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Suggested Citation:"5 Introduction to Part II." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice: Science, Practice, and Policy. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26705.

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5

Introduction to Part II

Part I of this report describes the nature, magnitude, and drivers of racial inequality in the criminal justice system. There we examined the roles of the historical legacies of slavery and settler colonialism, sociopolitical forces, and criminal justice policies and practices in creating and maintaining racial inequality. In Part II, we explore policies and programs to reduce racial inequalities in crime and criminal justice involvement. We examine community-based strategies, interventions in social policy areas adjacent to the criminal justice system, and criminal justice reform.

This current chapter outlines guiding principles for policy solutions and presents a historical example of a potentially promising policy agenda that was not fully developed to highlight lessons for decision makers and policy makers as they work to achieve reductions in racial inequalities in the criminal justice system.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES TO REDUCE RACIAL INEQUALITY IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

This section outlines a set of guiding principles to the application of public policy solutions to address racial inequality in the criminal justice system. Informed by the committee’s expertise, these principles are meant to inform decision makers as they consider strategies and policy levers for reducing racial inequalities in the criminal justice system, though they are not exhaustive nor meant to be prescriptive.

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Suggested Citation:"5 Introduction to Part II." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice: Science, Practice, and Policy. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26705.

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Reckoning and Reconciliation

Criminal justice policies and reform need to be informed by an acknowledgment of the harms perpetrated by the system against specific racial and ethnic groups. Reforms that involve reconciliation can help repair relationships between criminal justice agencies and impacted communities that have been marked by historical tensions, grievances, and misconceptions. For example, the Stockton (CA) police department implemented a racial reconciliation intervention that required the department to acknowledge the past harms of the criminal justice system, to truly listen to the community about their experiences, and then to make policy decisions based on what was learned in the process (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2021b).

Participation, Accountability, and Transparency

Any effort to reduce racial inequalities in the criminal justice system needs to include mechanisms for community participation, accountability, and transparent data and evaluation methods. Impacted communities need to be resourced and trained to participate in the research process if their voices are absent in leadership positions. Above all, these efforts need to be accountable to the communities they serve.

Impacted Community Voices

Communities that are disproportionately harmed by racial inequality in the criminal justice system need to be partners in knowledge generation and in the implementation of policy solutions. Communities themselves have multifaceted needs, diverse perspectives, and unique contexts; the fact that community voices are heterogeneous across contexts calls for adequate survey tools and other measures of community representation in decision making.

Heterogeneity

Criminal justice decision makers must understand the heterogeneity of contexts across jurisdictions and communities and take this into account when considering public policy solutions that have been shown to work in other contexts.

Engaging communities and impacted populations is a central theme across each of these principles. While community engagement can take a variety of forms, ensuring that the perspectives of all key partners are taken into consideration throughout research development and design is critical

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Suggested Citation:"5 Introduction to Part II." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice: Science, Practice, and Policy. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26705.

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to increasing the relevance and effectiveness of any resulting intervention programs or reform efforts and can help to empower populations that have been stigmatized, marginalized, and ignored (the National Academies, 2022a). For example, the Burns Institute has worked to center community voices in reform efforts in Los Angeles County (the National Academies, 2021b). Other examples in public health and climate adaptation rely on using structured decision making processes, facilitating partnerships between decision makers and community organizations, and encouraging public ownership of responses (the National Academies, 2022b,d).

APPLYING A HISTORICAL LENS TO INFORM CRIMINAL JUSTICE POLICY

Chapter 2 presents an overview of the profound disparities among different groups categorized by race and ethnicity at every level of criminal justice system processing. Chapter 1 locates these disparities in historical context; Chapters 3 and 4 place them in contemporary contexts. Demands for strategies, policies, and new conceptual frameworks for organizing the work of the various institutions that comprise the criminal justice system emerge from these contexts.

Evidence concerning the relationship that a policy has on a desired outcome, what Gelman and Imbens (2013) refer to as “forward causal inference,” is critical to future policy making that can address the serious issues detailed in this report. Equally important is a deeper understanding of the reverse of forward causal inference—that is, seeking to uncover the causes of an outcome, such as racial inequality in the criminal justice system. History as a discipline provides insight on questions such as these.

Criminal legal institutions in the United States have a shape, orientation, and function that are dictated in part by laws and legal structures, the organization of the political economy, and cultural contexts. This means that to understand the shape of what these institutions should be, one must first understand what they could be.

In this vein, this section offers an historical account of the first substantial efforts of the federal government to address racial inequality at the intersection of social policy and criminal law enforcement at the national level. During the 1960s, national policy makers recognized the devastating impact of historical discrimination and sought to use national resources to end racial inequality. Guided by social science research, the policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations offered a response to the problems of poverty and crime through a preventative framework that stressed community empowerment. Yet despite unparalleled federal attention to the larger socioeconomic drivers of delinquency, by the end of the 1960s it was clear that racial disparities still existed and were growing rather than abating.

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Suggested Citation:"5 Introduction to Part II." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice: Science, Practice, and Policy. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26705.

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The federal government investments in a promising conceptual framework put forth in the 1960s never reached the scale that some advocates recommended. The failure of national policy makers and social scientists to follow their own research and policy recommendations was due, in part, to the influential view that “cultural pathologies” of broken families and bad behavior were among the root causes of poverty and crime, to which policing and incarceration were often assumed to be appropriate responses. By the early 1980s, federal and state policy makers adopted increasingly punitive responses to the problems of unemployment, failing school systems, housing insecurity, and public health problems, such as gun violence, that involved greater oversight and more intensive enforcement of behavioral standards (Kohler-Hausmann, 2017; Soss et al., 2011; Mead, 1997). Social spending increased greatly in the 1960s, and absolute poverty declined in the 1960s, but the growth in the anti-poverty effort was not sufficient to substantially reduce relative disparities in well-being that had alarmed many policy makers and social scientists at the beginning of the 1960s. Crime-control budgets, particularly at the federal level, began to grow quickly. Ultimately, rising crime rates in the 1960s and 1970s were interpreted as proof that the War on Poverty had failed and that the War on Crime did not go far enough (see Box 5-1).

This history helps us understand the range of alternatives for reducing racial inequality in the criminal justice system today. The Kerner Commission—formally the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, chaired by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner—established by President Lyndon Johnson’s executive order during the unrest in Detroit in July 1967 called for large social policy investments to address underlying structural factors. This call was broadcast to a national audience through the Commission’s final report, release in February 1968. The report recommended the creation of two million jobs for “disadvantaged” Americans, continued federal intervention to ensure school desegregation, year-round schooling for low-income youths, the construction of hundreds of thousands of public housing units, and a guaranteed minimum income. Notably, the Commission looked beyond policing and incarceration to address problems of safety in disadvantaged communities. While spending in several of these areas did increase during the 1970s, anti-crime policy at all levels of government also came to rely more on the modernization of urban police forces. Further, changes in sentencing policy at the state level, from the mid-1970s forward (NRC, 1983, Chapter 3), drove significant growth in prison populations, amplifying racial inequality.

Page 191 Cite

Suggested Citation:"5 Introduction to Part II." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice: Science, Practice, and Policy. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26705.

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BOX 5-1
Case Study: Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses and Control Act of 1961

In the 1960s, the federal government launched a substantial national effort to combat crime based on an analysis of racial inequality for the first time in the history of the United States. This undertaking was notable for two reasons. First, it was national in scope, in contrast to notions of federalism that relegated crime policy to the states. Second, it targeted social conditions that gave rise to crime and juvenile delinquency—a preventive approach, in contrast to the more typical reactive, punitive approach to addressing crime. Under the influence of scientific theories that traced delinquency to the failures of educational and labor market institutions to support youthful development in a meaningful way through job training, education, and equal opportunity programs, the Kennedy administration framed its urban social programs as anti-delinquency measures.

Based on the “systemic barriers” conception of urban problems that Lloyd Cloward and Richard Ohlin described in their 1960 book, Delinquency and Opportunity, the federal government’s anti-delinquency program represented a moment when research-based criminological theory was used to design policy aimed at solving problems of racial inequality. The federal government sought to legitimize its approach to fighting delinquency by grounding it in scientific research. Federal officials had previously relied heavily on the opinions of agency officials and bureaucrats in shaping national programs, but the proliferation of academic research after World War II had produced a diverse body of knowledge. With research at hand, the envisioned anti-delinquency program of the 1960s articulated a theory of the sources and solutions to delinquency supported by statistical evidence provided by Cloward and Ohlin, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Q. Wilson, and other scholars (Hinton, 2017; O’Connor, 2001).

Cloward and Ohlin had both been strongly influenced by sociologist Frank Tannenbaum’s theory of delinquency (Flamm, 2005; Terte, 1963; Cloward and Ohlin, 1960). They had worked with prisoners in the 1950s—Ohlin as a researcher for the Illinois Parole and Pardon Board while pursuing a doctorate in sociology at the University of Chicago, and Cloward as a social worker at an army prison in Pennsylvania—and, following Tannenbaum, became convinced that law enforcement programs should focus on social systems rather than individuals in order to be effective. Writing about the criminalization of young European immigrants in Crime and Community, Tannenbaum (1938) argued that when authorities treated actions such as playing games in public or playing truant at school as criminal or delinquent, they further isolated already marginalized youth from mainstream society, increasing the resistance of that marginalized group to formal social institutions and exacerbating delinquency. Under Tannenbaum’s theory, the decision to arrest teenagers for offenses such as cursing, shouting, or skipping school reflected more the failings of traditional social welfare systems and public institutions than individual behavior. Labeling activities as delinquent that the teenagers themselves likely saw as adventuresome began a process Tannenbaum called the “dramatization of the evil” and inadvertently encouraged criminality in the future.

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Suggested Citation:"5 Introduction to Part II." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice: Science, Practice, and Policy. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26705.

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As Tannenbaum (1938) wrote, “The person becomes the thing he is described as being” (see also Hinton, 2017; Terte, 1963).

Building from Tannenbaum’s ideas about the sources of crime and the impact of criminal labeling and applying them to Black and Puerto Rican youth in New York City (NY), Cloward and Ohlin devised “opportunity theory” in the late 1950s. They argued that criminal “pathology” did not stem from culture or individual traits but was the result of inadequate resources for neglected children and punitive responses to their everyday behavior, making it more likely that low-income youth would fail in school, be unable to gain employment, and eventually engage in criminal activity. Thus, effectively controlling delinquency meant changing “opportunity structures” by strengthening the institutions in which poor young people interacted with education, training, and development programs. Paraphrasing Tannenbaum, Ohlin and Cloward explained, “The target for preventive action should be defined, not as the individual or group that exhibits the delinquent pattern, but as the social setting that gives rise to the delinquent” (Cloward and Ohlin, 1960, p. 211). According to Cloward and Ohlin, these preventative measures could effectively break the cultural pathologies that bred delinquency.

Administration officials considered opportunity theory a significant breakthrough in understanding and responding to urban problems and incorporated the concept into the federal government’s juvenile delinquency program. “The best solution to the delinquency problem is prevention,” David Hackett, the executive director of the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime (hereafter, the President’s Committee), declared at the Institute of Juvenile Delinquency in the fall of 1961. The committee, which was created by executive order on May 11, was chaired by then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy and included the secretaries of Labor and Health, Education, and Welfare.

The Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses and Control Act of 1961^a sought to address the problems of “youth unemployment, poor housing, poor health, inadequate education, and the alienation of lower-class communities and neighborhoods,” as Attorney General Kennedy explained. He and other federal policy makers believed that the racial discrimination Black families confronted within school systems and workplaces was the root cause of this “alienation.” Drawing from Cloward and Ohlin’s work, the preamble to the Act itself argued that “delinquency and offenses occur disproportionately among school dropouts, unemployed youth faced with limited opportunities and with employment barriers, and youth in deprived family situations” (Hinton, 2017).

The Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Act would focus on young people who had come into contact with law enforcement or criminal justice authorities, as well as groups of youth who lived in impoverished neighborhoods and whom federal policy makers believed to be susceptible to delinquency. Hackett and other Kennedy officials believed that if the social and behavioral problems they attributed to urban youth of color remained unaddressed, crime and delinquency would continue to escalate, among Black youth especially. With funding and broad discretion under the terms of the 1961 legislation, which passed in late September with an initial allocation of $10 million a year (equivalent to nearly $100 million today) for three years to support experimental programs, the

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Suggested Citation:"5 Introduction to Part II." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice: Science, Practice, and Policy. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26705.

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President’s Committee focused its efforts almost explicitly on Black youth and emphasized prevention as a key goal in controlling crime.

Indeed, despite the President’s Committee’s awareness that “delinquency has increased in the suburbs and rural areas,” policy proposals focused on concentrated poverty in Black central city neighborhoods, a harbinger of contemporary scholarly attention to communities of triple disadvantage described in Chapter 3. Concern for residents in the “decaying core of the inner city” strongly influenced the committee’s decision to target Black youth for the vast majority of juvenile delinquency appropriations. In the opinion of policy makers, researchers, and professional staff, Black urban neighborhoods contained “the most imposing array of social pathology” (Hinton, 2017).

In Harlem and other segregated Black communities with median family incomes well below the national average and high levels of unemployment, the committee faced “a challenge and an opportunity” to remedy the “broad, established, pathological base” that appeared to be the source of the community’s problems. In Detroit (MI), Philadelphia (PA), and Cleveland (OH), at least 80 percent of youth served by the federal anti-delinquency programs were Black. In Washington (DC) “undoubtedly all the youth involved” were Negro, as Hackett wrote to Kennedy. And in cities like Syracuse (NY) and New Haven (CT), where Black residents represented five percent and 15 percent of the population, respectively, half of the participants in the anti-delinquency demonstration programs were Black (Hinton, 2017).

Cloward and Ohlin’s delinquency prevention strategy opened up two policy domains for the federal government: forming partnerships with community-based organizations and addressing the plight of racially marginalized citizens. As a 1965 progress report produced by the Office of Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Development stated: “The delinquency program has… supported projects aimed primarily at changes in social situations affecting target area youth rather than changes in the personality of the individual delinquent. The program stresses a simultaneous focus on the many social conditions believed to cause delinquency” (Hinton, 2017).

Along these lines, the administration aimed to foster a community transformation, framed as an anti-delinquency program, which required a simultaneous attack on the institutional barriers to inclusion.

When Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency in 1963, he soon expanded the pre-kindergarten, remedial education, family intervention, and job training initiatives of Kennedy’s anti-delinquency program as part of a “War on Poverty,” which began in 1964 under the administration of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO).^b But rather than continuing to combat crime through the preventative framework developed by his predecessor, in 1965 Johnson also began a separate investment in policing, courts, and prisons as part of a “War on Crime,” to be prosecuted by the Office of Law Enforcement Assistance (OLEA). Soon, federal support for local law enforcement through the OLEA supplanted social welfare programs through the OEO as the main channel for a national anti-crime policy. Thus, the approach to local communities as the main centers of anti-poverty and crime control programs was short-lived. The scale of this community-based approach remained limited. It also faced resistance from local officials who bristled at the expanded role of community members in shaping municipal programs and

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Suggested Citation:"5 Introduction to Part II." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice: Science, Practice, and Policy. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26705.

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at the way it challenged widely held assumptions among policy makers that participants in social welfare programs were unworthy and incapable.

New community action, secondary education, and housing and urban development programs far surpassed crime control in terms of their proportion of federal expenditures during the Johnson administration. Anti-poverty policy developed quickly as many of the main safety net programs of the Great Society were established at this time, including food stamps (now the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, and expanded Social Security. Each of these programs became mainstays of the current social safety net. In line with the anti-crime predictions of opportunity theory, recent research finds that children’s access to food stamps is associated with reduced incarceration in adulthood (Bailey et al., 2020), that Supplemental Security Income benefits for disabled youth are associated with reduced criminal court charges (Deshpande and Mueller-Smith, 2022), and that Medicaid coverage is associated with a reduction in arrests (Simes and Jahn, 2022). Despite the evident success of these social programs at reducing crime and criminal justice contact, large racial inequalities in socioeconomic well-being endured, and crime rates escalated through the 1960s and 1970s.

During this period, assistance to local law enforcement became a key instrument of national crime policy through the 1960s and beyond. While Congress expanded and transformed the OLEA into the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) within three years of its creation, the OEO never grew into a larger, more permanent agency. Criminal justice agencies also began to administer social welfare programs. The LEAA came to fund some job training, after-school, and neighborhood service programs that had once been supported by the OEO. The choice to use criminal justice actors as agents of social policy tied the delivery of services to the surveillance of criminal risk, which was at odds with the Kennedy administration’s initial approach.^c The federal government gained a significant role in crime policy through the 1960s, and the LEAA became a forerunner of the many offices and programs at the Justice Department that implement a national crime policy by providing federal grants and technical assistance to local law enforcement agencies.

In short, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, federal policy makers’ expansion of the social safety net was insufficient to substantially reduce racial inequality in socioeconomic status or to stem rising crime, and federal funding of local criminal justice agencies became the dominant instrument of federal anti-crime policy. By the mid-1970s, Black and Latino groups combined began to approach majorities in state and federal prisons for the first time in American history (Black Americans had previously amounted to about one-third of the nation’s prison population). During the same period, state and federal prison populations ballooned, rising from just under 200,000 by 1970 to just over 300,000 by 1980—a 50 percent increase in a decade (Minor-Harper, 1986; Nagel, 1977).

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^a Public Law No. 87-274, 75 Stat. 572.

^b Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (Public Law No. 88-452. 78 Stat.).

^c On the criminalization of welfare during this period, see Kohler-Hausmann (2017).

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Suggested Citation:"5 Introduction to Part II." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice: Science, Practice, and Policy. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26705.

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CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS

In the 1960s, the Kerner Commission carried out just one of several high-level reviews during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations that found that serious crime in low-income Black neighborhoods was rooted in a deep racial inequality and that addressing it required significant investment in Black communities. The President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice (1967) drew parallel conclusions in its report, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society. Although the War on Poverty quickly expanded social safety net programs that benefited all low-income Americans, socio-economic disadvantage endured in minority communities.

At the same time, crime was transformed into a national political problem that demanded a federal response. Despite the social analysis of the time, federal crime policy came to rely heavily on grants to local law enforcement. Turning crime into a national political issue that demanded a national response in this way was not the only or even the main driver of high incarceration rates. But it was part of a trend in crime policy that greatly expanded the use of police and prisons disproportionately impacting primarily Black and Latino communities.

That the criminal justice system remains a significant dimension of racial inequality more than 50 years after the nation embarked on its most substantial investment in modernization, professionalization, and reform provides important context for the challenge of reducing racial inequality today. While policy makers should investigate criminal justice reforms that can directly reduce the harms associated with policing and incarceration, reducing racial inequality may also require changes outside the criminal justice system in social policy and community life. Moreover, the decentralized nature of criminal justice policy points us to states and local jurisdictions for policy innovation that can inform or drive change at the state and federal levels.

It is often observed that there is no one criminal justice system but a complex patchwork of agencies and jurisdictions at three different levels of government. Policy innovation and experimentation often happen at the local level, though sometimes buttressed and coordinated through state and federal budgets and legislation. Deep reform that addresses structural racism and severs the close connections between race, criminal harms, and criminal justice involvement may involve facilitating local innovation and coordinating and consolidating local initiatives with state and federal leadership.

The remainder of this report delves into community-driven approaches to safety and reducing harm, non-criminal policy interventions in adjacent social policy domains, criminal justice reform, and the federal role in

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Suggested Citation:"5 Introduction to Part II." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice: Science, Practice, and Policy. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26705.

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supporting communities to address inequalities. The committee’s recommendations set forth in the subsequent chapters offer evidence-based guidance on how public policy might reduce racial inequalities in crime and justice.