“I just want the system to follow the rules,” he said.
December 3, 2016 9:00 PM   Subscribe

An investigation by The New York Times of tens of thousands of disciplinary cases against inmates in 2015, hundreds of pages of internal reports and three years of parole decisions found that racial disparities were embedded in the prison experience in New York.
posted by roomthreeseventeen (11 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
Some of the starkest evidence of bias involves infractions that are vaguely defined and give officers the greatest discretion. Disobeying a direct order by an officer can be as minor as moving too slowly when a guard yells, “Get out of the shower.” It is one of the most subjective prison offenses. For every 100 black prisoners, guards issued 56 violations for disobeying orders, compared with 32 for every 100 whites, according to the analysis.

For smoking and drug offenses, which require physical evidence, white inmates, who make up about a quarter of the prison population, were issued about a third of the tickets.
That is a shocking level of disparity, indicative of massive injustice, and crucially I don't think it's easy to explain in any way that doesn't centre around explicit racism and/or different levels of empathy being extended.
posted by jaduncan at 11:27 PM on December 3, 2016 [3 favorites]


I am pleased to be subscribing. More of this sort of thing.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:43 PM on December 3, 2016 [3 favorites]


On a related note to that empathy difference, Brown-Iannuzzi et al (2016):
Scholars have argued that opposition to welfare is, in part, driven by stereotypes of African Americans. This argument assumes that when individuals think about welfare, they spontaneously think about Black recipients. We investigated people’s mental representations of welfare recipients. In Studies 1 and 2, we used a perceptual task to visually estimate participants’ mental representations of welfare recipients. Compared with the average non-welfare-recipient image, the average welfare-recipient image was perceived (by a separate sample) as more African American and more representative of stereotypes associated with welfare recipients and African Americans. In Study 3, participants were asked to determine whether they supported giving welfare benefits to the people pictured in the average welfare-recipient and non-welfare-recipient images generated in Study 2. Participants were less supportive of giving welfare benefits to the person shown in the welfare-recipient image than to the person shown in the non-welfare-recipient image. The results suggest that mental images of welfare recipients may bias attitudes toward welfare policies.
It's almost like systemic racism could be a thing.
posted by jaduncan at 1:02 AM on December 4, 2016 [8 favorites]


In these communities, prisons are often seen as political spoils, fiercely protected by upstate politicians for the jobs they provide.

With the disappearance of manufacturing upstate, prisons provide many of the middle-class jobs factories once did.


So the State government responds to a long series of toxic economic decisions that have crushed the poor and badly injured the middle class by using poor black urban lives as fuel to prop up the lives of middle class rural whites who, in turn, prop up the toxic political engine that ensures a steady flow of prisoners. This is what Empire looks like from the inside.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:54 AM on December 4, 2016 [12 favorites]




The irony is that the more discipline an incarcerated person faces the less they have access to rehabilitation programs like counseling, mental health care, spiritual care and education. These are considered "privileges" instead of solutions to discipline issues.
posted by SyraCarol at 4:09 AM on December 4, 2016 [6 favorites]


For smoking and drug offenses, which require physical evidence, white inmates, who make up about a quarter of the prison population, were issued about a third of the tickets.

This is taken as evidence of guard racism, which probably does exist, but I think it's probably caused by earlier racism in the system. If anything they may be still under penalizing white men in jail. To be a white man in jail requires that you be a much worse person than a black man in jail. The same with the data on traffic stops where they find drugs more often on white people. They are probably only stopping egregiously criminal white people thus the higher hit rate.
posted by srboisvert at 5:20 AM on December 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


Some of the starkest evidence of bias involves infractions that are vaguely defined and give officers the greatest discretion.

Not surprised, as these sort of (highly subjective, and solely based on the word of the guard against the prisoner) "infractions" are similar to the ones which drive racial gaps in school discipline. Examples from a Kirwan Institute report:

In California, 48% of the 710,000 suspensions issued in the 2011-2012 school year were for “willful defiance,” an offense that includes behaviors such as refusing to take off a hat, turn off a cellphone or failing to wear a school uniform (Los Angeles Times, 2013). During the 2010-2011 school year, according to data from the Ohio Department of Education, only 6% of out-of-school suspensions involved weapons or drugs, while 64% of suspensions were for disobedient or disruptive behavior, truancy, or intimidation (The Ohio Senate, 2013).

And, as the article notes, the solution is the same in the schools as in the prisons:

However, this trend varied based on the racial background of the teacher. Researchers have found that once Black students and White students are both placed with same-race teachers, and are similar on the other covariates, Black students’ classroom behavior is rated more favorably than is White students’ behavior.

posted by damayanti at 6:48 AM on December 4, 2016 [5 favorites]


A huge problem for the criminal justice system in this country is the reality of the urban-rural divide. Even putting aside how bad state laws can be (and those need to be fixed too, and absolutely enable racist pretrial and sentencing procedures), it is a well-known fact that defendants in the criminal justice system are treated astronomically more harshly in [usually heavily white working class] rural counties across the country than in urban centers because of factors like prosecutorial discretion and racism. Unfortunately, prisons are typically located in rural communities, and thus this trend is mirrored in post-sentencing areas such as prison discipline. I don't know what the solution is, but I'm glad to see this type of thing being researched more.
posted by likeatoaster at 6:53 AM on December 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


Also, in case anyone is wondering, it is extremely difficult to levy an equal protection prisoner rights lawsuit to address racial inequality in treatments in prisons, due to the heightened federal pleading standard, the fact that prisoners are almost always filing these claims pro se, and the specific limits on prisoner litigation set by Congress and hostile caselaw. The ACLU, generally speaking, doesn't seem to have sufficient resources to mount the kind of large-scale prisoner litigation that needs to happen, and no one else is funding that work either. (It was a large disappointment to me that those folks I met in law school who were dedicated to prisoner rights issues to a one ended up in other fields because no one funds that kind of work.)
posted by likeatoaster at 6:58 AM on December 4, 2016 [5 favorites]


This is taken as evidence of guard racism, which probably does exist, but I think it's probably caused by earlier racism in the system.

I think you're missing the argument being made here.

It's the comparison between the different types of offenses that's important. We know, based on the offenses that require objective evidence, that black men are if anything less prone to commiting offenses in jail. However, when it comes to offenses that are up to the guard's discretion, they are punished more. That's pretty strong evidence of that the guards are biased.

(The only counter-argument I can see is that black men are more likely to commit these "discretionary" offenses than white men, but less likely to commit smoking/drug offenses, which would be awfully convenient.)

The reason that white men commit more offenses in jail in the first place is another question.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 8:29 AM on December 4, 2016 [4 favorites]


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