Re: youth crime enforcement bias (fwd)

[xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Jim Devine:

> the author, Scott Shuger, was simply asking questions about these issues. I
> was hoping for answers to these questions rather than name-calling based on
> a partial reading.

first, let me decompose the neo-liberal journalist Mr.Shuger's article
and his critique of the report, within the scope of the literature on
criminology and race. second, let me look at the report, which says that
"Racial Disparities Are Pervasive in Justice System". For the time being,
I will leave aside New York Times interpretation of the report. This is
another issue.

in the first place, everybody can see that the "funding" sources of the
report prepared by the Justice Department are highly problematic. They
are typical liberal type foundations such as Ford and Soros. As the
NY Times article suggests "An unusual feature of the report is that its
costs were underwritten by the Justice Department and several leading
foundations: the Ford Foundation; the MacArthur Foundation; the
Rockefeller Foundation; the Walter Johnson Foundation; the Annie E. Casey
Foundation, which specializes in issues relating to young people; and the
Center on Crime, Communities and Culture of George Soros's Open Society
Institute".


Basically, these foundations do not give a serious damn about
racism in the criminal justice system just as they do not give a damn
about human rights violations in any part of the world.. They fund such
studies to look "politically correct. BUT, this is NOT Shuger's point.
Shuger is not criticizing the report because there are capital interests
behind it. Shuger is asking, based on the report's findings (ie., black
people are more likely to be "arrested" than white people or minority
people are  severely treated in each step of the justice system) to
criticize the notion that white unarrest is a prejudice and injustice. For
him, it seems, white unarrest and black arrest is not a structural
problem.When he implies that there are "law-abiding" whites so their
unarrest is not a prejudice against blacks but a justice, in my view, he
does an obscurantist nonsense. Whites are not arrested or less likely to
be arrested because they are law-abiding, Mr Shuger!. They are NOT
arrested because of the racist justice system in which black people find
themselves racialized and criminalized vis a vie the whites. They are
already stigmatized as not-law abiding. Because of this deeply structured
prejudice,there are obvious racial disparities between whites and blacks
interms of arrest, time of prisoning, incarceration, treatment by the
criminal justice system, etc..

Some studies on racial disparities in crime rates offer similar results
too. Turk's study  (1971) suggests a link between the structural position
of the "least powerful groups" in society, criminal labeling and unequal
treatment. Diana Schully's (feminist, 1994?) study on rape presents even
more devastating results such as differentail treatment between white and
black women rape victims.Schully summarizes different case studies on
how racism and sexism relate to one another (ie, if rapist is white, raped
is black, or vice versa, or punishment of two rapists if one black and the
other is white, etc..) Shuger, instead of asking the whys and hows of
these problems, demystfies racism by raising obscure questions
about the injustices of white arrest!!

I forget the figures in Schully's book now. I recommend the book but i
remember the turkish title only.


>from today's SLATE Magazine: >The NYT off-lead, by the paper's national
>crime reporter, Fox Butterfield, a story nobody else fronts, is that a
>new
>comprehensive study purports to show that black and Hispanic teenagers
>are
>treated more severely than their white counterparts in the juvenile
>justice
>system. Findings include: "Among young people who have not been sent to a
>juvenile prison before, blacks are more than six times as likely as
>whites
>to be sentenced by juvenile courts to prison." And: "Similarly, white
>youths charged with violent offenses are incarcerated for an average of
>193
>days after trial, but blacks are incarcerated an average of 254 days and
>Hispanics are incarcerated an average of 305 days."


And? isn't this a racism problem? (by just looking at the data)!!


>The story says that
>although in the past, when studies have found racial disparities in say,
>the number of inmates, critics have said the cause was simply that
>minorities commit a disproportionate  that it finds disparities at each
>stage of the juvenile
>justice process.

but civil rights activist Soler says a different thing according to the NY
Times article.Soler comments on the weaknesses of *both* the previous
studies and the report.


>In the past, when studies have found racial disparities in the number
>of adult black or Hispanic prison inmates, critics have asserted that
>the cause was simply that members of minorities committed a
>disproportionate number of crimes. That may be true, Mr. Soler said,
>but it does not account for the extreme disparities found in the
>report, nor for disparities at each stage of the juvenile justice
>process.


Shuger continues:

>it's important journalism to run down some issues the
>story seems to leave
>untethered.

See above!


>For instance, as regards that trans-racial comparison among
>people who have not been sent to juvenile prison before, has it been
>adjusted for equal numbers of prior convictions and for equal seriousness
>of the crime? If not, then it may be the prior number of blown chances
>and
>the gravity of the crimes that are pushing the offender into prison for
>the first time, not his/her race.

Again, Shuger is suggesting that racism or the fact that black people are
more likely to be arrested do not matter. What matters are
technical details. He assumes justice system is race neutral, and thus
relates criminality  to "prior convictions" or "equal seriousness of the
crime".


>A similar point can be made about
>violent
>offenses--they come in degrees of gravity and if one group's offenses
>cluster around one degree of gravity and another's cluster around
>another,
>then the difference in jail time served may be an artifact not of race
>but
>of the type of violent crime committed.

the same story! denial of racism! "Type of violent crime" is associated
with race, which is what RACISM does by racializing violence.Racial
categories are already implicit in how people perceive different types of
crimes. By saying that race does not matter is to deny the racist
discourse and its systemic realities. Is Shuger aware of the racist
criminal discourses that argue that "blacks are more likely to be
convicted because they commit crimes that have high visibility (ie.,
violent crimes)!! Is he aware of the "sub-culture violence" thesis of
Wolgang (1967)? These type of views are still part of the dominant culture
and the criminal justice system.

>Even the
>study's claim that
>"minority youths are more likely than their white counterparts to be
>arrested" needs more exegesis than the Times gives it here. If somebody
>isn't arrested, how do we know he's in any relevant sense a "counterpart"
>of the person who is? Maybe he's law-abiding, in which case his not being
>arrested isn't prejudice, it's justice.


according to Shuger's formulation, he seems to conclude that white
unarrest is justice because whites are law abiding!! what is this if not
racism?


Mine