Study Settles It: Shocking Black & Latino Imprisonment Rates the Result of Racist, Punitive Impulse

AlterNet / By Liliana Segura

Study Settles It: Shocking Black & Latino Imprisonment Rates the Result of Racist, Punitive Impulse
How racist attitudes barely hide beneath the surface of 'tough on crime' policies.

April 21, 2010 |


For decades, journalists, scholars and activists seeking to understand the soaring number of people locked up in U.S. prisons over the past 40 years have uncovered -- or just looked clearly enough to see -- overwhelming evidence of systemic racism at every level of the criminal justice system. Yet, there has been a wide reluctance to name racism as one of the primary factors fueling the prison boom; as sentences have gotten longer and parole granted less often, even the starkest racial statistics -- like the fact that African Americans and Latinos make up 70 percent of the incarcerated population -- have often been treated as an unfortunate byproduct of the war on drugs.

Now, two criminologists have concluded, in a new study investigating public attitudes behind harsh sentencing, that the warehousing of African Americans and other minorities is no accident. Rather, "racial resentments are inextricably entwined in public punitiveness." In other words, racism and the rise of "tough on crime" policies go hand in hand.

James Unnever of the University of South Florida-Sarasota and Francis Cullen of the University of Cincinnati acknowledge the "lengthy roster" of previous studies on race and the U.S. prison system; yet theirs manages to contribute something crucial to the current debate: "… iven the large body of research that documents a substantive association between punitiveness and racial animus," they write, "it is somewhat disconcerting that theories of the mass-incarceration movement do not place race and racism at the center of their explanation for why the United States imprisons so many of its citizens."

This conclusion echoes the work of civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander, who, in the introduction to her new book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, admits that even she was once skeptical of how central racism was to the rise of the modern American prison system. "Quite belatedly, I came to see that mass incarceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow." .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/rights/146550/study_settles_it%3A_shocking_black_%26_latino_imprisonment_rates_the_result_of_racist%2C_punitive_impulse

of a sick society too, at least that is what I believe.

Dostoevsky's nightmare

in deed,the blacks and browns go to jail and the whites on wall street go home to their plush estates with black and brown servants now thats justice in action.

Thanks for the thread, marmar.

But probably understated.

More of a "we're more punitive to those outside of our group." After all, the best of them is worse than the worst of us. It's not restricted to race or ethnicity: If you define some group as the outsiders, whether because of race, ethnicity, language, social class, political party, or religion, you'll probably be harder on them. You'll find ways to justify those in "your" group, and find ways to make acts by those outside more egregious than they would normally be.

Then again, what I say may be from recent research, but it certainly predates this earthshaking, ground-breaking research applying that insight to a specific type of instance.

All you have to do is read, oh, any political blog or forum.

Then again, I'm sure somebody will point out that reducing this to a specific and remarkably unremarkable case diminishes the inherent remarkableness of racism. Russian saying: Своя рубашка ближе к телу. One's own shirt is closer to (one's) body. And is, therefore, remarkable.