Study Settles It: Shocking Black & Latino Imprisonment Rates the Result of Racist, Punitive Impulse

For decades, journalists, scholars and activists seeking to understand the soaring number of people locked up in U.S. prisons over the past 40 years have uncovered -- or just looked clearly enough to see -- overwhelming evidence of systemic racism at every level of the criminal justice system. Yet, there has been a wide reluctance to name racism as one of the primary factors fueling the prison boom; as sentences have gotten longer and parole granted less often, even the starkest racial statistics -- like the fact that African Americans and Latinos make up 70 percent of the incarcerated population -- have often been treated as an unfortunate byproduct of the war on drugs.

Now, two criminologists have concluded, in a new study investigating public attitudes behind harsh sentencing, that the warehousing of African Americans and other minorities is no accident. Rather, "racial resentments are inextricably entwined in public punitiveness." In other words, racism and the rise of "tough on crime" policies go hand in hand.

James Unnever of the University of South Florida-Sarasota and Francis Cullen of the University of Cincinnati acknowledge the "lengthy roster" of previous studies on race and the U.S. prison system; yet theirs manages to contribute something crucial to the current debate: "… [G]iven the large body of research that documents a substantive association between punitiveness and racial animus," they write, "it is somewhat disconcerting that theories of the mass-incarceration movement do not place race and racism at the center of their explanation for why the United States imprisons so many of its citizens."

This conclusion echoes the work of civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander, who, in the introduction to her new book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, admits that even she was once skeptical of how central racism was to the rise of the modern American prison system. "Quite belatedly, I came to see that mass incarceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow."

Alexander argues that the U.S. prison system has so sweepingly and consistently targeted African American men that it has effectively created a new racial caste system. That most Americans would deny such a caste system exists speaks to how insidious it is. "Like an optical illusion," she writes, "one in which the embedded image is impossible to see until its outline is identified -- the new caste system lurks invisibly within the maze of rationalizations we have developed for persistent racial inequality."

Unnever and Cullen's study makes it that much easier to see what Alexander describes.

Racial Resentments

To conduct their study, Unnever and Cullen used the results of the 2000 National Election Survey, which featured interviews with 1,620 Americans who shared their views on a range of social issues. To assess the "punitive attitudes" of participants, the authors considered their answers to questions weighing the social roots of crime versus the need to punish those who commit crime. For example: "Do you think that the best way to reduce crime is to address the social problems that cause crime like bad schools, poverty, and joblessness or to make sure criminals are caught, convicted, and punished, or that we should do something in between, or haven't you thought much about this?"

The authors also measured respondents' support for the harshest sentence of all: capital punishment. When asked if they favored or opposed the death penalty for convicted murderers, 55 percent of respondents "strongly favored the death penalty." Eighteen percent "did not strongly support it." The rest did not know.