Americans For Racial Injustice

In spite of declines in violent crime during the past two decades, the United States imprisons more people than any other country in the world, and at any time in its history. Our punitive criminal justice policies have had a grossly disproportionate impact on racial minorities. While African-Americans make up 12% of the population, they are 40% of our criminal inmates. These disparities exist even where evidence suggests there are no racial differences in commission of the offense.

Both President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have argued for reducing the length of prison terms for nonviolent offenses, giving racial disparities in incarceration as one of their reasons. The President commented on this issue when the administration announced new guidelines for public school discipline intended to reduce racial disparities in school suspensions and dropout rates.

I remember thinking at the time that this argument could backfire. In a racist society, stating racial discrimination as a reason to reduce mass incarceration carries the risk of increasing support for punitive crime policies. Ian Haney-Lopez has noted that get-tough crime policies are a "dog whistle" used by politicians to appeal to white prejudice without referring directly to race. These coded racial appeals are used because they are effective. A new article by two Stanford social psychologists, Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt, supports these speculations.

Hetey and Eberhardt note that racial disparities in imprisonment are usually treated as an unintended outcome of punitive policies. They propose instead that knowledge of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is one of the causes of widespread public support for these policies. They conducted two field experiments.

In the first, white registered voters were approached by a white female experimenter at a train station and asked to sign a petition for a ballot initiative to reduce the punitiveness of California's "three-strikes-and-you're-out" law. Before being presented with the petition, participants were shown a 40-sec video about the prison system. The video did not refer to race, but in one version, 25% of the inmates shown were black, while in the other version, 45% were black. As predicted, fewer people (27%) were willing to sign the petition in the More-Black condition than in the Less-Black condition (52%).

The second study was an online survey of white New York City residents conducted by Survey Sampling International. Near the beginning of the survey, participants were given demographic information stating that the prison population was either 40.3% or 60.3% African-American. (Both statements were true. The first referred to the U. S. prison population, while the second referred to New York City.) Later in the survey, participants were shown a petition calling for an end to the New York police's "stop-and-frisk" policy, and asked whether, if they had been approached, they would have signed it. The results confirm those of the first experiment.

A measure of fear of crime was included in the survey. The relationship between racial composition of the prison population and support for less punitive policies was mediated by fear of crime.  That is, the More-Black condition produced greater fear of crime, which led to less willingness to sign the petition.  However, this was not the whole story.  The effect of racial composition on policy acceptance was statistically significant even when fear of crime was statistically eliminated.

The authors admit that their results pose "quite a challenge for those striving to create a more just and equal society."  It appears that presenting people with evidence that a social policy leads to racial injustice has the effect of increasing, rather than reducing, support for the policy.  Maybe the President should emphasize the fact that reducing the prison population would save money.

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Dog Whistle Politics

Another Dog Whistle

Old-Fashioned Racism