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Race, Ethnicity, and
Corrections
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction
A. Race and ethnicity are pervasive themes in contemporary American
culture.
1. People of color are far more likely than whites to be caught up in the
criminal justice system.
2. Today, African Americans make up almost one-half of the prison
population but only about 13 percent of all U. S. residents.
3. If current rates continue, nearly one-third of African American children
born today will go to prison during their lifetimes.
4. Among African Americans below the age of 18, referrals to juvenile
court occur at more than twice the rate for whites.
5. In Washington D. C., half of all African American men aged 18-35 were
under some form of correctional control.
B. Implications
1. For many young men of color, the penal system is not an abstraction,
but a reality.
2. The pervasiveness of corrections in the lives of people of color has
evolved gradually, fueled by the 1980s war on drugs and the enormous
growth of our penal system.
3. In everyday thinking of many Americans, crime-particularly violent
street crime-is a racial phenomenon.
4. When white Americans imagine burglars, robbers, or rapists, they often
think of African American men, and they think fearfully of African
American men in general.
5. This had crucial consequences for relations among the races in the
United States.
II. The Concepts of Race and Ethnicity
A. Race—usually assumed to be a biological concept that divides mankind
into categories related to skin color and other physical features; today the
concept is controversial because so many Americans with interracial
backgrounds that it is difficult to accept a purely biological approach.
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Race is controversial to the extent that it has political and social
implications.
B. Ethnicity—a concept that is used to divide people according to their
cultural characteristics: language, religion, and group tradition.
III. Visions of Race and Punishment
A. A. African Americans and Hispanics are subjected to the criminal justice
system at much higher rates than the white majority is.
1. This could be as a result of disparity, which is difference between
groups that can be explained by legitimate factors.
2. Or it could be a result of discrimination, which occurs when groups are
differentially treated without regard to their behavior or qualifications.
B. The View of Differential Criminality: Nobody denies that there is disparity
in the involvement of people of color in the criminal justice system. There
is controversy over whether disparity results from discrimination.
1. Self-report studies have shown that nearly everyone admits to having
committed a crime during his or her lifetime, although most people are
never caught.
2. Whites are slightly more likely than African Americans to admit to using
illegal substances.
3. It is estimated that there are 5 times more white drug users than
African-American.
4. Black men are admitted to prison on drug charges at a rate that it 13.4
times higher than whites.
5. Criminality is related to socioeconomic disadvantage and many people
of color suffer from great disadvantage.
6. Social problems such as poverty, single-parent families, and
unemployment are reliably known to contribute to higher crime rates; it
would be natural in this view to expect Hispanic and African American
males to engage in more crime.
C. The View of a Racist Criminal Justice System: Racial disparities become
racial discrimination of people who are otherwise similar in their criminality
are treated differently because of their race.
1. Because people of color are arrested more than whites does not mean
they are more crime prone than whites.
2. Evidence suggests that even though African Americans area arrested
for drug offenses more frequently than whites, they do not seem to use
drugs more frequently.
3. Mumia Abu-Jamal case in “Focus” box.
4. Disparity between crime rates and punishment patterns is a key factor
in the claim by some scholars that the criminal justice system is biased
against minority groups.
5. Officials need not act in overtly racist ways in order to produce a gap
between arrest rates and punishment rates. At each stage of the
process, the criminal justice system operates according to principles
that may tend to disadvantage them.
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6. Some reformers have considered ways to eliminate racism from the
system; the solution depends on how the problem is defined.
7. The step-by-step decisions of the criminal justice system mean that
African Americans, the unemployed, and the poor often appear at
sentencing hearings with more extensive prior records and fewer
prospects for reform. Thus, what appears discriminatory may simply
represent the functioning of an impersonal bureaucratic system.
8. The solution to this problem would lie in revamping the decisionmaking criteria to exclude biased factors and in finding ways to control
the discretion of officials to use the new criteria.
D. The View of a Racist Society: Some people claim that eliminating racism
within the system is not likely to occur because the system is embedded in
a larger racist society.
1. The strongest voices claim that the system operates as an instrument
of such racism.
2. There is evidence of broader racism in the way society asks the
system to operate—i.e., punishment of crack cocaine offenders and
powder cocaine offenders.
3. Many believe the relationship between racism and the criminal justice
system is reciprocal; confronted with the reality of crime by people of
color, the system reacts in a way that reflects public horror and
revulsion by removing large numbers of people of color from their
communities.
4. Racist institutions help produce the higher crime rate among minorities
and then racist fears of people of color help justify treating them more
harshly when they are caught.
5. An ominous collateral consequence of overrepresentation of AfricanAmericans in the felony justice system is disenfranchisement; 13% of
black men are permanently banned from voting in the states in which
they live.
6. The loss of vote has denied them access to political participation in a
way that has racially disparate effects.
IV. Which is it: Race or Racism?
A. Young African American men often experience arrests that result with
charges being dropped.
B. Recent studies find that “the criminal justice system is neither completely
free of racial bias nor systematically racially biased.”
V. The Significance of Race and Punishment
A. The repercussions of racial disparities in the criminal justice system have
already become a force to be reckoned with by policy makers.
B. The fact that such a high percentage of young African-American men are
behind bars must be understood in terms of what these young men cannot
be doing: earning a living, attending school, parenting their children,
supporting their partners, voting or otherwise partaking of “free” society.
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C. The Simpson trial serves as a microcosm of the fruits of our disparate
correctional practices.
D. How do we interpret the problems of race that we see in our corrections
system? What can we do to overcome them?
1. We must open the corrections system to greater participation by
people from the groups historically disadvantaged by disparate
treatment.
2. We must ferret out and refuse to tolerate incidents of blatant racism in
justice practices or policy.
3. We must recognize that as long as racism is a force in the larger
society, any attempt to eradicate it from the criminal justice system will
have only marginal prospects for success.
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