Earl Ofari Hutchinson, in his book the
Mugging of Black America,
relays an interesting experience by a reporter who spent two and one half hours watching suspects march past Washington, D.C. Superior Court Judge Morton Berg. All but one of these subjects was Black. “There is an odd air about the swift afternoon—an atmosphere like that of British Africa in colonial times—as the procession of tattered, troubled, scowling, poor blacks plead guilty or not guilty to charges of drug possession, drug distribution, assault, armed robbery, theft, breaking in, fraud and arson.”
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The reporter witnessed more than a courtroom scene, according to Hutchinson, he witnessed the legacy of slavery.
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The United States criminal justice system has frequently been characterized as inherently biased against Black people. That is, there are those who see the criminal justice system as part and parcel of the mechanisms which seek to maintain the status quo. If the status quo is understood to be a set of power relations that has Whites on the top, and Black people, (especially poor Blacks) on the bottom, then one can certainly argue that maintenance of the status quo has been achieved in the United States. For as Manning Marable suggests, “The foundations of the modern U.S. police state are designed specifically to ensure that the killings, rapes and property thefts of Blacks continue unabated—so long as whites (especially in the upper classes) remain protected.”
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In order to maintain this set of power relations, the criminal law has been employed as a means of legal control.
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As Richard Quinney states,
Criminal law is used by the state and the ruling class to secure the capitalist system, and, as capitalist society is further threatened by its own contradictions, criminal law will be increasingly used in the attempt to maintain domestic order. The underclass, the class that must remain oppressed for the triumph of the dominant economic class, will continue to be the object of crime control as long as the dominant class seeks to perpetuate itself, that is, as long as capitalism exists.
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Along those same lines, as the National Minority Advisory Council on Criminal Justice concluded in their national assessment of the impact of crime on minority communities, “America . . . is . . . a classic example of heavy-handed use of state and private power to control minorities and suppress their continuing opposition to the hegemony of white racist ideology.”
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In addition, there are others who suggest that because the criminal justice system is inherently racist, it can not but consider the race of the defendant in every stage of a Black person’s journey through the criminal justice system. As Nkecha Taifa, director of the Public Services Program at Howard University School of Law and cochair of the Criminal Justice Section of the National Conference of Black Lawyers said, “Invariably, people of color and the poor are subjected to disparate treatment at every stage of the criminal justice system, from arrest, prosecution and pretrial, to conviction, sentencing and parole decisions. That disparate treatment is a direct reflection of the institutionalization of racism in the system.”
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Public policy, particularly the so-called War on Drugs, is often seen as serving one primary purpose: the continued incarceration of Black males. (Tonry, 1995). For example, The Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission entitled:
The Real War on Crime
states that, “African-American arrest rates for drugs during the height of the “drug war” in 1989 were five times higher than arrest rates for whites even though whites and African-Americans were using drugs at the same rate.” As Earl Ofari Hutchinson stated “When the question is asked: Where are the white defendants? The police and prosecutors have a ready answer: “There’s as much cocaine in the Sears Tower or the stock exchange as there is in the black community,” says Charles Ramsey, head of the narcotics division of the Chicago Police Department, “but those guys are harder to catch.”
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When those in the criminal justice system believe that Whites “are harder to catch”, they inevitably concentrate their energies elsewhere, usually upon Black males. This directly contributes to the criminalization of Black males. For example, in “six California counties independently surveyed in 1995, 100 percent of those sent to trial on drug charges were minorities, while the drug-using population in these same counties was more than 60 percent white—and relatively untouched by law enforcement.”
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Across the country, incarceration rates for Blacks have greatly surpassed those for Whites and shockingly high percentages of young Black males are under some form of court-ordered supervision, (Marc Mauer, 1990, The Sentencing Project) even though no commensurate increases occurred in Black violence and drug use.
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The aforementioned Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission further states that “A race crisis of disastrous proportions is unfolding in the US criminal justice system.” The issue of race, particularly when an individual is Black, appears to be of tremendous importance in regards to the criminal justice system. As Manning Marable further states “The irony of the . . . ” war against crime” is that white police, politicians and law enforcement officers have been nonchalant, at best, in aiding and defending Blacks’ lives and personal property.
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An examination of several statistics in regards to Blacks and their relationship to the criminal justice system is in order here.
For what is rarely mentioned, but of tremendous significance, is that Blacks are most often the victims where more serious crimes are concerned.
For example, from 1973 to 1978, white males were victimized by violent crime at rates between 42 and 45 per year per thousand . . . For Black men, the rate was between 53 and 57 per thousand . . . Any Black man in the U.S. (in the aforementioned time frame) had a 6 to 8 time greater chance of being murdered than any white man.
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Of all Black households in 1985, 27 percent had been touched by crime. Two years later, black households continued to be more vulnerable than whites for violent crimes (5.4 percent vs. 4.6 percent), burglary (7.6 percent vs. 5 percent), and theft in and around the home (9.1 percent vs. 7.9 percent.)
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Unfortunately, there has been no improvement in this area. In fact, things have gotten much worse.
According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, in 1986 Blacks accounted for 46.5% of all arrests for violent crimes even though Blacks comprised 12% of the US population. Blacks accounted for 48% of the persons arrested for murder; 46.6% of all arrests for rape; 39.8% for assault . . . In 1986, of those person under 18 years of age, Blacks accounted for 54% of those arrested for violent crimes . . . the highest violent crime rates are demonstrated by young Black males. . . .
Over 40% of all jail inmates throughout the nation are Black—and the percentage is rapidly rising.
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More young Black men died from homicide in one year (1977) than died in ten years in the Vietnam War . . .
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(The number of Black females murdered between 1980 and 1985 exceeds the number of American casualties in Vietnam in 1967, one of the peak years of fighting.
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) Murder is the fourth leading cause of death for Black males of age 20 to 29.
Clearly, crime statistics can be interpreted in many different ways, depending upon ones motivation(s), agenda(s) or political perspective(s). Furthermore, “Unless we have a fair understanding of the characteristics of crimes that become official and those that do not, we are on very tenuous ground when we use official statistics to try to determine if crime is related to such things as income, racial inequality or a variety of other variables for we do not know what crime rates measure.”
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What can be said however, with little if any serious discourse to the contrary, is that Black people in America are facing a serious crisis in regards to their involvement in the criminal justice system, and that this crisis manifests itself at every level of interaction with this system. Yet, a further note of caution is in order here in regards to the statistics mentioned above. For as William Ryan states, “ . . . the FBI Crime Report—with all its tables and charts, its fatuously precise summations . . . is one of the most preposterously non-factual documents ever to roll off the print presses of the U.S. Government Printing Office. As a basis for serious discussion of social problems and social policies, it is approximately as useful as Madame Zelda’s Lucky Number Dream Book.”
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