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Race, Rights, and the Evolution of Criminal Justice Policy
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Weaver 2
Racial Unrest and Criminal Justice
The springboard of this project is three related puzzles. Since 1973, there has been a sixfold increase in the prison population and by 1993 states were incarcerating one man per every fifty in the workforce. Compared to its advanced industrial counterparts in Western Europe, the US imprisons at least five times more of its citizens per capita. The second puzzle is the large, and unexplained, racial disparity in imprisonment, a disparity that has become more pronounced over time.
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As of the last census, fully three-fourths of those imprisoned are black and one in three
black men between ages 20 and 29 are currently under state supervision. Third, this period has been characterized by crime policy shifts that are consistently more punitive (i.e. zero tolerance drug laws, crackdown on juvenile offenders, mandatory minimums, truth-in-sentencing, and “three strikes” laws) and that corrections expenditures and prison growth has risen steadily, arguably out of sync with crime rates. The prison population more than doubled during the 1980s; throughout the 90s, the prison population grew by 8 percent each year, even while crime was decreasing. Despite these trends, very little research has been generated that explores long-term causes of this rise in incarceration and what accounts for the rise in racial disparity over time, especially given that it was one of the most dramatic policy shifts in the modern period, exceptional both in sheer magnitude of social control compared to its own history and relative to other advanced industrialized democracies.
This paper is based on a time-series cross-sectional analysis of racial disorder and criminal justice. It evaluates the hypothesis that racial dynamics, and not the prevalence of crime, is a predominant determinant of state crime policy and imprisonment. The findings demonstrate that race explains a large part of state divergence in criminal justice. Imprisonment is predicted by black electoral gain, black initiated protest and collective action events, and the Voting Rights Act. These preliminary results also suggest that the relationship is most pronounced for certain dimensions of racial threat and unrest. Patterns of racial disturbance and black mobilizationconsistently predict criminal justice and can explain prison expansion better than crime. It is clear that the effects of criminal justice are racially disparate; this study raises the possibility that their origins were also and challenges the instrumental logic of incarceration as crime control.
T
HEORETICAL
F
RAMEWORK
This analysis brings two distinct literatures into conversation – racial threat and collective action. The racial threat literature has its origins with Key (1949) and Blalock’s seminal works (1967)and has continued to enter scholarly discussions of race relations. These studies build on Blalock’s “power threat curve,” which posited that the effort to dominate will become greater as the population of blacks increases but that this relationship was “positive nonlinear with an increasing slope” (1967). The fundamental concept, that white racial resentment or hostility increases as blacks (or non-whites) become a larger proportion of the population, has been adapted to explore determinants of white policy preferences (Hajnal 2001), stereotypes of blacks, and racial prejudice (Taylor 1998).
Several analyses have attempted to empirically test the racial threat hypothesis as it relates to punishment. Racial composition has a positive effect on the rate of incarceration for blacks independent of crime rates (Bridges, Crutchfield, and Simpson 1987; Greenberg & West 2001;
1
See Appendix 1 for illustrations of the trends in incarceration broken down by race.
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Weaver 2
Racial Unrest and Criminal Justice
The springboard of this project is three related puzzles. Since 1973, there has been a sixfold
increase in the prison population and by 1993 states were incarcerating one man per every fifty
in the workforce. Compared to its advanced industrial counterparts in Western Europe, the US
imprisons at least five times more of its citizens per capita. The second puzzle is the large, and
unexplained, racial disparity in imprisonment, a disparity that has become more pronounced over
time.
1
As of the last census, fully three-fourths of those imprisoned are black and one in three
black men between ages 20 and 29 are currently under state supervision. Third, this period has
been characterized by crime policy shifts that are consistently more punitive (i.e. zero tolerance
drug laws, crackdown on juvenile offenders, mandatory minimums, truth-in-sentencing, and
“three strikes” laws) and that corrections expenditures and prison growth has risen steadily,
arguably out of sync with crime rates. The prison population more than doubled during the
1980s; throughout the 90s, the prison population grew by 8 percent each year, even while crime
was decreasing. Despite these trends, very little research has been generated that explores long-
term causes of this rise in incarceration and what accounts for the rise in racial disparity over
time, especially given that it was one of the most dramatic policy shifts in the modern period,
exceptional both in sheer magnitude of social control compared to its own history and relative to
other advanced industrialized democracies.
This paper is based on a time-series cross-sectional analysis of racial disorder and criminal
justice. It evaluates the hypothesis that racial dynamics, and not the prevalence of crime, is a
predominant determinant of state crime policy and imprisonment. The findings demonstrate that
race explains a large part of state divergence in criminal justice. Imprisonment is predicted by
black electoral gain, black initiated protest and collective action events, and the Voting Rights
Act. These preliminary results also suggest that the relationship is most pronounced for certain
dimensions of racial threat and unrest. Patterns of racial disturbance and black mobilization
consistently predict criminal justice and can explain prison expansion better than crime. It is
clear that the effects of criminal justice are racially disparate; this study raises the possibility that
their origins were also and challenges the instrumental logic of incarceration as crime control.
T
HEORETICAL
F
RAMEWORK
This analysis brings two distinct literatures into conversation – racial threat and collective action.
The racial threat literature has its origins with Key (1949) and Blalock’s seminal works (1967)
and has continued to enter scholarly discussions of race relations. These studies build on
Blalock’s “power threat curve,” which posited that the effort to dominate will become greater as
the population of blacks increases but that this relationship was “positive nonlinear with an
increasing slope” (1967). The fundamental concept, that white racial resentment or hostility
increases as blacks (or non-whites) become a larger proportion of the population, has been
adapted to explore determinants of white policy preferences (Hajnal 2001), stereotypes of blacks,
and racial prejudice (Taylor 1998).
Several analyses have attempted to empirically test the racial threat hypothesis as it relates to
punishment. Racial composition has a positive effect on the rate of incarceration for blacks
independent of crime rates (Bridges, Crutchfield, and Simpson 1987; Greenberg & West 2001;
1
See Appendix 1 for illustrations of the trends in incarceration broken down by race.
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