In a truly remarkable article published in the Sacramento Bee on January 17th, Michelle Alexander, author of "The New Jim Crow" and former director of the ACLU Racial Justice Project, explained how criminal justice policy in California over the past three decades has been all about race. While the focus of the piece is to question the sincerity of Governor Schwarzenegger's recent interest in releasing prison inmates, which Ms. Alexander supports, it's her insights on why the prisons are full that make it noteworthy. She explains that the skyrocketing incarceration rates of the past three decades were caused by "the war on drugs - a war that has targeted people of color for drug crimes even though studies show they are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites." She cites the recent 9th Circuit decision in Farrakhan v. Washington in which the court "acknowledged the rampant racial bias in the criminal justice system, particularly in the prosecution of the drug war." Then there were the "racial profiling studies that were conducted several years ago documenting biased stop and search practices in dozens of police departments, including the California Highway Patrol." There's more: "The uncomfortable reality we must face is that California, like the nation as a whole, has treated a generation of African Americans and Latinos as largely disposable. They have been rounded up by the thousands, locked in cages, and upon release ushered into a parallel social universe in which they can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits..." Finally we learn that the get tough on crime movement that increased sentences, was driven "not by crime rates, but by politics - a politics that scapegoated the most vulnerable as a means of scoring political points."
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It is hard to understand how Erik Holder passed over this woman for a
senior spot at Justice. For the record, the L A street gangs
that have for three decades, controlled drug trafficking for most of
the western United States, are 96% black and Latino according to the
Los Angeles Times. Apologists routinely lump users and dealers
together when talking about "drug offenses" to support the fiction that
prisons are full of recreational users. Users, even chronic addicts,
have not been going to prison or jail in California since 2000, when
voters adopted Proposition 36, which requires that users receive
treatment rather than incarceration. The 11.8% of inmates in
California prisons for drug offenses are drug manufacturers and
dealers. Among the remaining inmates Ms. Alexander wants freed with
their voting rights restored, 53% are there for the violent crimes of
murder, rape, robbery, assault and kidnapping, while 33.9% are there
for multiple felonies such as burglary, grand theft, drunk driving, or
as ex-felons in possession of a firearm. The suggestion that police, a
quarter of which are minorities, have been rounding up blacks and
Latinos and throwing them in cages evades the fact that, by far, the
young men in these ethnic groups commit most of the crime, mostly
against members of their own race. While blacks account for 12.3% of
the U.S. population, the BJS reports that in 2008 over 50% of all
murder victims were black. Over 31% of the female victims of
aggravated assault are black. Victimization rates for those living in
poor households are more than twice as high as for middle income
households. If Ms. Alexander was really interested in helping blacks
and Latinos, she would shift her focus to the victims and demand more
policing to remove the disproportionate number of criminals that
plague urban neighborhoods.
Finally, the movement in the late 1970s to abandon what I like to call the "therapeutic model" for criminals adopted in the mid 1960s, and replace it with actual consequences for criminal behavior was driven entirely by crime rates. Smart elected officials from both political parties jumped on board of what was essentially a grass-roots movement to restore public safety. The 1982 Victims Bill of Rights Initiative was drafted by deputy district attorneys, not politicians. The 1994 Three Strikes and You're Out initiative was authored by a Fresno photographer who's daughter was murdered by a white habitual criminal. Public interest in the measure took off after national media coverage of the kidnap and murder of another young girl, Polly Klaas, by another white habitual criminal. Race had nothing to do with it.
Finally, the movement in the late 1970s to abandon what I like to call the "therapeutic model" for criminals adopted in the mid 1960s, and replace it with actual consequences for criminal behavior was driven entirely by crime rates. Smart elected officials from both political parties jumped on board of what was essentially a grass-roots movement to restore public safety. The 1982 Victims Bill of Rights Initiative was drafted by deputy district attorneys, not politicians. The 1994 Three Strikes and You're Out initiative was authored by a Fresno photographer who's daughter was murdered by a white habitual criminal. Public interest in the measure took off after national media coverage of the kidnap and murder of another young girl, Polly Klaas, by another white habitual criminal. Race had nothing to do with it.
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