Crime, Part 2

Crime

• Prisons
• War on drugs
• The criminalization of darkness
• Immigrants and crime
• Unjust sentencing
• The costs of mass incarceration
• Do prisons make us safer?
• Rethinking the crime problem

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American attitudes

• According to a recent poll, 73% of Americans believe that immigrants are “somewhat” or “very likely” to increase crime
• Social scientific research has arrived at the opposite conclusion

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Immigrant communities have low crime rates

• Border cities such as El Paso and San Diego are some of the safest metropolitan areas in the country (criminologist Ramiro Martinez)
• Many immigrant communities in large cities—Haitian neighborhoods in Miami, Mexican barrios in Houston—have incredibly low crime rates
• Those who live in immigrant neighborhoods, regardless of racial identity or immigrant status, are less likely to commit crimes than those who do not

Immigration Rates and Homicide Trends

Immigrants are less likely to commit crime

• Youth of Mexican descent commit far less crime than white or black youth
• Some social scientists have argued that a sizable proportion of the crime drop that occurred in the 1990s can be attributed to the swelling immigrant population (for example, sociologist Robert Sampson)
• Most first-generation immigrants have a lower incarceration rate than whites born in the United States�

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Comparing first- and second-generation Americans

• First-generation immigrants were 45% less likely to participate in crime than were third-generation Americans.
• Second-generation immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than first-generation immigrants
• Third-generation immigrants are more likely to do so than second-generation immigrants

Explanation

• High rates of marriage
• The presence of professionals in immigrant communities
• Informal social control
• Encourages neighbors to watch out for one another and be mindful of criminal activity

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Anti-immigrant legislation is about punishing the immigrant herself

• Foreignness has become intimately intertwined with our notions of criminality, so much so that immigration itself is conceived as a criminal act
• Interpersonal racism directed at nonwhites, and at Mexicans in particular, is strongly associated with anti-immigration policies
• Such as California’s Proposition 187 (1994), designed to deny undocumented immigrants access to education, emergency medical care, and welfare benefits

The Arabization of Terrorism

September 11, 2001

Arab Americans were among those who served and died at Ground Zero as police officers, firefighters, and doctors.

In the nine weeks following the attacks, over 700 violent attacks directed at Arab�Americans were reported.

The face of a “terrorist” became the face of an Arab in the American imagination.�

Crime

• Prisons
• War on drugs
• The criminalization of darkness
• Immigrants and crime
• Unjust sentencing
• The costs of mass incarceration
• Do prisons make us safer?
• Rethinking the crime problem

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Unjust sentencing

• Public defenders
• Differential sentencing
• Faith in the criminal justice system

Unjust sentencing

• Public defenders
• Differential sentencing
• Faith in the criminal justice system

Because most nonwhites from disadvantaged communities accused of a crime are flat broke, they are forced to rely on public defenders

• Public defenders tend to be overworked, underpaid, and unable to afford potentially useful resources such as DNA tests and expert witnesses
• Public defenders have very poor records
• Achieving a not guilty verdict
• Private attorneys--over half
• Public defenders--11%
• Force dismissal
• Private attorneys--48%
• Public defenders--11%

Unjust sentencing

• Public defenders
• Differential sentencing
• Faith in the criminal justice system

Differential sentencing

• Blacks arrested for aggravated assault are jailed nearly a third longer than whites arrested for the exact same offense.
• In Georgia, between 1990 and 1995, 573 repeat drug offenders were sentenced to life.
• 13 of them were white
• 15% of black repeat offenders were sentenced to life
• 3% of white repeat offenders were sentenced to life��

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Juvenile offenders

• Compared to whites who commit similar crimes, nonwhite juvenile offenders
• More likely to be tried as adults
• More likely to receive tougher punishments
• More likely to be viewed as “inherently criminal” by their parole officers

Sentencing disparity between crack and powdered cocaine

• Similar high, similar health risks, cost about the same
• Most arrested for possessing or distributing crack are African Americans
• Most arrested for possessing and distributing powder cocaine are whites or Latinos
• The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010
• Reduced the disparity between the amount of crack cocaine and powder cocaine needed to trigger certain United States federal criminal penalties from a 100:1 weight ratio to an 18:1 weight ratio and eliminated the five-year mandatory minimum sentence for simple possession of crack cocaine (5 grams) [500 grams for powdered cocaine].

Death penalty

• Blacks are more likely to be sentenced to death than whites
• After taking into account dozens of other factors (including previous offenses and the heinousness of the crime); numerous studies came to this conclusion
• People accused of killing whites are four times more likely to receive a death sentence than those accused of killing blacks
• Exoneration by DNA evidence: since 1989, 311 people found innocent; 193 of them black, 94 white, 22 Hispanic�

Unjust sentencing

• Public defenders
• Differential sentencing
• Faith in the criminal justice system

Faith in the criminal justice system

• Many blacks and Hispanics have little faith in the criminal justice system
• Some feel that justice is better served if community members dole it out
• “retaliatory killings”
• edict against “snitching”

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The very fact that many whites view the criminal justice system as unbiased and fair reflects their racial privilege

• no time in American history has the system been used as a machine of oppression against people of their skin color
• people who look like them are not racially profiled
• whiteness is not riveted to images of violence and criminality, as is blackness
• most police officers are white and have good relationships with white communities
• should they stand trial, their whiteness will not result in a harsher sentence
• in a jury trial, they can rest assured they will be judged by (a panel of their peers)

Unjust sentencing

• Public defenders
• Differential sentencing
• Faith in the criminal justice system

Crime

• Prisons
• War on drugs
• The criminalization of darkness
• Immigrants and crime
• Unjust sentencing
• The costs of mass incarceration
• Do prisons make us safer?
• Rethinking the crime problem

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Consequences of prison

• Negative psychological effects caused by the conditions of prison

Consequences of prison

• Political consequence
• Cannot vote

Consequences of prison

• Difficulty finding a job
• Many licensed professional occupations in healthcare or the public sector disqualify all applicants with criminal records, and a good number of employers simply refuse to hire ex-convicts, especially men of color with felony convictions
• One study found that a criminal record reduces one’s chances of landing a job by 50 to 60%

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Consequences of prison

• Budgets for educational and vocational training have been rolled back in recent years
• Prisoners are cut off their connections to stably employed friends and family members, people who could connect them to job opportunities
• Ex-offenders are denied many types of social services, such as food stamps, public housing, Medicaid, and government-based financial aid for college

Consequences of prison

• Less work hours
• those who have been incarcerated work an average of eight weeks less a year than if they had never been convicted

Consequences of prison

• Lower wages
• Incarceration results in a 15% reduction in hourly wage rates
• An ex-convict earns 30 to 40% less each year than a person with the same job skills and education
• A black man who dropped out of high school earns roughly $9,000 a year; but a black man who dropped out of high school and has a criminal record earns roughly $5,700 a year

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Consequences of prison

• Harms families
• Incarceration also wreaks havoc on the family, as wives must cope without their husbands, children without their mothers
• Reduces length of marriage
• Although the divorce rate for men inside and outside the prison is the same – 50% -- most marriages involving an incarcerated partner end in less than seven years, a full decade before the national rate of 17 years

Consequences of prison

• Reduces marriages
• By one estimate, America would enjoy 20% to 30% more marriages if they did not incarcerate a single person
• Men with criminal records seem to have a difficult time getting married after their sentence expires
• by the age of 35, roughly 80% of men who have never been incarcerated are married
• by the age of 35, only 40% of men with a record are married

Consequences of prison

• Financial cost
• It costs approximately $30,000 a year to incarcerate one person
• Over $60 billion annually
• If we add in the costs of policing, legal processing, court fees, and all the other expenses of the criminal justice system, we are met with the realization that America spends an extravagant $110 billion a year to fight crime.
• As the prison system has swelled, the United States has rolled back social spending. In 1973, states spent 2 percent of their budgets on police and corrections and 5.5 percent on cash assistance to the poor; in 2013, cash assistance programs accounted for a little more than 1 percent of state expenditures, and police and corrections accounted for roughly 4.5 percent.

Consequences of prison

• Incarceration reproduces the racial order
• By supervising, punishing, and confining a disproportionate number of poor blacks and Hispanics, the prison imprints on black-skinned people the stamp of criminality with all the force of state power

Crime

• Prisons
• War on drugs
• The criminalization of darkness
• Immigrants and crime
• Unjust sentencing
• The costs of mass incarceration
• Do prisons make us safer?
• Rethinking the crime problem

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Do prisons make us safer?

• Incarceration does little to reduce crime
• Prison boom only accounts for 2% to 5% of the crime drop
• Deterrent effect is not very strong
• Survey research suggests that many, if not most, people do not even perform the mental cost- benefit analysis required by the deterrent effect
• 30 percent of state convicts confess to having been on drugs when they committed their crimes
• Another 17 percent committed the offenses in order to get money for drugs.

Prisons produce more crime

• Incarceration leads to poverty, which leads to more crime
• Incarceration leads to family breakdown, which leads to more crime
• Prison is a place where first-time offenders are introduced to career criminals, therefore making it more likely that they also will become career criminals
• Prison is a place where friendships between gang members and drug dealers were forged and solidified, increasing the chances of criminal behavior after release
• Recidivism rates are high
• A good number of 630,000 people released from prison every year “return to their old ways”

Crime

• Prisons
• War on drugs
• The criminalization of darkness
• Immigrants and crime
• Unjust sentencing
• The costs of mass incarceration
• Do prisons make us safer?
• Rethinking the crime problem

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“The First Impression is Not �the Fundamental Truth”

Crime is not forever on the rise

Immigrants do not cause crime, but make the streets safer

We have more to fear from unsafe working conditions than from the crazed murderer lurking in the darkness

Prisons may do more harm than good when it comes to decreasing crime.

Reconsider where to devote time and money

• Violence against women
• As important as inner-city homicide?
• Corporate crime
• As important as street crime?
• Question the very definition of “crime”
• Why do some acts fall under criminal law and others under civil law?

Rethink conventional solutions

• Anti-incarceration movement
• There are other ways to punish offenders
• Proactive approaches to decrease crime
• Attacking structural disadvantages of the inner city
• Dismantling racial segregation
• Confronting widespread joblessness
• Fighting for a higher minimum wage
• Making college more affordable and available to exfelons

Examine how our racialized fears erode the hope of a multicultural democracy

• Racialized fear causes us to:
• Lock our doors
• Not introducing ourselves to our neighbors
• Divert our eyes
• Clutch our purses
• Change seats on an airplane
• Racialized fear withers away the promise of American community

Crime

• Prisons
• War on drugs
• The criminalization of darkness
• Immigrants and crime
• Unjust sentencing
• The costs of mass incarceration
• Do prisons make us safer?
• Rethinking the crime problem

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