There’s Overwhelming Evidence That The Criminal Justice System Is Racist – Washington Post

A couple years ago, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) gave a powerful speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Scott talked about how he had been repeatedly pulled over by police officers who seemed to be suspicious of a black man driving a nice car. He added that a black senior-level staffer had experienced the same thing and had even downgraded his car in the hope of avoiding the problem. Given that Scott otherwise has pretty conservative politics, there was little objection or protest from the right. No one rose up to say that he was lying about getting pulled over.

The thing is, most people of color have a similar story or know someone who does. Yet, there’s a deep skepticism on the right of any assertion that the criminal-justice system is racially biased. In early August, National Review editor and syndicated columnist Rich Lowry wrote a column disputing the notion that our system is racist. Andrew Sullivan wrote something similar in New York magazine. (Interestingly, both Lowry and Sullivan cite criminologist John Pfaff to support their positions. Pfaff has since protested on Twitter that both misinterpreted what he wrote.) And attempting to refute the notion that the system is racist has become a pretty regular beat for conservative crime pundit Heather Mac Donald.

Of particular concern to some on the right is the term “systemic racism,” often wrongly interpreted as an accusation that everyone in the system is racist. In fact, systemic racism means almost the opposite. It means that we have systems and institutions that produce racially disparate outcomes, regardless of the intentions of the people who work within them. When you consider that much of the criminal-justice system was built, honed and firmly established during the Jim Crow era — an era almost everyone, conservatives included, will concede rife with racism — this is pretty intuitive. The modern criminal-justice system helped preserve racial order — it kept black people in their place. For much of the early 20th century, in some parts of the country, that was its primary function. That it might retain some of those proclivities today shouldn’t be all that surprising.

In any case, after more than a decade covering these issues, it’s pretty clear to me that the evidence of racial bias in our criminal-justice system isn’t just convincing — it’s overwhelming. But because there still seems to be some skepticism, I’ve attempted below to catalog the evidence. The list below isn’t remotely comprehensive. And if you know of other studies, please send them to me. I would like to make this post a repository for this issue.

I, of course, can’t vouch for the robustness or statistical integrity of all of these studies. I’m only summarizing them. But for the most part, I’ve tried to include either peer-reviewed studies or reviews of data that tend to speak for themselves and don’t require much statistical analysis. I will note that most (but not all) of these studies do factor in variables that address common claims such as that the criminal-justice system discriminates more by class than by race, or that racial discrepancies in sentencing or incarceration can be explained by the fact that black people commit more crimes. And I’ve also included a section for studies that do not find bias in various aspects of the criminal-justice system. There are far fewer of these, though I’m open to the possibility that I missed some.

Finally, none of this is to say that race is the only thing we need to worry about in the criminal-justice system. Certainly, lots of white people are wrongly accused, arrested and convicted. Lots of white people are treated unfairly, beaten, and unjustifiably shot and killed by police officers. White people too are harmed by policies such as mandatory minimums, asset forfeiture, and abuse of police, prosecutorial and judicial power.

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