History of Criminal Justice in the U.S.
The history of criminal justice in America is deeply rooted in racial and economic inequities.
While the scale of the current system is historically unprecedented, its discriminatory nature is not.
From the nation's inception, the criminal justice system has been used to maintain White dominance.
After conquest and genocide failed to fully control Native populations, White settlers turned to criminalization, targeting their cultural practices and dispossessing them of their land and resources.
During slavery, Black people were regularly criminalized but often punished outside of the court system.
However, the association of Blackness and Brownness with inherent criminality became deeply ingrained in the nation's cultural DNA.
After the abolition of slavery, prisons, which had previously largely not existed, began to rapidly fill with people of color.
This was driven by new laws specifically targeting Black people, existing laws applied more rigorously to them, and both legal and extralegal efforts by White Southerners to control Black behavior.
The 13th Amendment's exception for those convicted of crimes enabled the exploitation of Black labor through convict leasing and chain gangs.
The criminal justice system continued to operate in a racially discriminatory manner in the decades leadin up to mass incarceration.
Despite fluctuations in crime rates, people of color, particularly Black Americans, were consistently overrepresented in prisons and jails.
This disparity was further exacerbated by laws and policing practices that targeted Black communities in both the South and the North.
The Civil Rights Movement and urban uprisings of the 1960s, fueled by the discriminatory treatment of people of color by law enforcement, ironically led to the rise of mass incarceration.
White anxieties about Black activism, coupled with the association of civil rights with lawlessness, resulted in calls for more policing and harsher laws.
The passage of the Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEAA) in 1965 provided unprecedented support to law enforcement, marking the beginning of the War on Crime.
Significantly, the War on Crime was initiated not in response to rising crime rates, but as a political reaction to Black demands for equality.
Several factors contributed to the dramatic increase in incarceration rates in the latter half of the 20th century:
The War on Drugs, driven by racialized perceptions of drug use, led to a surge in drug-related arrests and imprisonment.
The expansion of criminal law and the imposition of harsher sentences, including mandatory minimums, significantly increased the length of prison terms.
Aggressive policing tactics like no-knock raids and stop-and-frisk practices disproportionately targeted Black and Brown communities, leading to higher arrest rates.
The prevalence of plea bargains, often coerced due to inadequate legal representation and the threat of lengthy sentences, resulted in a high proportion of convictions without trials.
The consequences of mass incarceration, particularly its racialized nature, have been devastating for communities of color, leading to increased poverty, family disruption, and the erosion of social fabric.
The concentration of formerly incarcerated individuals in specific neighborhoods has created cycles of poverty and crime.
In conclusion, the history of the American criminal justice system is characterized by a persistent pattern of racialized criminalization and punishment.
This system has consistently been used to control and disenfranchised communities of color, and its current state of mass incarceration is a direct consequence of this deeply ingrained inequity.
Sources: Thompson (2018), Mayeux (2018)
