Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-wq484 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T13:08:47.095Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

THE RACIAL HISTORY OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE IN AMERICA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2020

Heather Ann Thompson*
Affiliation:
Department of Afro-American and African Studies, University of Michigan
*
*Corresponding author: Heather Ann Thompson, Department of History, University of Michigan, 1029 Tisch Hall, Ann Arbor, MI. 48109. E-mail: hthompsn@umich.edu

Abstract

The United States today has the highest incarceration rate, as well as the largest number of people living under correctional control more broadly (including probation and parole), than any other country on the globe. The size of the American criminal justice system is not only internationally unparalleled, but it is also historically unprecedented. This apparatus is also deeply racialized. African Americans, Latinos, and indigenous populations (Hawaiian, Puerto Rican, Native American), are all represented in U. S. jails and prisons in numbers dramatically disproportionate to their representation in the population as a whole, and every non-White population is incarcerated at a rate far surpassing that of Whites. Notably, however, while the scale of today’s criminal justice system is unsurpassed and unprecedented, its severe racial disproportionality has always been a defining feature. Only by taking a close look at the long and deeply racialized history of the American criminal justice system, and more specifically at the regularly discriminatory application of the law as well as the consistent lack of equal justice under the law over time, can we fully understand not only why the American criminal justice system remains so unjust, but also why prison populations rose so dramatically when they did.

Type
Guest Edited Dossier
Copyright
Copyright © Hutchins Center for African and African American Research 2020 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Alexander, Michelle ([2010] 2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Reprint edition. New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
Anderson, Gary Clayton (2005). The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820-1875. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Austin, J., and McVey, A. D. (1989). The 1989 NCCD Prison Population Forecast: The Impact of the War on Drugs. NCJ 122794. National Council on Crime and Delinquency, U.S. Department of Justice.Google Scholar
Baker, Al (2012). New York Police Release Data Showing Rise in Number of Stops on Streets. The New York Times, May 12.Google Scholar
Balto, Simon (2019). Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Barnett, Ron, and Alongi, Paul (2011). Critics Knock No-Knock Police Raids. USA Today, February 13.Google Scholar
Baulch, Vivian, and Zacharias, Patricia (1999). The 1943 Detroit Race Riots. The Detroit News, February 11.Google Scholar
Beckett, Katherine, and Western, Bruce (2001). Governing Social Marginality: Welfare, Incarceration, and the Transformation of State Policy. Punishment & Society , 3(1): 4359.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berger, Daniel (2010). “We are the Revolutionaries”: Visibility, Protest, and Racial Formation in 1970s Prison Radicalism. University of Pennsylvania: PhD Dissertation.Google Scholar
Berger, Dan (2014). Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era . Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Berger, Dan, and Losier, Toussaint (2016). Rethinking the Prisoner Rights Movement. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Biondi, Martha (2006). To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Boyle, Kevin (2005). Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age. New York: Henry Holt.Google Scholar
Chase, Robert (2009). Civil Rights on the Cellblock: Race, Reform, and Violence in Texas Prisons and the Nation, 1945-1990. University of Maryland: PhD Dissertation.Google Scholar
Chase, Robert (2012). “Slaves of the State” Revolt: Southern Prison Labor and a Prison-Made Civil Rights Movement, 1945–1980. In Zieger, Robert (Ed.), Life and Labor in the New, New South, pp. 177213. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chávez, Ernesto (2002). “Mi Raza Primero!”: Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966-1978. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Chávez-García, Miroslava (2012). States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System . Oakland, CA: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Childs, Dennis (2015). Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Clear, Todd R. (2009). Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse . New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Curtin, Mary Ellen (2000). Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865-1900. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia.Google Scholar
Debrah, Ama (2012). Special Report: Bias Against Native Hawaiians in Hawaii Criminal Justice System. ACLU Hawaii. <https://acluhi.org/2012/06/20/special-report-bias-against-native-hawaiians-in-hawaii-criminal-justice-system/> (Accessed April 10, 2019).Google Scholar
Detroit News (2004). State Must Evaluate Its Prison Population, Michigan Spends a Fifth of Its Budget on Corrections. November 21.Google Scholar
Disaster Center, The. United States Crime Rates, 1960–2009. <http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm> (Accessed April 11, 2019).+(Accessed+April+11,+2019).>Google Scholar
Dorsey, Tina, and Zawitz, Marianne (2005). Drugs and Crime Facts. NCJ 165148. Office of Justice Programs, United States Department of Justice. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.Google Scholar
Edsall, Thomas Byrne, and Edsall, Mary D. (1992). Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Elfenbein, Jessica, Hollowak, Thomas, and Nix, Elizabeth, (Eds.) (2011). Baltimore ’68: Riots and Rebirth in an American City. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Farmer, Ashley (2017). Remaking Black Power: How Women Transformed an Era. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fine, Sidney (2007). Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press.Google Scholar
Fischer, John Ryan (2015). Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i . Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flamm, Michael (2007). Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Forman, James Jr. (2017). Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Gettman, Jon B. (2005). Crimes of Indiscretion: Marijuana Arrests in the United States . Washington, DC: National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.Google Scholar
Gomez, Alan (2009). Nuestras Vidas Corren Casi Paralelas: Chicanos and the Prisoner Rebellion in Leavenworth. In Oboler, Suzanne (Ed.), Behind Bars: Latino/as and Prison in the U.S. , pp. 6796. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave McMillen.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gottschalk, Marie (2006). The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gottschalk, Marie (2016). Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Gram, John (2016). Education at the Edge of Empire: Negotiating Pueblo Identity in New Mexico’s Indian Boarding Schools. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
Gross, Kali (2006). Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910 . Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guerino, Paul, Harrison, Paige M., and Sabol, William J. (2011). Prisoners in 2010. NCJ 236096. Office of Justice Programs, United States Department of Justice. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.Google Scholar
Haberman, Clyde (2012). Stopping to Question the Numbers. The New York Times, June 18.Google Scholar
Haley, Sarah (2016). No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hernández, Kelly Lytle (2010). Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hernández, Kelly Lytle (2017). City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hersey, John (1998). The Algiers Motel Incident. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Hicks, Cheryl (2010). Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890-1935 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hinton, Elizabeth (2015). Creating Crime: The Rise and Impact of National Juvenile Delinquency Programs in Black Urban Neighborhoods. Journal of Urban History , 41(5): 808–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hinton, Elizabeth Kai (2015). Creating Crime: The Rise and Impact of National Juvenile Delinquency Programs in Black Urban Neighborhoods. Journal of Urban History. V. 4 (5). 808824.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hinton, Elizabeth K. (2016). From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirsch, Arnold (1998). Making the Second Ghetto Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holt v. Sarver I, (1969). 300 F. Supp. 825.Google Scholar
Hornblum, Alan (1999). Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison . New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Horne, Gerald (1995). Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.Google Scholar
Isserman, Maurice, and Kazin, Michael (2007). America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jackson, Bruce (1968). Our Prisons are Criminal. The New York Times , September 22.Google Scholar
Jacoby, Tamar (1998). Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Johnson, Ann K. (1996). Urban Ghetto Riots, 1965-1968: A Comparison of Soviet and American Press Coverage. New York: East European Monographs; Distributed by Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Justice Policy Institute (2000). Graph 1: Number of Prison and Jail Inmates, 1910-2000. The Punishing Decade: Prison and Jail Estimates at the Millennium . Washington, DC: Justice Policy Institute.Google Scholar
Kapell, Matthew Wilhelm (2009). “Miscreants, be they white or colored”: The Local Press Reactions to the 1943 Detroit “Race Riot.” The Michigan Academician, 39(3): 83114.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Randall (1997). Race, Crime, and the Law . New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Kohler-Hausmann, Julilly (2010). The Attila the Hun Law: New York’s Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Making of a Punitive State. The Journal of Social History , 44(1): 7195.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kohler-Hausmann, Julilly (2017). Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Krinitsky, Nora (2017). The Politics of Crime Control: Race, Policing, and Reform in Twentieth-Century Chicago. University of Michigan, PhD Dissertation.Google Scholar
Langan, Patrick (1991). Race of Prisoners Admitted to State and Federal Institutions, 1926-86. NCJ 125618. Office of Justice Programs, United States Department of Justice. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.Google Scholar
Lassiter, Matthew D. (2015). Pushers, Victims, and the Lost Innocence of White Suburbia: California’s War on Narcotics during the 1950s. Journal of Urban History , 41(5): 787807.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LeBrón, Marisol (2017). They Don’t Care If We Die: The Violence of Urban Policing in Puerto Rico. Journal of Urban History. <https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144217705485> (Accessed April 11, 2019).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LeBrón, Marisol (2019). Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LeFlouria, Talitha L. (2015). Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lichtenstein, Alex (1996). Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South . New York: Verso.Google Scholar
Long, Gerhard, Smith, William Deane, Porter, David O., Weber, Delores, and Loukopoulus, L. L. (1970). The Detroit Police Department—A Research Report on Previous Studies; Criminal Statistics; and Police Technology, Productivity, and Competence. Box 37, Kenneth Cockrel/Sheila Murphy Cockrell Collection. Walter Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Detroit.Google Scholar
Madley, Benjamin (2016). An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Manion, Jen (2015). Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Matusow, Allen J. (1984). The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
McKay Collection. Proposals acceptable to Oswald at this time. #15855-90, Box 84. Albany, NY: New York State Archives.Google Scholar
McKay Commission, The (1972a). Testimony of William Jackson. The McKay Commission: New York State Special Commission on Attica. Albany, NY: New York State Archives. April 12.Google Scholar
McKay Commission, The (1972b). Testimony of Sargent Cochrane. The McKay Commission: New York State Special Commission on Attica. Albany, NY: New York State Archives. April 13.Google Scholar
Miles, Tiya (2015). Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom . Oakland, CA: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Karen (2014). Managing Inequality: Northern Racial Liberalism in Interwar Detroit. New York: New York University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miranda v. Arizona (1966). 384 U.S. 436.Google Scholar
Monroe v. Pape (1961). 365 U.S. 167.Google Scholar
Muhammad, Khalil G. (2010). The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muhammad, Khalil G., and Thompson, Heather Ann (2012). Historical Causes of Mass Incarceration. Unpublished paper.Google Scholar
Mumford, Kevin (2008). Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Murakawa, Naomi (2014). The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Murch, Donna (2015). Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late Twentieth-Century War on Drugs. Journal of American History , 102(1): 162–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murphy, Chuck, and Freedberg, Sydney P. (2003). Fort Florida. St. Petersburg Times, March 2Google Scholar
Murton, Tom, and Hyams, Joe (1969). Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal . New York: Grove Press.Google Scholar
Nash, Dwayne (2014). Prototypes of Racial Profiling: Forgotten History of Stop and Frisk in 1960s New York. Northwestern University, PhD Dissertation.Google Scholar
National Research Council (2014). The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences. Edited by Travis, J., Western, B., and Redburn, S.. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.Google Scholar
New York State Attorney General (1999). Investigation into the New York City Police Department’s use of the investigative technique commonly known as “stop & frisk.” Commenced: March 18.Google Scholar
New York Times , The (1967). Detroit’s Mayor Assails Critics: Goes on Television to Defend his Record on Crime. May 18, p. 33.Google Scholar
Oshinsky, David (1997). Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice . New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Peltier, Leonard (2000). Prison Writings: My Life is my Sun Dance . New York: St. Martin’s Press.Google Scholar
Perkinson, Robert (2010). Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire . New York: Metropolitan Books.Google Scholar
Perlstein, Rick (2010). Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Pettit, Becky, and Western, Bruce (2010). Incarceration and Social Inequality. Daedalus, Summer, 2010.Google Scholar
Pfaff, John (2017). Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration—and How to Achieve Real Reform. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Quillian, Lincoln, and Pager, Devah (2001). Black Neighbors, Higher Crime?: The Role of Racial Stereotypes in Evaluations of Neighborhood Crime. American Journal of Sociology , 107(3): 717767.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reséndez, Andrés (2016). The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America . New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.Google Scholar
Rieder, Jonathan (1985). Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Rios, Victor M. (2011). Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys . New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Risen, Clay (2009). A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.Google Scholar
Robinson v. California (1962). 370 U.S. 660.Google Scholar
Roediger, David R. (1994). Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History. New York: Verso.Google Scholar
Sabol, William J., Rosich, Katherine, Mallik-Kane, Kamala, Kirk, David P., and Dubin, Glenn (2002). The Influences of Truth-in-Sentencing Reforms on Changes in States’ Sentencing Practices and Prison Populations. Justice Policy Center, Urban Institute.Google Scholar
Sampson, Robert, and Wilson, William J. (1995). Toward a Theory in Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality. In Hagen, J. and Peterson, R. (Eds.), Crime and Inequality , pp. 3754. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Schoenwald, Jonathan (2001). A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Simon, Jonathan (2007). Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear . New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, A. M. (1942a). The Race Problem in Detroit, Article I: The Negro Problem in Detroit. The Detroit News , October 5.Google Scholar
Smith, A. M. (1942b). The Race Problem in Detroit, Article III: A Natural Problem, Too. The Detroit News, October 7.Google Scholar
Smith, Andrea (2005). Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.Google Scholar
Sugrue, Thomas (1996). The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Thompson, Heather Ann (1999). Rethinking the Politics of White Flight in the Postwar City: Detroit, 1945–1980. Journal of Urban History , 25(2): 163198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Heather Ann (2001). Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Thompson, Heather Ann (2010a). Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History. Journal of American History , 97(3): 703734.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Heather Ann (2010b). Blinded by the ‘Barbaric’ South: Prison Horrors, Inmate Abuse, and the Ironic History of American Penal Reform. In Lassiter, Matthew and Crespino, Joseph (Eds.), The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism , pp. 7496. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Thompson, Heather Ann (2016). Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Thompson, Heather Ann (2017). Attica: It’s Worse Than We Thought. The New York Times. November 19, p. A23.Google Scholar
Thompson, Heather Ann (Series Ed.). Social and Political Movements of the 20th Century. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Tonry, Michael (2010). The Social, Psychological, and Political Causes of Racial Disparities in the American Criminal Justice System. Crime and Justice , 39(1): 273312.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
U.S. Census Bureau (1967). Crimes Known to the Police by Type and Area: 1965. Statistical Abstract of the United States. U.S. Department of Commerce. Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census.Google Scholar
U.S. Census Bureau (1997). Crimes and Crime Rates by Type of Offenses: 1985–1995. Statistical Abstract of the United States. U.S. Department of Commerce. Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census.Google Scholar
U. S. Department of Justice (DOJ). Key Facts at a Glance: Homicide rate trends. 1900-2006. Office of Justice Programs, United States Department of Justice. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.Google Scholar
U. S. Kerner Commission (1968). “Our Nation Is Moving Toward Two Societies, One Black, One White—Separate and Unequal”: Excerpts from the Kerner Commission Report. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Wacquant, Loïc (2001). Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh. Punishment & Society , 3(1): 95133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wacquant, Loïc (2002). From Slavery to Mass Incarceration. New Left Review , (13): 4160.Google Scholar
Weaver, Vesla M. (2007). Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy. Studies in American Political Development , 21(2): 230265.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weaver, Vesla (2017). The Untold Story of Mass Incarceration. Boston Review, October 24.Google Scholar
Weiman, David F., and Weiss, Christopher (2009). The Origins of Mass Incarceration in New York State: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Local War on Drugs. In Raphael, Steven and Stoll, Michael (Eds.), Do Prisons Make Us Safer?: The Benefits and Costs of the Prison Boom , pp. 73116. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Western, Bruce, and Pettit, Becky (2010). Incarceration & Social Inequality. Daedalus , 139(3): 819.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Williams, Rhonda (2014). Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power . New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolfe, Patrick (2006). Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4): 387409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar