White supremacy and mass incarceration

The 1987 McCleskey v. Kemp decision reinforced a
long history racial discrimination in the American criminal
justice system. EPA/MICHAEL REYNOLDS [EPA]

Republicans join the Left in calls for American prison reform but ignore the relevance of racism and social justice.

Last Modified: 22 Jan 2013 09:31

In a 2011 opinion piece in the Washington Post, Newt Gingrich said, “There is an urgent need to address the astronomical growth in the prison population, with its huge costs in dollars and lost human potential…The criminal justice system is broken, and conservatives must lead the way in fixing it.” An advocacy group called Right on Crime is spearheading Republican efforts to “demand more cost effective approaches that enhance public safety.” Signatories to its statement of principles include, in addition to Gingrich, other notable Republicans like Jeb Bush and Grover Norquist. A recent Washington Monthly article celebrated the right’s new focus on crime claiming it would “put the nation on a path to a more rational and humane correctional system.”

But by focusing on achieving “a cost effective middle ground,” Republican reform strategies end up eschewing the relevance of social justice and largely ignoring racial disparities and the disruptive social costs created by mass incarceration. 

Justice and white supremacy

The travesty of mass incarceration and its devastating social effects and of the malfeasance of American jurisprudence cannot be measured purely in terms of economic rationality. It is an issue deeply entwined with long histories of racial oppression and white supremacy. True reform will require grappling with this larger problem.

A 1987 Supreme Court case illustrates what I mean when I say that the justice system is saturated with racism. In McCleskey v. Kemp, the Court declined to define the death penalty as racially discriminatory. The case involved the appeal of the death sentence for Warren McCleskey, a Georgia man convicted of armed robbery and the murder of a white policeman. In his appeal McCleskey cited research analysing 2000 Georgia homicides over an eight year period beginning in 1972 that found black defendants were nearly twice as likely to be sentenced to death as white defendants.
The research, described as the “most sophisticated study of the criminal justice system in the 20^th century,” also found that the death sentence was applied 4.3 times more often when the murder victim was white. McCleskey’s appeal (based upon the 14^th Amendment guarantee of equal protection and the 8^th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment), argued that the death sentence was racially biased. Justice Powell, in the majority opinion, accepted the general validity of the data and the likelihood that race was a factor in death penalty cases,  but wrote that in the specific case of Warren McCleskey there was no proof of “the existence of purposeful discrimination.”
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