This review synthesizes the historical literature on the criminalization and incarceration of black Americans for an interdisciplinary audience. Drawing on key insights from new histories in the field of American carceral studies, we trace the multifaceted ways in which policymakers and officials at all levels of government have used criminal law, policing, and imprisonment as proxies for exerting social control in predominantly black communities from the colonial era to the present. By underscoring this antiblack punitive tradition in America as central to the development of crime-control strategies and mass incarceration, our review lends vital historical context to ongoing discussions, research, and experimentation within criminology and other fields concerned about the long-standing implications of institutional racism, violence, and inequity entrenched in the administration of criminal justice in the United States from the top down and the ground up. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 4 is January 13, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Over the five summers of Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency, the nation witnessed more than 250 incidents of urban civil disorder. The violence-termed riots by policy makers, journalists, and the public-swept American cities and resulted in the deaths of more than two hundred black Americans, thirteen thousand injured civilians and officers, and the destruction of billions of dollars worth of property. Beginning with the killing of an unarmed black fifteen-year-old boy by New York City police that sparked the Harlem riot in July 1964, the uprisings constituted a prolonged and sporadic conflict involving more than one hundred thousand black participants and law enforcement officials. By the close of the 1960s these uprisings-sparked not by white hostility to integration like earlier race riots but by the presence of exploitative and exclusionary institutions in black neighborhoods-constituted the greatest period of domestic bloodshed the nation had witnessed since the Civil War. 1 Unprecedented in its fury and frequency, this disorder radically reshaped the direction of Johnson's Great Society programs, resulting ultimately in a merger of antipoverty programs with anticrime programs that laid the groundwork for contemporary mass incarceration. The links that the fire of urban discord forged between the fighting of crime and the fighting of urban inequality were established as early as 1965, in the three pieces of legislation that represented the Johnson administration's legislative response to the civil rights movement. In March of that year, the administration presented to Congress the Elizabeth Hinton is an assistant professor of history and African and African American studies at Harvard University. I am deeply indebted to Heather Thompson and Eric Foner for their insights and mentorship. Heather in particular has generously offered advice on numerous drafts of this article, and I am grateful for her challenges and encouragement. I must also thank
The criminal legal system in the USA drives an incarceration rate that is the highest on the planet, with disparities by class and race among its signature features1–3. During the first year of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the number of incarcerated people in the USA decreased by at least 17%—the largest, fastest reduction in prison population in American history4. Here we ask how this reduction influenced the racial composition of US prisons and consider possible mechanisms for these dynamics. Using an original dataset curated from public sources on prison demographics across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, we show that incarcerated white people benefited disproportionately from the decrease in the US prison population and that the fraction of incarcerated Black and Latino people sharply increased. This pattern of increased racial disparity exists across prison systems in nearly every state and reverses a decade-long trend before 2020 and the onset of COVID-19, when the proportion of incarcerated white people was increasing amid declining numbers of incarcerated Black people5. Although a variety of factors underlie these trends, we find that racial inequities in average sentence length are a major contributor. Ultimately, this study reveals how disruptions caused by COVID-19 exacerbated racial inequalities in the criminal legal system, and highlights key forces that sustain mass incarceration. To advance opportunities for data-driven social science, we publicly released the data associated with this study at Zenodo6.
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