Race and the Criminal Justice System: The New Jim Crow

Introduction

Race has always been a cultural factor in the United States, and it is certainly a factor in today's criminal justice system. James (2018:30) has shown that current "research on police officers has found that they tend to associate African Americans with threat." A significantly higher percentage of the African American population is incarcerated than any other population in the U.S. And, as Lopez (2018) points out, "Black people accounted for 31 percent of police killing victims in 2012, even though they made up just 13 percent of the US population." The evidence indicates that African Americans receive a disproportionate amount of attention from police and are disproportionately punished and incarcerated because of institutionalized racism within the American ruling class.

This racist worldview was evident from the early days of the nation, when the concept of Manifest Destiny was put forward by John O'Sullivan (1845). That concept expressed the belief that White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were essentially God's chosen people and thus had a right — that is, it was their manifest destiny — to rule others, take their land, and dominate them. This worldview became so ingrained in American culture that it gave rise to Jim Crow laws, such as the "separate but equal" clause upheld in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), entrenching segregation and further oppression. The Civil Rights Movement drew attention to the plight of African Americans, but today there is evidence of a New Jim Crow responsible for the ongoing association of race with incarceration (Alexander 2012).

The Root of the Problem

Alexander (2012) notes that the mass incarceration of African Americans stems from racial prejudice in the criminal justice system — a prejudice informed by the same culture that promoted Manifest Destiny nearly two centuries ago. She points out, for instance, that 50% of the young African American male population is "currently under the control of the criminal justice system" (Alexander 2012:16). Another significant issue is the unjust War on Drugs, which disproportionately impacts African Americans, who are commonly denied adequate legal representation and are pushed into accepting unfair plea deals that nonetheless deliver them into the prison industrial complex.

Aguirre and Baker (2000) note that minorities often cannot afford bail, whereas it is easier for white defendants to post bail. Minorities are routinely denied due process, and even the use of juries often lends itself to bias that the prosecution is able to exploit (Aguirre and Baker 2000). When a jury is composed predominantly of white people and the defendant is Black or Latino, there is unlikely to be much sympathy for the defendant — primarily because white culture in America has been conditioned to view minorities as threats (Davis 2012). As a result, the minority defendant is more often than not found guilty. Knowing this is the likely outcome, the African American defendant will accept whatever plea deal the prosecution offers in exchange for a lighter sentence.

Of course, there is no such thing as a truly light sentence, because once in prison, the prison label follows a person for life. From that point forward, the African American male is marked in ways that prevent him from finding employment, and before long he is back in prison — as though that were where he belonged, or where the ruling class believes he should be. As Davis (2012:38) notes, the prison industrial complex is "accompanied by an ideological campaign to persuade us once again…that race is a marker of criminality." In other words, slavery was never truly abolished; today it exists within the prison industrial complex, where African American prisoners are forced to work for minimal wages for corporations.

African Americans are not the only ones being oppressed, however. As Aguirre and Baker (2000:100) observe, "police officers often exhibit prejudice against members of minority groups," including Latinos, who are also overrepresented in the prison industrial complex. Latinos, like African Americans, fall outside the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant group and are therefore considered inferior and untrustworthy from a cultural standpoint. That perspective is embedded in a legal system that is inherently biased against them, and that bias fuels the creation of laws causing them to be unfairly targeted. Because of those laws, the criminal justice system absorbs them into what Davis (2012) calls the new plantation system — the prison industrial complex.

Targeting African Americans

As Pettit and Western (2004:151) show, the prison population increased sixfold between 1972 and 2000, and "by 2002, around 12 percent of black men in their twenties were in prison or jail." This means that more than one in ten young African American males were having their lives completely upended by incarceration and permanently marked by the prison label. This approach to criminal justice has consequences that extend beyond the individuals who suffer directly; it also decimates African American families and communities. The more African American men are absorbed into the prison industrial complex, the less stable their communities and neighborhoods become. It appears that the criminal justice system is inherently racist toward minorities, using the law to oppress and effectively re-enslave them in the New Jim Crow era.

Conclusion

As Alexander (2012:258) states, "If we want to do more than just end mass incarceration — if we want to put an end to the history of racial caste in America — we must lay down our racial bribes, join hands with people of all colors who are not content to wait for change to trickle down, and say to those who would stand in our way: Accept all of us or none." The criminal justice system has been called out by critics, activists, reformers, and scholars alike. The problem is that the criminal justice system is really just an extension of a culture industry that has been shaping the country since its inception. The same White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ruling class that founded the country remains essentially in control today.

The only difference is that the tension between races has grown more hostile and harder to address. Today's culture is one in which white communities are taught to fear minorities and to view them as threats to their way of life. Many white Americans consequently see little problem with the mass imprisonment of minorities, and they regard those not in prison with suspicion, treating them as criminals who happen to be walking free. The problem is inherently cultural, and the racial expressions found in the disproportionate incarceration rate signify that racial attitudes embedded in the culture must change — or else minority populations will continue to suffer unjustly.