After the fall of the American slave trade, propaganda and media surrounding Black criminality materialized to justify Black inferiority and the prison boom. The Black codes and Jim Crow segregation began the era of Black criminalization by making the term synonymous with poverty. As Angela Davis notes, “[the Black codes] criminalized such behavior as vagrancy, breach of job contracts, absence from work, the possession of firearms, insulting gestures or acts….In other words, white behavior that was tolerated and thus went unnoticed by the criminal justice system could lead to the conviction of black individuals and to the ideological criminalization of black communities”(Davis 364). By the end of the nineteenth century, incarceration statistics had replaced pseudoscience and biological explanations for Black inferiority that began in the late eighteenth century. In 1890, the first publication of the national census included crime statistics, changing the conversations about public safety to include race. This new statistical evidence could not be challenged and was used to increase laws concerning: racialized surveillance, punishment, Black political involvement, and eventually mass incarceration. As a result of these “objective” findings, access to economic opportunities and calls for equality were dismissed. Public education, housing, and social welfare were challenged on the basis that giving Blacks opportunities would only make them educated criminals. Blacks association with criminality led to more discriminatory laws and practices, perpetuating inequality and creating a cycle of disadvantage. Desmond and Emirbayer write, “Many police officers…internationally targeted blacks and Latinos because, statistically, they have higher arrest rates. Thus, through a self-reinforcing cycle of disadvantage, racial profiling results in more nonwhites being arrested, and high levels of nonwhites arrest rates as marshaled as evidence to justify racial profiling” (Desmond and Emirbayer 213). The overrepresentation of Black people in crime statistics and arrest rates allowed whites to assume superiority. As a result, Black criminalization justified lynching, police brutality, mob violence, race riots, and the expansion of the prison system.
The political platform of Law and Order, introduced by Richard Nixon in the 1960s, also expanded Black criminalization by cracking down on the apparent War on Crime. He played on public fear to expand crime prevention/ black incarceration on the basis of safety. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan extended Nixon’s Law and Order itinerary to include a “War on Drugs.” Regan took the problems of economic inequality, poverty, and segregation to criminalize drug usage. However, like many other safety initiatives, this campaign was targeted towards Black citizens. Desmond and Emirbayer explain, “The Justice Department announced its intention to cut in half the number of specialists assigned to identify and prosecute white-collar criminals and to shift its attention to street crime, especially drug-law enforcement”(Desmond and Emirbayer 206). The prosecution of crack cocaine is the most prominent example of this. Crack was an inner-city drug, mainly found in poorer, minority neighborhoods, whereas powdered cocaine was more confined in white suburbs. As a result, mandatory sentencing was put in place for crack, taking thousands of Black people off the streets and into prisons. The different sentencing between crack and powdered cocaine decimated the Black community. The increasingly high arrest rates of petty drug charges went into crime statistics, however, there was no distinction in media between drug and violent arrests. As a result, the overrepresentation of Black arrests online planted an image of fear in the eyes of society. Black people were viewed as animals in cages, making whites believe that prisons were taking dangerous people off the streets. “Super predator” became a term used by politicians to combat violent, untamable Blacks. It referred to “fatherless, jobless, and godless” Blacks who lacked consciousness and empathy (The 13th 28:50-29:13). It became an effective term used to synonymize Blackness with criminality and primitiveness. Crime rates secretly fell throughout the 1990s, however with the imbalance of Black people broadcasted in news, fear towards Blackness became ingrained in viewers’ consciousness. This fear allowed millions of dollars to be allocated to prison expansion, starting what is formally known as mass incarceration.
Since the prison boom, Black people have increasingly occupied prisons at higher rates than whites and other minorities. It is unfathomable that Black youth are put into the criminal justice system as early as six years old and according to statistics, return at least once in their lifetime. The cycle of incarceration and reincarceration needs to end in order to erase perpetuated racial disadvantages and inequalities. The school-to-prison pipeline is one of the mechanisms that lead to the overrepresentation of Blackness in the unjust justice system. According to The Sentencing Project, “Forty-one percent of youths in placement are Black, even though Black Americans comprise only 15% of all youth across the United States” (Rovner). The prison system is explicitly used to deprive Black people of their fundamental rights. It was never rehabilitative and never will be in the current era of privatization and for-profit prisons. It is up to us and the future generations to end Black criminality and imagine a world without prisons- a nation of true democracy, equality, and emphasis on rehabilitation, not retribution.
