This page is an online course module on Race and the Criminal Justice System for Poli 323: Race, Ethnicity and Gender in American Politics taught at Brigham Young University in Winter 2020.

 Today's Reading Assignment:

(For copyright reasons, I can't post copies of the assigned reading material. But I do hope you will track down these books.)

Vesla M. and Amy E. Lerman. 2010. "Political Consequences of the Carceral State." American Political Science Review 104 (4): 817 - 833. See also: Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control. 2014. University of Chicago Press.

Baumgartner, Frank R., Derek A. Epp, and Kelsey Shoub. 2018. Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ch. 1, pp 1 - 34.

The Sentencing Project. 2018. "Felony Disenfranchisement: A Primer." Policy Brief. https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Felony-Disenfranchisement-Primer.pdf

Today's Key Points:

1. The criminal justice system is complex, with formal and informal policies and practices (i.e. institutions) at many different stages. Think about the evidence for racial or gender bias in each of these steps of the process - you might be more persuaded about racial bias in some steps of the process than in others, but it's important to recognize that we can't dismiss or embrace claims of racial bias in the whole system based on evidence about one practice or stage of the criminal justice process. (I.e. believing that racial imbalances in "Stop and Frisk" policies are or are not justified doesn't give us any information about sentencing or drug policies/enforcement). We won't be able to cover all of the pieces in depth, but one goal for today is to introduce at least one argument regarding institutional racial bias at a variety of these decision points in the process.

2. Contact with the criminal justice system can have downstream impacts on who participates in politics. This is both formal, through felon disenfranchisement laws, and informal as individuals feel less empowered (lower "efficacy" and less trust in government) and choose not to participate in politics. Think about the impact of this on political representation.

3. One of the challenges in determining racial bias in the criminal justice system is that we don't have an objective baseline number of crimes committed. We only know about crimes that are "caught" - meaning there is police contact, a report, maybe a hearing, trial, or sentencing. We don't know about or have any data tracking crimes that police do not find or do not report. Arguments about racial bias in the criminal justice system must find ways of estimating a true base rate - they cannot be trusted if the only base rate of criminality measured is reported crimes. For example, if police have a larger presence in a low-income, predominantly minority community than a comparable white community, and they report more crimes in the minority community, that might be evidence that minorities commit more crimes, but it might also just be evidence that police catch more crimes when they have a larger presence in the community. Without reliable base rate data, we can't distinguish between these two explanations. Pay attention to how the authors of the studies you read today account for propensity for criminality (likelihood of committing a crime) in their analyses.

Watch: 

Get some background statistics and an overview of the system in this video: https://vimeo.com/315027537

Intersectionality: This is about race, but also about gender and age. Consider the following image of (national) frequency of police stops per 1000 people in each of these demographic groups:

Stage 1: Public Opinion about Crime

People view minorities as more likely to engage in criminal behavior than whites. These perceptions are often inflated relative to even rates of reported criminal activity (much less true baseline rates of undetected criminal activity). Whites who overestimate minority criminality are more supportive of punitive criminal justice laws.

Read just the executive summary of this report for an outline of this argument (meaning you can stop at the header I. Introduction). https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/race-and-punishment-racial-perceptions-of-crime-and-support-for-punitive-policies/#Executive%20Summary {If you want to know more about their evidence for any of the points in the executive summary - it's in the rest of the report.}

Stage 2: Politicians Determine What is a Crime and Define Sentencing Laws

One common example of this is the war on drugs, and particularly the national sentencing laws for crack vs. powder cocaine (two different forms of the same drug). See the brief explanation in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAKYpZ8Cc4k&feature=youtu.be

Stage 3: Police Identify People Who (may) have Broken Laws

Baumgartner, Shoub, and Epp focus on comprehensive data of routine traffic stops in North Carolina to see whether there are systematic racial biases present in how minorities are treated in traffic stops, accounting not just for stops but the results of those stops and searches. Their argument is that if more searches of minorities leads to more arrests for drug violations, then a higher rate of searches is justified. But, if it doesn't, it's evidence of unjustified racial bias in the system.

Watch this local news segment about the study, which includes the response from a local police chief:

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/what-decades-of-traffic-stop-data-tells-us-about-racial-bias/

This 30-minute podcast interview of Frank Baumgartner is a good big-picture summary of the study, with some additional context about why it matters and the proposed solutions: https://newbooksnetwork.com/frank-r-baumgartner-suspect-citizens-what-20-million-traffic-stops-tell-us-about-policing-and-race-cambridge-up-2018/

The key takeaway: Accounting for many alternative explanations, the authors find that (conditional on being stopped - they deal with the base rate problem by looking at data about every single traffic stop) minority drivers are about twice as likely as whites to have their car searched, but searches of minorities are less likely to turn up contraband drugs.

Their story is not entirely hopeless, though: They find that when there are minorities in city / police force leadership, the racial disparities in traffic stops was lower and trust in government among minorities was higher. In other words: Descriptive representation matters. Also, increasing trust in government / police can result in higher trust of the police and lower crime.

Stage 4: Courts Determine Guilt and Apply Sentences

There are debates about racial inequalities in who is found guilty, the availability of plea bargains, and the severity of sentences. In the most extreme case, many argue that the application of the death penalty has racial underpinnings.  Skim this summary by the ACLU: https://www.aclu.org/other/race-and-death-penalty

See also this short video from Vox which looks at a variety of outcomes at many stages of the process, including several related to sentencing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=96&v=InOsF5x1lZw&feature=emb_title

Three strikes laws or mandatory minimums are one way that government has tried to move sentencing from being at the whim of judges who might have racial bias to more consistent standards determined by legislators. Many still argue that these policies perpetuate racial bias because they are layered on top of racialized institutional practices at earlier stages of the criminal justice process.

Stage 5: People (don't) Participate in Politics (See how this circles back to public opinion and representation?)

The brief about felon disenfranchisement and the Weaver and Lerman study both show how interactions with criminal justice can formally or informally limit someone's participation in the political system. 

Pay attention to how Weaver and Lerman use panel data to overcome the "criminal propensity" problem. Specifically, because they can identify people who have not (yet) interacted with the criminal justice system in Wave 1 of the survey, but would by the time of Wave 2, they can distinguish statistically between the effect of being the kind of person who engages in criminal activity and actual contact with the criminal justice system. They find that criminal justice contact reduces people's likelihood of participating in politics.

Write: 

Pick two stages of this process. On Digital Dialog, in the appropriate sub-thread for each of those two stages, write about one new thing that you learned or thought about in this material. You are welcome to agree or disagree in your reaction to that new idea, but be sure to specifically engage with the material and evidence from today's readings, and not just rely on the preconceptions you had before starting today. In other words, today's reading might reinforce or contradict what you previously thought, but try to spend some time setting aside your ideas and respond directly to an argument or evidence from today on its own merits.  Your post can be a new addition, or you can respond directly to what someone else said and start a conversation.