The Origins of Mass Incarceration: The Racial Politics of Crime and Punishment in the Post–Civil Rights Era

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 433-452
Author(s):  
Katherine Beckett ◽  
Megan Ming Francis
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Control Policy ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Civil Rights Era

This article examines the origins of US mass incarceration. Although it is clear that changes in policy and practice are the proximate drivers of the prison boom, researchers continue to explore—and disagree about—why crime control policy and practice changed in ways that fueled the growth of incarceration in all 50 states. One well-known account emphasizes the centrality of racial and electoral politics. This article more fully explicates the racial politics perspective, describes several friendly amendments to it, and explores a range of arguments that challenge it in more fundamental ways. In the end, we maintain that although mass incarceration has many drivers, it cannot be explained without reference to the centrality of racial politics; the importance of the crime issue to the GOP electoral strategy that emerged in the wake of the civil rights movement; and the nature of the decentralized, two-party electoral system in the United States.

RATS, RANDOM RETRIBUTION, AND REVOLUTION

2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-50
Author(s):  
Shaun Ossei-Owusu
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Relevant Literature ◽  
Control Policy ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
The United States

The abysmal state of the American criminal justice system and its pernicious features has been well documented in much of the relevant literature. Feeley and Simon (1992) propose the notion of a “new penology” that prioritizes efficient, cost-effective (and often actuarial) techniques to manage criminal populations, while Katherine Beckett (1997) argues that the punitive shift in crime control policy was an ideologically motivated response to the Civil Rights Movement, with political rhetoric fomenting fears of crime and public policy reflecting the vogue of law-and-order punishment. David Garland's (2001) comparative study of the United States and Britain suggests that “late modernity,” which encompasses much of the social, economic, cultural, and technological advancements and changes of the second half of the twentieth century (e.g. wage stagnation, regressive tax policies, suburbanization, the rise in the service economy, new penal technologies), along with neoconservative politics in the 1980s played key roles in the reconfiguration of the criminal justice system.

Latino/a and African American Relations

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian D. Behnken
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black And White

African Americans and Latino/as have had a long history of social interactions that have been strongly affected by the broader sense of race in the United States. Race in the United States has typically been constructed as a binary of black and white. Latino/as do not fit neatly into this binary. Some Latino/as have argued for a white racial identity, which has at times frustrated their relationships with black people. For African Americans and Latino/as, segregation often presented barriers to good working relationships. The two groups were often segregated from each other, making them mutually invisible. This invisibility did not make for good relations. Latino/as and blacks found new avenues for improving their relationships during the civil rights era, from the 1940s to the 1970s. A number of civil rights protests generated coalitions that brought the two communities together in concerted campaigns. This was especially the case for militant groups such as the Black Panther Party, the Mexican American Brown Berets, and the Puerto Rican Young Lords, as well as in the Poor People’s Campaign. Interactions among African Americans and Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban/Cuban American illustrate the deep and often convoluted sense of race consciousness in American history, especially during the time of the civil rights movement.

Local Labor Market Inequality in the Age of Mass Incarceration

2020 ◽  
pp. 003464462096602
Author(s):  
Luke Petach ◽  
Anita Alves Pena
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Incarceration Rate ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Level Data ◽  
White Poverty

We contend that the rise of mass incarceration in the United States can be framed through the lens of stratification economics, which views race- and class-based discrimination as a rational attempt on behalf of privileged groups to preserve their relative status and the material benefits which that status confers. Using the first (to our knowledge) local-level data set on incarceration rates by race, we explore the relationship between income inequality, poverty, and incarceration at the commuting zone level from 1950 to the present. Consistent with Michelle Alexander’s hypothesis that expansion of the penal system and the rise of “tough on crime” policy were efforts by privileged groups to drive a wedge into working-class political coalitions formed out of the Civil Rights Movement, we find that labor markets with greater inequality experienced larger increases in the overall incarceration rate. Furthermore, we find that relative rates of poverty play a key role in explaining differential effects of mass incarceration across race. Areas where White poverty rates were large relative to non-White poverty rates experienced no significant change in White incarceration, but an expansion of non-White incarceration. These findings have implications for policies related to economic and judicial systems.

scholarly journals W. E. B. Du Bois on Brown v. Board of Education

2004 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-31
Author(s):  
Stanley O. Gaines
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
The United States ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Political Contributions ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
The 1960S

The 1960s have been described as the “civil rights decade” in American history. Few scholar-activists have been identified as strongly with the legal, social, economic, and political changes culminating in the 1960s as has African American historian, sociologist, psychologist W. E. B. Du Bois. Inexplicably, in 2003, the 100-year anniversary of Du Bois' classic, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), came and went with little fanfare within or outside of academia. However, in 2004, the 50-year anniversary of the initial U. S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) presents an opportunity for ethnic studies in general, and Black studies in particular, to acknowledge the intellectual and political contributions of Du Bois to the civil rights movement in the United States. In the post-Civil Rights Era, some authors have suggested that Du Bois opposed the initial Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruling. In contrast, I observe in the present paper that Du Bois (1957) opposed the U. S. Supreme Court's subsequent (1955) ruling that invoked the much-criticized term “with all deliberate speed,” rather than the initial (1954) ruling that rendered the “separate but equal” doctrine unconstitutional. Moreover, I contend that Du Bois' own values and attitudes were fully consistent with his position on the (1954, 1955) decisions.

The Racial Politics of the 1956 Elections

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kyle Day
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
National Elections ◽  
Presidential Primaries

This chapter discusses how the emerging Civil Rights Movement and the controversy over Brown’s implementation played out in American partisan politics. Specifically, the United States Senate’s Southern Caucus, under the leadership of Senator Richard Brevard Russell, Jr., led a concerted regional program to subvert Brown. In turn, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s response to the controversy over Brown and the Autherine Lucy riots proved to be the driving force of American politics in the 1956 national elections, determining Ike’s own decision to seek reëlection/. The Civil Rights Movement also set the course for the Democratic Presidential Primaries in that election year, almost becoming definitive issue in American politics.

Notes from the Editors, September 2015

2015 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 2
Author(s):  
The Editors
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Back Issue ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Monthly Review

<div class="buynow"><a title="Back issue of Monthly Review, September 2015 (Volume 67, Number 3)" href="http://monthlyreview.org/back-issues/mr-067-04-2015-08/">buy this issue</a></div> In the U.S. case, imperialism has always been closely tied to a system of racial domination at home. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote some sixty years ago in "<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.14452/MR-004-12-1953-04_4" target="_blank">Negroes and the Crisis of Capitalism in the United States</a>" (<em>Monthly Review</em>, April 1953; reprinted in <a href="http://archive.monthlyreview.org/index.php/mr/article/view/MR-054-11-2003-04_3" target="_blank">April 2003</a>),<div class="blockquote">The United States, with its existing social structure, cannot abolish the color line despite its promises. It cannot stop injustice in the courts based on color and race. Above all, it cannot stop the exploitation of black workers by white capital, especially in the newest South. White North America beyond the urge of sound economics is persistently driving black folk toward socialism. It is the United States which is straining every effort to enslave Asia and Africa, and educated and well-to-do black Americans are coming to know this just as well as anybody. They may delay their reaction; they may hold ominous silence. But in the end, if this pressure keeps up, they will join the march to economic emancipation [the struggle against capitalism], because otherwise they cannot themselves be free.</div>Despite the gains of the civil rights era, the reemergence of what is now called the "New Jim Crow," based on the mass incarceration and repeated police killings of unarmed black men, shows that the old systems of racial control have been "modernized" in the present, maintaining the color line, if in modified fashion: not only in relation to black Americans&mdash;though they have a special position emerging out of the whole legacy of slavery&hellip;&mdash;but also with respect to all other people of color as well.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-4" title="Vol. 67, No. 4: September 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Religion, Race, and Sports

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Scholes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Baseball Player ◽  
Sports History ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
African American Race

Race, religion, and sports may seem like odd bedfellows, but, in fact, all three have been interacting with each other since the emergence of modern sports in the United States over a century ago. It was the sport of boxing that saw a black man become a champion at the height of the Jim Crow era and a baseball player who broke the color barrier two decades before the civil rights movement began. In this chapter, the role that religion has played in these and other instances where race (the African American race in particular) and sports have collided will be examined for its impact on the relationship between race and sports. The association of race, religion, and sports is not accidental. The chapter demonstrates that all three are co-constitutive of and dependent on each other for their meaning at these chosen junctures in American sports history.

Black Lives Matter and the revitalization of collective visionary leadership

Leadership ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 174271502097592
Author(s):  
Sarah J Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Visionary Leadership ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Black Queer

Herein, I share a conversation with Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, as context to detail the collective visionary leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. After highlighting how Garza enacts this tradition in the contemporary era, I revisit Ella Baker’s foundational model of collective visionary leadership from the civil rights era. Collective visionary leadership, embodied across these generations, is local and community-based, centers the power and knowledge of ordinary people, and prioritizes transformative accountability and liberatory visions of the future. Such leadership has been central to a range of transformational movements, and especially those anchored by Black women and Black queer folk. I also consider what critiques of traditional models of leadership collective visionary leadership levies both past and present. I call on all those concerned with the act of leading justly to take up this model.

Federal Policy and the Racial Integration of Southern Industry, 1961–1980

1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy J. Minchin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Federal Intervention

In the last two decades, one of the central debates of civil rights historiography has concerned the role that the federal government played in securing the gains of the civil rights era. Historians have often been critical of the federal government's inaction, pointing out that it was only pressure from the civil rights movement itself that prompted federal action against Jim Crow. Other scholars have studied the civil rights record of the federal government by analyzing a single issue during several administrations. In this vein, there have been studies of the federal government's involvement in areas as diverse as black voting rights and racial violence against civil rights workers. These studies have both recognized the importance of federal intervention and have also been critical of the federal government's belated and half-hearted endorsement of civil rights.

scholarly journals Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vesla M. Weaver
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
The United States ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Federal Sentencing Guidelines ◽  
State Supervision ◽  
Capital Crimes

Civil rights cemented its place on the national agenda with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, fair housing legislation, federal enforcement of school integration, and the outlawing of discriminatory voting mechanisms in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Less recognized but no less important, the Second Reconstruction also witnessed one of the most punitive interventions in United States history. The death penalty was reinstated, felon disenfranchisement statutes from the First Reconstruction were revived, and the chain gang returned. State and federal governments revised their criminal codes, effectively abolishing parole, imposing mandatory minimum sentences, and allowing juveniles to be incarcerated in adult prisons. Meanwhile, the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 gave the federal government an altogether new role in crime control; several subsequent policies, beginning with the Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 and culminating with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, ‘war on drugs,’ and extension of capital crimes, significantly altered the approach. These and other developments had an exceptional and long-lasting effect, with imprisonment increasing six-fold between 1973 and the turn of the century. Certain groups felt the burden of these changes most acutely. As of the last census, fully half of those imprisoned are black and one in three black men between ages 20 and 29 are currently under state supervision. Compared to its advanced industrial counterparts in western Europe, the United States imprisons at least five times more of its citizens per capita.

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