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THE US JUSTICE SYSTEM IS NOT INFECTED WITH RACIST INTENTIONS
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- A GENDERED RESPONSE TO THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX IS NECESSARY
THE US JUSTICE SYSTEM IS NOT INFECTED WITH RACIST INTENTIONS1. THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM DOES NOT TREAT BLACK DEFENDANTS MORE HARSHLY Eli Lehrer, writer for the Heritage Foundation, 9 Oct. 2000. THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, accessed 7/26/06, Little evidence exists that black criminals face discrimination in the criminal-justice system. Black "overrepresentation" in that system is in the number of criminals arrested. Racist cops aren't responsible for this disparity: Blacks get arrested at the same high rates in cities like Atlanta and Washington where the political establishment is almost entirely African-American and the police forces reflect the population's ethnic makeup. In a study on sentencing disparity commissioned by the Center for Equal Opportunity, former University of Maryland professor Robert Lerner finds that arrested blacks get sent to prison at a lower rate than arrested whites in just about every category that the government measures. Lerner found that blacks were twice as likely to get off on rape charges, around 50 percent more likely to escape punishment when charged with simple assault, and a third more likely to beat the rap on drug dealing. The difference in favor of black offenders existed in 12 out of 14 categories of crime.
Dinesh D’Souza, scholar at Hoover Institution, 23 Feb. 2006. THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, accessed 7/27/06, In my view, this is complete nonsense. As a nonwhite immigrant, I am grateful to the activists of the civil rights movement for their efforts to open up doors that would otherwise have remained closed. But at the same time, I am struck by the ease with which Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement won its victories, and by the magnitude of white goodwill in this country. In a single decade, from the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties, America radically overhauled its laws through a series of landmark decisions: Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act. Through such measures, America established equality of rights under the law. Of course, the need to enforce nondiscrimination provisions continues, but for nearly half a century, blacks and other minorities have enjoyed the same legal rights as whites. Actually, this is not strictly true. For a few decades now, blacks and some minorities have enjoyed more rights and privileges than whites. The reason is that America has implemented affirmative action policies that give legal preference to minority groups in university admissions, jobs, and government contracts. Such policies remain controversial, but the point is that they reflect the great lengths to which this country has gone to eradicate discrimination. It is extremely unlikely that a racist society would grant its minority citizens legal preferences over members of the majority group. Some private discrimination continues to exist in America, but the only form of discrimination that can be legally practiced today benefits blacks more than whites. 3. BLACK DEFENDANTS ARE NOT TARGETTED BY DRUG SENTENCES Eli Lehrer, writer for the Heritage Foundation, 9 Oct. 2000. THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION, accessed 7/26/06, Black murderers face shorter sentences than their white counterparts and (contrary to leftist dogma) make fewer trips to death row. Even when it comes to the federal law punishing crack possession much more harshly than powder-cocaine possession-a favorite topic of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton-racism doesn't enter the picture. In his 1997 book Race, Crime and the Law, Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy shows that the law passed with the enthusiastic support of black congressmen who saw crack becoming the drug of choice in their districts. The use of methamphetamine and heroin-predominantly by whites-has soared in the 1990s, while the penalties for this use have remained stable. Would black Americans be better off if the situation were reversed, and crack dealing went on uninterrupted in American inner cities while police cracked down on rural whites using methamphetamine? If this happened, civil-rights leaders would organize protest marches in favor of stronger drug-enforcement efforts in inner cities-and would be right to do so. A GENDERED RESPONSE TO THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX IS NECESSARY1. FEMALE CRIMINALITY IS TREATED UNEQUALLY IN SOCIETY Angela Davis, philosopher/political activist, 2003. ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE, p. 65-6 It is from this perspective of the contemporary expansion of prisons, both in the United States and throughout the world, that we should examine some of the historical and ideological aspects of state punishment imposed on women. Since the end of the eighteenth century, when, as we have seen, imprisonment began to emerge as the dominant form of punishment, convicted women have been represented as essentially different form their male counterparts. It is true that men who commit the kinds of transgressions that are regarded as punishable by the state are labeled as social deviants. Nevertheless, masculine criminality has always been deemed more “normal” than feminine criminality. There has always been a tendency to regard those women who have been publicly punished by the state for their misbehaviors as significantly more aberrant and far more threatening to society than their numerous male counterparts.
Angela Davis, philosopher/political activist, 2003. ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE, p. 75-6 Paradoxically, demands for parity with men’s prisons, instead of creating greater educational, vocational, and health opportunities for women prisoners, often have led to more repressive conditions for women. This is not only a consequence of deploying liberal – that is, formalistic – notions of equality, but of, more dangerous, allowing male prisons to function as the punishment norm. 3. SEXUAL VIOLENCE IS COMMITTED AGAINST FEMALE PRISONERS Angela Davis, philosopher/political activist, 2003. ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE, p. 77-8 As the level of repression in women’s prisons increases, and, paradoxically, as the influence of domestic prison regimes recedes, sexual abuse – which, like domestic violence, is yet another dimension of the privatized punishment of women – has become an institutionalized component of punishment behind prison walls. Although guard-on-prisoner sexual abuse is not sanctioned as such, the widespread leniency with which offending officers are treated suggests that for women, prison is a space in which the threat of sexualized violence that looms in the larger society is effectively sanctioned as a routine aspect of the landscape of punishment behind prison walls. 4. FEMALE PRISONS ARE HYPSEXUALIZED TO CONDONE RAPE Angela Davis, philosopher/political activist, 2003. ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE, p. 79-80 The criminalization of black and Latina women includes persisting images of hypersexuality that serve to justify sexual assaults against them both in and outside of prison. Such images were vividly rendered in a Nightline television series filmed in November 1999 on location at California’s Valley State Prison for Women. Many of the women interviewed by Ted Koppel complained that they received frequent and unnecessary pelvic examinations, including when they visited the doctor with such routine illnesses as colds. In an attempt to justify these examinations, the chief medical officer explained that women prisoners had rare opportunities for “male contact,” and that they therefore welcomed these superfluous gynecological exams. Although this office was eventually removed form his position as a result of these comments, his reassignment did little to alter the pervasive vulnerability of imprisoned women to sexual abuse. Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 5.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
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