The Global Sociology Blog

William Stuntz, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, has a great blog post today on the intersection of race, crime and punishment in the United States, specifically using comparison data regarding crime and punishment rate differentials between White and African Americans. First, he starts with the absurdity of the drug laws and their application.

“According to the best available data, blacks are 20% more likely than whites to use illegal drugs. But blacks are an incredible thirteen times more likely to be imprisoned for drug crime. (Data source here). In effect, Americans live under two sets of drug laws: the forgiving set of rules that mostly white suburbanites know, and the unfathomably severe rules that govern urban blacks.”

Indeed, it is undeniable that young African American males have borne the brunt of the War on Drugs, including mandatory minimum sentencing, elimination of parole in the Federal system, conspiracy amendment that send a lot more people to prison for much longer sentences for low level offenses and forfeiture laws. In a sense, when it comes to drug policy, there is a de facto system of segregation in place. But, of course, there is more than just drug law enforcement.

“If drug crime is overpunished in black neighborhoods, violent crime is underpunished.(…) In other words, the kinds of criminal punishment that do the most good are undersupplied in black America, and the kinds that do the LEAST good—so far as I know, there is no evidence that the level of drug punishment has any appreciable effect on the level of drug crime—are oversupplied. African Americans live with the worst of both worlds: unfathomably high crime rates, coupled with truly horrifying levels of criminal punishment.

The bottom line is as simple as it is awful: When whites are robbed, raped, beaten, and killed, their victimizers are usually punished. When the same crimes happen to blacks, the usual result is: nothing. No arrest, no prosecution, no conviction. That is one reason why black neighborhoods are so much more violent than white ones.”

It is also a source of great mistrust between the low-income African American communities (such as the one described by Sudhir Venkatesh in Gang Leader for A Day): police is seen not as a protective force but as a bully on the same level as the gangs, only with more power. They show up, beat up and arrest mostly young black men for drug offenses but do not take care of the other crimes going on. And that is when police actually shows up. This phenomenon has been called “depolicing”: when police does not respond to calls to report crimes in progress. As Stuntz puts it bluntly, “high-crime city neighborhoods are seriously underpoliced.” Moreover,

“Overstretched big-city police forces tend to make lots of drug arrests, because those arrests are easy to make—and too few arrests for violent crimes, which require more manpower to investigate. Over time, those police forces have come to see drug punishment as a substitute for punishing violent crime.”

And such a substitution does not work at all. The drug arrests are easy to make and high conviction rates easy to obtain. That is convenient for prosecutors to show that they are actively fighting crime. It plays well with the white middle-class for elected officials to play tough on crime. Fighting violent crime would require not just more investigative work but more trust and connections between the community and law enforcement so that exchange of information would take place. That is just not the case.

“On every front, the power of poor city neighborhoods has declined, and the power of middle- and upper-class suburbs has risen. If criminal justice in poor urban neighborhoods is dysfunctional, that may be because the residents of those neighborhoods are not permitted to decide for themselves how to deal with the crime in their midst.”

The above quote refers to the fact that the greater professionalization and institutionalization of the criminal justice system has progressively superseded an essential aspect of it: its local nature. The basis of the American criminal justice system is that the local community should have some power over the way justice and punishment are administered. Over time, this connection between local community and criminal justice has been loosened. The political power of white suburban communities has increased at the expense of the inner city.

But here is where I think the good professor gets it wrong:

“Those sad changes didn’t happen because of white racism; they happened because of a series of long-term trends: the Great Migration of rural Southern blacks to the urban North, white flight from Northern cities to populous suburbs, the professionalization of urban police, and so on. But the sum of those trends is a system that produces large-scale racial injustice, and that deprives urban black communities of the power to remedy that injustice. One way or another, Americans of all races need to grapple with those facts, and soon.”

Yes, and this “large-scale racial injustice” has a name in sociological research: institutional racism or racism without racists (to borrow the title from Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s book). Institutional racism is different from individual racism (racism WITH racists) but its effects are real, more pervasive (because structural and not individual) and harder to detect, measure and correct. And it is completely not understood by the White community. For instance, Affirmative Action was supposed to correct institutional discrimination (the fact that, even in the absence of individual racism and discrimination, the social structure still places minorities at a structural disadvantage). But because, we, white folks, don’t see it, we don’t think it exists and any attempt at correcting it is seen as “reverse racism” or “reverse discrimination.” It is racism and discrimination nonetheless.

As an illustration of such an invisibility of privilege and disadvantage (and certainly, probability of arrest, conviction and incarceration do count as privilege or disadvantage), I love this cartoon by Ampersand (click on image for link to the original).