aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Stuart Taylor Jr. on criminal injustice and Race
It is regrettable that the legend of the “Jena Six” has for many become the leading symbol of the grave injustices to African-Americans that pervade our nation’s penal system. The legend is partly false. And the notion that racism is the main reason for the injustices to hundreds of thousands of black defendants around the nation is entirely false.
To be sure, there is still too much racism among prosecutors, judges, and jurors. But this is far less widespread and virulent, even in Jena, La., than Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson—the media-anointed (albeit, repeatedly discredited) African-American “leaders”—like to pretend. There are still too many unwarranted prosecutions of innocent minority (and other) defendants, as detailed in my August 4 column, ”Innocents in Prison.” But the vast majority of those prosecuted are guilty, as may prove to be the case with some or all of the Jena Six.
Rather, the heart of the racial injustice in our penal system is the grossly excessive punishment of hundreds of thousands of nonviolent, disproportionately black offenders whose long prison terms ruin countless lives and turn many who could have become productive citizens into career criminals. [...]
Orlando Patterson, the noted African-American sociology professor at Harvard, put his finger on the main source of racial injustice in a September 30 New York Times op-ed:
“This virtual gulag of racial incarceration [reflects] a law enforcement system that unfairly focuses on drug offenses and other crimes more likely to be committed by blacks, combined with draconian mandatory sentencing and an absurdly counterproductive retreat from rehabilitation [of] offenders. [This system] simply makes hardened criminals of nonviolent drug offenders and spits out angry men who are unemployable, unreformable, and unmarriageable.”
In short, focusing mainly on the residue of racism is a distraction from the far bigger problem of over-punishment. It is also a distraction from understanding why African-American crime rates are so high.
The reason, Patterson says, is “something that has been swept under the rug for too long in black America: the crisis in relations between men and women of all classes and, as a result, the catastrophic state of black family life, especially among the poor.... The resulting absence of fathers—some 70 percent of black babies are born to single mothers—is undoubtedly a major cause of youth delinquency.”
This is not to deny that the Jena case involved a clear injustice to identifiable African-Americans. Nor is it necessarily to deny the (debatable, in my view) assertions that Jena school authorities and/or the local district attorney used a racial double standard favoring white students over blacks.
The clear injustice was the initial use of a grossly excessive charge—attempted second-degree murder—that could have doomed five of the Jena Six to long prison terms for ganging up on Justin Barker, a white student who was neither attacked with a deadly weapon nor seriously injured. Indeed, after a much-needed outcry the charges were reduced to aggravated second-degree battery.
Read the whole piece before it rotates off the site.
Via Walter Olson.
