Michael Tonry - Punishing Race: A Continuing American Dilemma

PUNISHING RACE

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A CONTINUING AMERICAN DILEMMA

MICHAEL TONRY

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tonry, Michael H.
Punishing race : a continuing American dilemma / Michael Tonry.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-975137-2 (hardcover); 978-0-19-992646-6 (paperback)
1. Criminal justice, Administration ofUnited States.
2. Discrimination in criminal justice administrationUnited States.
3. Crime and raceUnited States. I. Title.
HV9950.T667 2011
364.973089dc22 2010015822

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

This book is about racial injustice in the American criminal justice system generally and about racial disparities in imprisonment in particular. Racial injustices are, by definition, wrong. They do harm to individuals, and they do harm to Americas ongoing mission to ameliorate the persisting effects of slavery, racial discrimination, and bigotry.

Those effects persist, and that is not surprising. The first important federal civil rights legislation was enacted less than a half century ago, in 1964. Explicit appeals to race in elections disappeared only a decade later. Barely forty years have passed since George Wallace, in an openly racist campaign, in 1968 received 13.5 percent of the presidential vote and won five southern states. In 1966 Georgians elected as their governor a man, Lester Maddox, who was most famous for vowing to stand in the door of his restaurant, axe handle in hand, to greet black people who dared try to eat there. Constitutionally barred from reelection, Maddox was elected lieutenant governor in 1970.

Long before open appeals to racism disappeared from American politics, conservative Republicans fashioned the Southern Strategy, a deliberate attempt to focus on issuesinitially states rights and later crime, welfare fraud, busing, and affirmative actionthat everyone understood were coded appeals to whites antiblack animus, anxiety, and resentment. The roots of the Southern Strategy lay in the 1940s, but the term came into use only in the 1960s. Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964 was the first to implement the strategy in a national election. In retrospect few people deny that.

It would be easy to dismiss these peoplemany Americans under forty-five probably recognize few of their namesand the things they did as ancient history, but that misses a major point. Although it is true that few whites any longer believe in white supremacy or the racial inferiority of black people, and that mainstream political candidates no longer make open appeals to racism, it is also true that too many black Americans are poor, disadvantaged, undereducated, and underemployed. Those realities have everything to do with race.

When racial discrimination ceased to be legal, and later on, when white beliefs about black inferiority substantially disappeared, large percentages of black Americans were poor, ill educated, and either unemployed or locked into menial unskilled jobs. That was not surprising. Blacks were long excluded by bias and discrimination from much that was good in American life. And so, of course, they were less well-off than whites.

An optimist in 1964, however, would have predicted that by 2000 blacks would catch up. Descendants of European immigrants normally were fully assimilated into American life and distinguishable, if at all, only by their surnames two generations after their grandparents arrived. If black Americans had been given a fair playing field on which to compete they too should have been fully assimilated, and indistinguishable from other Americans except for the pigment in their skin, within two generations after the great victories of the civil rights movement.

That didnt happen. On every demographic measure of well-beinglife expectancy, infant mortality, income, education, employment, home ownershipblack people in America are substantially worse off than whites. The reasons for that are inextricably caught up in the politics of race, and the public policies they engendered. No serious informed person on the right or the left, for example, any longer questions that federal housing policies on red-lining and mortgage eligibility long made it impossible for many urban black people to buy homes. The effect was to corral black Americans in deteriorating urban ghettos. Few remember the welfare rules in the 1960s and 1970s that made women ineligible to receive benefits for themselves and their children if there was a man in the house. The effect was to break up couples and establish a pattern that persists to this day of poor black single-parent female-headed households. And American drug and crime control policies since the mid-1970s, the subject of this book, have disabled poor young black men from successful participation in American life and thereby damaged not only them but also their children, their families, and their communities.

The supporting statistics are legion. The U.S. Department of Justice predicts that one in three black baby boys born in 2001 will spend part of his life as an inmate in a state or federal prison. At any time in the first decade of the twenty-first century one-third of young black men in their twenties were in jail or prison or on probation or parole. Imprisonment rates for black men have for a quarter century been five to seven times higher than those for white men.