Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [241]
Does race discrimination, plain and simple, explain these horrific figures? In the years before the civil rights revolution, there was an enormous amount of discrimination, in the crudest, most obvious sense, especially in the South. Today, overt forms of discrimination have been wiped from the books. But slavery and oppression have left their mark; poverty and social disorganization hang like yokes of stone around the necks of the urban black poor. Draconian drug laws punish thousands of blacks who are trapped in the drug world or bent on self-destruction. These facts explain a good deal of the disparity; do they explain it all?
Are prosecutors and courts biased against blacks? This is not quite so easy to puzzle out. Dozens of studies have looked at sentencing practices, for example. Do blacks get worse treatment than whites, all other things being equal? The results of these studies have been mysteriously inconclusive. A fair number of scholars, searching for prejudice in the jungles of data, never find it. Other scholars do. Some researchers think that “discrimination has not gone away,” that the legal system has simply “caused discrimination to undergo cosmetic surgery, with its new face deemed more appealing,” that discrimination against blacks is pervasive but “subtle rather than overt.”78 But plenty of scholars can be found who disagree.
It is not easy to answer the question, not even easy to know what to measure, or how. Blacks tend to be poor; the middle class has grown nicely since the end of segregation, but a good third or more of the black population is stuck at the bottom of the economic and social heap. Criminal justice has always been biased against the underclass, the unattached, the unrespectable. What this may mean is that bias tends to be systemic, organic; not the crude race-hate of older days. Moreover, the general weakness in authority structures, the enthronement of the self, the glorification of the celebrity, the mass media culture—all these features of modern society are bound to create unrest, disorganization, and pathology in those who are stuck at the base of the social ladder.
It is less often recognized that blacks are disproportionately victims of crime as well. Most crime is neighborhood crime; blacks trapped by poverty in ghetttos are the most vulnerable people in society. Two blacks are likely to fall victim to robbery, vehicle theft, or aggravated assault for every white; the black homicide rate is more than six times as great as the white rate, and has been so for over fifty years.79
Blacks need police protection more than any other group, but do they get it? Police forces are integrated, more or less. Yet blacks are more dissatisfied with the police than whites. On the one hand, police persecute and brutalize blacks; and on the other hand, they ignore black complaints about crime. They let black communities stew in their own juices, essentially unprotected. These, at any rate, are common charges and they may well have substance. Certainly, studies of white policemen turn up substantial evidence of prejudice. And in 1991, the Rodney King episode exploded onto television screens. The public was shocked to see a group of police officers savagely beating and kicking a black man who had been stopped for speeding and who seemed to be supine and helpless.db Blacks were not surprised.80
In the last decade, there have been a number of serious examples of race-hate crimes. One of the most troubling