Discussions of the relationship between black people and the criminal justice system in the US too often grind to a halt as people slink down into their silos and arm themselves with their best rhetorical weapons: racial bias on one side and statistics in which minorities, particularly blacks, are overrepresented as criminals on the other.
What is too often overlooked in this war of words is the intersection between the two positions, meaning the degree to which bias informs the statistics and vice versa.
The troubling association — in fact, over association — of black people with criminality directly affects the way US citizens think about both crime and black people as a whole.
A damning report released by the Sentencing Project recently lays bare the bias and the interconnecting systemic structures that reinforce it and disproportionately affect African-Americans.
This is the kind of report that one really wants to publish in its totality, for its conclusion is such a powerful condemnation of the perversity of racial oppression. However, this being a newspaper column, that is not possible. Still, here are many of the findings:
‧ “White people are more punitive than black people and Hispanics even though they experience less crime.”
‧ “White US citizens overestimate the proportion of crime committed by people of color and associate people of color with criminality. For example, white respondents in a 2010 survey overestimated the actual share of burglaries, illegal drug sales and juvenile crime committed by African-Americans by 20 percent to 30 percent.”
‧ “White Americans who associate crime with black people and Latinos are more likely to support punitive policies — including capital punishment and mandatory minimum sentencing — than white people with weaker racial associations of crime.”
This association of crime with blacks has been noted by others. Lisa Bloom, in her book Suspicion Nation, writes: “While white [people] can and do commit a great deal of minor and major crimes, the race as a whole is never tainted by those acts. However, when black [people] violate the law, all members of the race are considered suspect.”
She adds: “The standard assumption that criminals are black [people] and black [people] are criminals is so prevalent that in one study, 60 percent of viewers who viewed a crime story with no picture of the perpetrator falsely recalled seeing one and of those, 70 percent believed he was African-American. When we think about crime, we ‘see black,’ even when it’s not present at all.”
As the Sentencing Project report makes clear, the entire US government and media machinery is complicit in the distortion.
According to the report:
‧ “Whether acting on their own implicit biases or bowing to political exigency, policymakers have fused crime and race in their policy initiatives and statements. They have crafted harsh sentencing laws that impact all US citizens and disproportionately incarcerate people of color.”
‧ “Many media outlets reinforce the public’s racial misconceptions about crime by presenting African-Americans and Latinos differently than whites — both quantitatively and qualitatively. Television news programs and newspapers overrepresent racial minorities as crime suspects and whites as crime victims.”
‧ “Disparities in police stops, in prosecutorial charging and in bail and sentencing decisions reveal that implicit racial bias has penetrated all corners of the criminal justice system.”
The effects of these perceptions and policies have been absolutely devastating for US society in general and black people in particular. According to the report:
‧ “By increasing support for punitive policies, racial perceptions of crime have made sentencing more severe for all Americans. The US now has the world’s highest imprisonment rate, with one in nine prisoners serving life sentences. Racial perceptions of crime, combined with other factors, have led to the disparate punishment of people of color. Although black [people] and Latinos together comprise just 30 percent of the general population, they account for 58 percent of the prison population.”
‧ “By increasing the scale of criminal sanctions and disproportionately directing penalties toward people of color, racial perceptions of crime have been counterproductive for public safety. Racial minorities’ perceptions of unfairness in the criminal justice system have dampened cooperation with police work and impeded criminal trials. In 2013, over two-thirds of African-Americans saw the criminal justice system as biased against black [people], in contrast to one-quarter of whites. Crime policies that disproportionately target people of color can increase crime rates by concentrating the effects of criminal labeling and collateral consequences on racial minorities and by fostering a sense of legal immunity among white [people].”
There is no way in the US to discuss crime statistics without including in that discussion the myriad ways in which those statistics are informed and influenced by the systemic effects of racial distortion.
Individual behavior is not the only component of the numbers; bias is the other.
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