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Crime, Punishment and Race: Why The Beat Goes On
In the last article we stated facts about prisons in America today and who makes up the population. Mostly the imprisoned person is uneducated, black and male.
Vesla Mae Weaver, a political scientist, has put forth her a logical deduction. In her recently completed dissertation Weaver examines policy history, public opinion and media. Weaver suggests understanding the role these entities have played and continue to play in the alteration of the American justice system will also make clear how race has been an important part of U.S. social policy. She postulates there is a strong connection between the movement for civil rights and the development of punitive criminal justice
This is the reason why we have changed over to being less forgiving toward those who violate any of “the rules”. Our current policy for imprisonment keeps alive the the longstanding racist American tradition of sublimating social meanings that have always been associated with being black. Race is one component in explaining why the U.S. numbers for persons confined to penal institutions is so exceptional among democratic industrial nations.
The turn toward being a more punitive society represents a political response to the success of the civil rights movement. Weaver calls the process “frontlash”. Those who are in opposition of the revolutionary changes brought about because of the civil rights movement have sought to regain and in many cases have succeeded in regaining the dominance by bringing to the public more frequently a new issue.
It makes sense that instead of poring energy and resources into fighting a battle that clearly had already been lost segregationists such as the late Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the former Republican Senate majority leader Trent Lott, even President Reagan and G.H.W. Bush, chose to move attention to a asocial issue that concerns everyone irrespective of race. It’s an allegedly race neutral matter. The best example of the effectiveness of this new strategy is the presidential campaign of the late George Wallace, former governor of Alabama, staunch segregationist whose war on crime campaign gained support in the Midwest sectors of the U.S.. In fact crime has become a staple platform for presidential candidates ever since.
Though Weaver’s argument is speculative there is astrong correlation between the general public attitude on the subject of race and welfare. Both have in the past 30 years become linked. In the American mind race is associated with welfare as is race associated with crime.
Despite the fact drug use has declined along with other crime statistics antidrug campaigns with the attendant restrictive laws and arrests have increased with blacks more than 5 times as likely to be arrested and jailed.
Young whites use drugs more frequently than young blacks. But our society has elected to criminalize underclass teens to save middle-class teens from the so-called threat of a drug epidemic. The price of street drugs has declined as the number of arrests have increased.
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