AS WE HAVE SEEN, while it
certainly cannot be said that the United States
has achieved complete equality in employment,
education, voting, and housing, we continue to
make slow but steady progress towards that goal.
But in one critical arena - criminal justice -
racial inequality appears to be growing, not
receding. America's criminal laws, while
facially neutral, are too often enforced in a
biased manner. Indeed, the injustices of the
criminal justice system threaten to render
irrelevant fifty years of hard-fought civil
rights progress in other areas. For example:
- In 1964 Congress passed the Title
VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibiting
discrimination in employment. Yet today, three
out of every ten African American males born in
the United States will serve time in prison, a
status that renders their prospects for
legitimate employment bleak and often bars them
from obtaining professional licenses.
- Similarly, Title
II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
guaranteed minority citizens the right to travel
and utilize public accommodations freely. Yet
racial profiling and police brutality make such
travel hazardous to the dignity and health of
law-abiding black and Hispanic citizens today.
- In 1965 Congress passed the Voting
Rights Act. Yet today, 31 percent of all
black men in Alabama and Florida are permanently
disenfranchised as a result of felony
convictions. Nationally, 1.4 million black men
have lost the right to vote under these laws.
- In 1965 Congress passed the Immigration
and Nationality Act, which sought to
eliminate the vestiges of racial discrimination
in the nation's immigration laws. Yet today,
Hispanic and Asian Americans are routinely and
sometimes explicitly singled out for immigration
enforcement.
- In 1968 Congress passed the Fair
Housing Act. Yet today, the current housing
for approximately 2 million Americans -
two-thirds of them African American or Hispanic
- is a prison or jail cell.
DISPARATE
TREATMENT within the criminal justice system
is not rational: Most crimes are not committed
by minorities, and most minorities are not
criminals. Yet the unequal targeting and
treatment of minorities throughout the criminal
justice process -- from arrest to sentencing --
reinforces the perception that drives the
inequality in the first place. The result is a
vicious cycle that has evolved into a
self-fulfilling prophecy: More minority arrests
and convictions perpetuate the belief that
minorities commit more crimes, which in turn
leads to racial profiling and more minority
arrests.
"RACIAL
PROFILING" refers to law enforcement
strategies and practices that single out blacks
and Hispanics as objects of suspicion solely on
the basis of the color of their skin or accent.
Under such practices, minorities are
disproportionately targeted as criminal
suspects, skewing at the outset the racial
composition of the population ultimately
charged, convicted and incarcerated. For
example:
MONITORING OF TRAFFIC STOPS by
the Maryland State Police on I-95 pursuant to a
consent decree found that, from January 1995 to
December 1997, 70 percent of the drivers stopped
and searched by the police were black, while
only 17.5 percent of all drivers -- and speeders
-- were black.
SIMILARLY, in Volusia
County, Florida, nearly 70 percent of those
stopped on a particular interstate highway in
Central Florida in 1992 were black or Hispanic,
although blacks and Hispanics comprised only 5
percent of all drivers on that highway.
Moreover, minorities were detained for longer
periods of time per stop than whites, and 80
percent of the cars searched after being stopped
belonged to minority drivers.
THE
EVIDENCE similarly suggests that prosecutorial
discretion is too often systematically exercised
to the disadvantage of black and Hispanic
Americans. In 1991 the San Jose Mercury News
reviewed almost 700,000 California criminal
cases between 1981 and 1990 and uncovered
statistically significant disparities at several
different stages of the criminal justice
process. The study found, for example, that 20
percent of white defendants charged with crimes
providing for the option of pretrial diversion
received that benefit, while only 14 percent of
similarly situated blacks and 11 percent of
similarly situated Hispanics were placed in such
programs. The same study revealed consistent
discrepancies in the treatment of white and
non-white defendants at the pretrial negotiation
stage of the criminal process. During 1989-1990,
a white felony defendant with no criminal record
stood a 33 percent chance of having the charge
reduced to a misdemeanor or infraction, compared
to 25 percent for a similarly situated black or
Hispanic.
DISCRIMINATION CAN OCCUR at
the sentencing stage as well. One of the most
thorough studies of sentencing disparities was
undertaken by the New York State Division of
Criminal Justice Services, which studied felony
sentencing outcomes in New York courts between
1990 and 1992. The State concluded that
one-third of minorities sentenced to prison
would have received a shorter or
non-incarcerative sentence if they had been
treated like similarly situated white
defendants. If probation-eligible blacks had
been treated like their white counterparts, more
than 8000 fewer black defendants would have
received prison in that two-year period. In
short, the study found that blacks are sentenced
to prison more frequently than whites for the
same conduct.
ANOTHER AREA OF CONCERN
involves the disproportionately harsh treatment
of minorities in the
juvenile
justice system, an area in which especially
pronounced disparities pose ominous consequences
for minority communities. For example, minority
youths are disproportionately targeted for
arrest in the war on drugs. In Baltimore,
Maryland, 18 white youths and 86 black youths
were arrested for selling drugs in 1980. One
decade later, juvenile drug sale arrests had
increased more than 100 percent overall, and the
almost 5-to-1 racial disparity that existed a
decade earlier had become a 100-to-1 disparity:
white youths were arrested 13 times for selling
drugs in 1990, while black youths were arrested
1304 times -- a 1400 percent increase from 1980.
These figures reflect the broader national
experience: From 1986 to 1991, arrests of white
juveniles for drug offenses decreased 34
percent, while arrests of minority juveniles
increased 78 percent. All this despite data
suggesting that drug use rates among white,
black, and Hispanic youths are about the same,
and that drug use has in fact been lower among
black youths than white youths for the last
couple of decades.
IN 1994, Congress
enacted legislation authorizing the Department
of Justice to conduct investigations of and
bring suit against police departments alleged to
be engaging in a pattern or practice of abusive
use of force or racial discrimination such as
racial profiling. This authority led to the
development of consent decrees with the Los
Angeles Police Department, the New Jersey State
Police, the Pittsburgh Police Department, and
other jurisdictions to address racial profiling,
excessive use of force, and other concerns.
Investigations of other departments - such as
those in New York and Cincinnati - continue.
CIVIL RIGHTS ADVOCATES have urged a
number of further reforms: the increased use of
data collection programs by law enforcement to
assess whether their officers are engaged in
racial profiling, establishing accreditation for
law enforcement, ensuring equal employment
opportunity for minorities and women seeking
careers in law enforcement, abolishing or
suspending the death penalty, reforming
sentencing guidelines, repealing felony
disenfranchisement laws, and repealing efforts
to move juveniles into the adult justice system.
Throughout these discussions, civil rights
advocates have emphasized that fairness and
nondiscrimination are entirely consistent with a
commitment to tough, effective law enforcement.
CIVIL
RIGHTS GLOSSARY FELONY
DISENFRANCHISEMENT - The practice of some states
to disenfranchise - sometimes permanently - any
citizen with a record of a felony conviction.
RACIAL PROFILING -- Refers to law
enforcement strategies and practices that single
out minorities as objects of suspicion solely on
the basis of the color of their skin or accent.