Talking About Prison Means Talking About Race | Robert Perkinson | Big Think

Talking About Prison Means Talking About Race

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African-Americans are imprisoned at seven times the rate of whites. Intentional discrimination is a factor in this—as are poverty, educational attainment, urban density, and white flight from urban centers.

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Robert Perkinson:

Robert Perkinson is the author of "Texas Tough: The Rise of a Prison Empire," a history of American punishment that focuses on the country’s most incarcerated and politically influential state, Texas. His research focuses on how the dynamics of race, politics, crime, and for-profit prisons have intersected to create a uniquely harsh system that seeks to punish rather than rehabilitate prisoners. He is a Soros Justice Fellow and a professor at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How has racism factored into your study of the penal system?

Robert Perkinson: I think they are entwined in ways that we haven’t fully appreciated. We’ve seen over the past two generations, really you know breathtaking progress in terms of civil rights. My grandparents on my mom’s side are from Mississippi. Their parents were involved in... my great-grandfather was involved in driving the blacks out of a little county in Mississippi, and my 90-something year old grandmother pushed her walker down to vote for Obama in the fall of 2008, and that was stunning for her. I mean something she couldn’t have imagined for most of her life. But, you know, over the same period of tremendous progress, we’ve seen measurable disparities along racial lines and criminal justice worsen.

It used to be that the prison population in the United States was mostly white, now it’s mostly black and Latino. Before desegregation, the rate African-Americans were going to prison at roughly the rate of four times the rate of whites, now they’re roughly going to prison at the rate of seven times the rate of whites. So, it’s a huge contradiction in what’s happened in American race relations and that’s something that civil rights organizations and the media and public policymakers have not been paying attention to.

Question: Why has the racial disparity in prisons become so drastic?

Robert Perkinson: I mean, like everything in our inchoate criminal justice system, it’s difficult to disentangle all of the variables. There is certainly intentional bias in racial profiling by police, in the ways that judges regard certain defendants, even in the ways that probably Public Defenders and certainly Prosecutors and Juries do, and Parole Boards. So, the role of intentional discrimination shouldn’t be minimized. It’s still present with us even in the post-civil rights era. But there are a lot of other factors as well. You can’t very well disentangle it from poverty, educational attainment, urban density, white flight and capital flight out of central urban areas where crime, and even more than crime, incarceration has been most concentrated.

And then too, it is also important for people to know that there is all sorts of ways that race has—that racial divisions have worsened in criminal justice in unanticipated, unintentional ways. Just one example, in the ‘90’s all sorts of legislatures passed laws to enhance penalties if you sell drugs near a school... say 200 yards, 2,000 yards from a school. Well, it turns out that in rural areas, almost every place you might sell drugs is more than 2,000 yards from a school. In the Bronx, or dense parts of Los Angeles, or Washington D.C., every place on the map is within 200 yards of a school or almost, and that means that all defendants who are getting charged with drug crimes in that area, whether school kids were involved or not, are getting those enhanced penalties. Whereas, the meth dealer in rural Nebraska gets a comparatively lighter sentence. And that’s had a big, big racial impact.

Crack cocaine is less—even the racial disparities caused by the differences in sentencing for crack versus powdered cocaine. And we now know these two drugs are identical, pharmacologically. That’s had an even more dramatic racial impact.

Question: Why is it important to talk about race when we talk about incarceration?

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