Last spring, the Race and Social Policy Research Center at Virginia Tech, which I direct, held its eighth annual Combating Racial Justice Workshop. Our topic was “Black Lives Matter: Eliminating Racial Inequalities in Criminal Justice.” We took this from the title of a report by the Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based research and advocacy center that works to reduce the use of incarceration in the United States and to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
In previous years we have focused substantially on race and criminal justice—including arrest, prosecution, conviction, sentencing, and incarceration. However, we have also addressed juvenile justice, felon disenfranchisement, and employment discrimination. Each year we have had experts in the topic area come and lead discussions of issues and development.
At our workshop last April, the scholar who authored the Sentencing Project’s Black Lives Matter report, Dr. Nazdol Ghandnoosh, came and led discussions about sources of racial inequities in the criminal justice system and solutions to some of the disparities from each of those sources.
I will discuss some of these inequities here. In a later article, I will review some of the sources and solutions various places across the country are trying.
The United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other country. It incarcerates more than repressive regimes at their heights, more than Rwanda, Russia, South Africa, Iran, and Mexico. The United States is home to five percent of the world’s population but houses 25 percent of its prisoners.
Through 1980 the number of incarcerated persons, though high, was less than 500,000. In 30 years, it more than quadrupled.
The number of people incarcerated has declined since 2010, but not substantially. It peaked in 2010 at 2.3 million and is now 2.2 million. Notably, imprisonment increased while crime declined.
Imprisonment rates are a function of responses to crime, not a result of crime itself because both property and violent crime declined since 1980. Yet throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and even more recently, politicians have produced a steady drumbeat about the myth of increasing crime and the need for more and more tough on crime officials. In the U.S., between 1980 and 2000, over 500 new prisons were built, even though crime was declining.
From the 1920s to the mid-1970s, the prison admission rate by race was reasonably steady, with the black incarceration ranging from two to three times that of whites. Beginning the late 1970s, however, the rate of incarcerating blacks skyrocketed to be over six times that of whites.
Nationally, African Americans are imprisoned at alarming rates. They are 13 percent of the U.S. population, but 27 percent of those arrested, and 35 percent of those in prison. Further, blacks and whites use and sell drugs at similar rates, but the imprisonment rate of blacks for drug charges is almost six times that of whites.
Another criminal justice myth is that crack cocaine is a “black urban” drug. Taint so. Ever since the crack epidemic in the 1980s, the majority of users have been white. People are persuaded otherwise because 80 to 90 percent of the people arrested for crack cocaine have tended to be black.
At the current rate of imprisonment, one-third of all black males born in 2001 will go to prison in their lifetime. This is an unjust and devastating attack on black communities.
The harm being done by these racist policies and practices to black communities and ultimately whole towns and cities, and even the nation, might be worse than the “crime.”
