent career criminals, they have often been used against small-time criminals who are arrested for property crimes and drug offenses. Rand Corporation research and 1994 data from the Los Angeles Public Defender’s Office suggest that Black individuals were being charged under the law at a rate seventeen times that of White individuals.

Law Enforcement

Discussions of race and criminal justice often focus on confrontations between police and members of minority groups. This issue gained prominence in the 1990s due to incidents such as the 1991 beating of Rodney King and its aftermath or the assault on Abner Louima in a New York City police station in 1997, which seemed to represent entrenched prejudice in the criminal justice system. Historically, low-income individuals and minorities have commonly been victims of “curbside justice” at the hands of law enforcement officers, and until the 1980s, when in Tennessee v. Garner the Supreme Court ruled the fleeing-felon rule unconstitutional, they were likely to be shot by the police as “fleeing felons.” Studies published in the 1994 edition of the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics showed that Black and Hispanic Americans consistently had less favorable attitudes toward the police than White Americans. These negative perceptions have been based not only on incidents of police brutality or misconduct but also on a belief that police departments will not discipline the officers who are guilty but will instead form a wall of silence to protect them.

In response to these developments, many cities adopted community policing strategies to address hostile relations between law enforcement officers and citizens, particularly those who reside in minority neighborhoods. Such programs use foot patrols to place police officers closer to the citizens in nonconfrontational situations. Officers work with community groups to deal with neighborhood problems and to reduce victimization.

The issue of relations between police and communities of color rocketed back into the public spotlight in the 2010s with the rise of online social media. Most prominently, the 2014 shooting of African American teenager Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, touched off days of civil unrest following the failure of a grand jury to indict the officer. In addition, social media posts of videos capturing violent police confrontations with people of color became a mainstay of the news cycle and gave rise to organized protest movements such as Black Lives Matter, which sought to bring attention to the issue of racial disparities in policing.

Nationwide, the proportion of minority police officers has increased since the early 1970s, when the 1972 amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited racial or gender employment discrimination by state or local governments. However, White officers remain the majority in most communities. Some studies have indicated that more diverse police forces do not necessarily result in improved police-community relations in minority neighborhoods.

Race Issues in the Courts

In the courts, the connection between race and bail decisions, charges, jury selection, legal representation, and juvenile processing is ambiguous. Overt discrimination is seldom seen in most US courtrooms, partly because in the 1960s, the Supreme Court repeatedly ruled that the constitutional rights of the accused must be respected by the state courts. On the other hand, such factors as the economic status of defendants and the quality of legal representation are indisputably linked. Research published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology demonstrates that factors such as unemployment, a prior criminal record, and pretrial detention (the inability to make bail) have an impact on the probability of conviction. Members of minority groups, who are also more likely to be of low-income households, suffer double disadvantages in the court system.

Race and Sentencing

Many observers of the US criminal justice system have claimed that racial discrimination is clearly observable in sentencing. They charge specifically that African Americans are liable to receive harsher sentences than White individuals who are convicted of similar crimes. Others argue that Black Americans receive heavier sentences because they commit more and graver crimes. Mandatory federal sentences that impose penalties that are fifty times heavier for distribution of crack cocaine than for powdered cocaine (used most commonly by White Americans) seem to symbolize the disparity.

Studies of sentencing discrepancies, such as those conducted by Cassia Spohn, John Gruhl, and Susan Welch (1982) and Joan Petersilia (1983), reveal a complex situation in which blatant racism is seldom a factor, but some judges appear to take race into account by imposing harsher sentences on African Americans and other minorities who commit violent crimes against White individuals and more lenient sentences when victims are members of minority groups. In some jurisdictions, in marginal cases, White Americans are more likely to get probation, and Black Americans are more likely to be sent to prison. With respect to juvenile processing, White youths are more apt to be released to their parents, while a juvenile facility is a more probable destination for minority youths.

Examinations of the correlation of race with the death penalty show one consistent pattern. As the widely respected and frequently quoted studies done by David Baldus, George Woodworth, and Charles Pulaski, Jr., in 1990 showed, those who murder White individuals are more likely to receive a capital sentence than those who murder African Americans. On several occasions, the Supreme Court has been asked to rule on the constitutionality of the death penalty given the racial disparity in its use. Although the Court acknowledged in McCleskey v. Kemp (1987) that there was statistical evidence of race as a factor in the application of capital punishment, it refused to find the discrimination unconstitutional.

Implications

The United States has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world, and minorities are disproportionately included among those confined. Although minorities have always been overrepresented in US prisons, the disparity has increased dramatically since the 1980s. During the 1990s, more African Americans were under the supervision of the correctional system (in jail or prison, on probation or parole) than were enrolled in college. Hispanic Americans were imprisoned at twice their representation in the general population. It is impossible to ignore the implications for the future, if sizable numbers of young people receive their higher education in a correctional institution rather than on a college campus.

Most observers attribute this growth in incarceration to the War on Drugs. Law enforcement agencies at both the federal and state levels have focused their efforts on visible and open drug trafficking, the sort that occurs in low-income, minority neighborhoods. They make more arrests in such communities than in affluent or suburban areas, where drug use is likely to be less obvious. The number of arrests, coupled with mandatory sentences for drug offenses, helps account for the expanded minority populations in prisons.

In examining the issues of race and criminal justice, many scholars have concluded that less overt racial discrimination occurs in the system than in the past. Changes in the legal status of minority groups, Supreme Court decisions protecting the rights of the accused, and political action by African American, Hispanic, and other ethnic groups have helped to reduce discrimination. However, discrimination remains a factor in accounting for the disparate experiences of White individuals and minorities at all stages of the criminal justice system, from encounters with the police to charging to sentencing. Coupled with the economic biases inherent in the system, race and color continue to influence Americans’ experiences of crime and punishment.

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