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From page 12... ... Reducing racial inequality must involve coordinated reforms across stages of the criminal justice system that will reduce the racial disadvantage that accumulates from police contact, to court processing and sentencing, to correctional supervision. Reducing Racial Inequalities in Criminal Justice Outcomes Although some jurisdictions have significantly reduced specific kinds of criminal justice contacts that have, in turn, reduced absolute disparities, wide racial inequality in the criminal justice system remains. Read the entire page →
From page 13... ... A robust data infrastructure to monitor, track, and assess progress toward reducing racial inequalities in the criminal justice system. Read the entire page →
From page 14... ... Furthermore, reversing structural racism and severing the close connections among racial inequality, criminal harms such as violence, and criminal justice involvement will involve fostering local innovation and evaluation, and coordinating and consolidating local initiatives with state and federal leadership. The report synthesizes the evidence on community-based solutions, non-criminal p olicy interventions, and criminal justice reforms, charting a path toward the reduction of racial inequalities by minimizing harm in ways that also improve community safety. Read the entire page →
From page 15... ... Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there have been recent increases in violence nationally across communities of various sizes and locations -- rural, suburban, and urban.1 The weight of the increased violence has fallen disproportionately on racial and ethnic minorities, though White communities have experienced increases as well. The urgent need to address this recent violence is one of many aspects of reducing racial inequality in the criminal justice system, the main focus of this report, and begs the question of how to address public safety and increase community well-being while continuing to reduce racial disparities in the system. Read the entire page →
From page 16... ... States and localities have curtailed cash bail, ended mandatory minimum sentences, and capped periods of community supervision. At the federal level, in 2021 the administration identified racial equity and criminal justice reform as an immediate priority.2 At this writing, following the tumult of a global pandemic, a dramatic rise in homicides and gun violence, the killings by police of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others, and subsequent protests against racial injustice, the committee takes this moment to infuse research evidence into public discourse and inform the current wave of public policy reform to address racial inequality in the criminal justice system and to advance racial equity. Read the entire page →
From page 17... ... 2. How has the criminal justice system exacerbated racial inequality in the United States? Read the entire page →
From page 18... ... Given the complex and deeply rooted nature of racial inequality in the United States, the committee acknowledges the need to examine policy changes within the criminal justice system and to address broader social, economic, and environmental conditions that give rise to inequalities in criminal justice. Addressing racial inequalities will require examining changes in criminal justice policy and examining changes to social and economic policy as well. Read the entire page →
From page 19... ... The public information-gathering sessions were not intended to reflect the full range of expertise or approaches to reducing racial inequalities in the criminal justice system and were not a representative sample; rather, they were meant to augment the committee's own expertise, solicit opinions from community representatives and key stakeholders, and facilitate exchanges among parties that otherwise might not have the opportunity to disseminate information and ideas. They were open to the public and live-streamed online. Read the entire page →
From page 20... ... ; and • The way racial inequalities in the criminal justice system are measured matters. There is a lack of consistent, reliable data as well as data trans parency and accountability. Read the entire page →
From page 21... ... . Additional information-gathering calls were held with criminal justice state officials, police executives working on criminal justice reform, and policy makers and groups, including the National Governors Association, the N ational Conference of State Legislatures, the National Association of Counties, and the National Center for State Courts. Read the entire page →
From page 22... ... It is also important to note that the existence of a disparity is simply a descriptive pattern and absent further analysis delivers no information as to the source of the disparity. Racial inequality refers to group-based differential treatment or access to valued resources rooted in law and public policy as well as in individual behavior and institutional practices. Read the entire page →
From page 23... ... . Given the entrenched problem of racial inequality in the criminal justice system, scholars have argued persuasively that any potential benefit of adopting a biological model of race in behavioral g enetics research is outweighed by the harm of entrenching racial stereotypes (Rothenberg and Wang, 2006) Read the entire page →
From page 24... ... Data used to measure racial disparities in criminal justice reflect the racial categories created by decision makers, including U.S. Census catego ries and classifications created by local officials. Read the entire page →
From page 25... ... . Racial Disparities and Inequality in Criminal Justice Involvement in crime, victimization, and contact with the criminal justice system varies greatly from person to person, from place to place, and across demographic groups in the population. Read the entire page →
From page 26... ... In the next section, we focus on the various ways disparities have been defined and interpreted. That is followed by a discussion of racial inequality, which we argue is a more general framework that encompasses and expands the explanation of racial disparities in criminal justice. Read the entire page →
From page 27... ... Racial inequality includes differences in criminal justice involvement that may be rooted in social structures of racial stratification outside the criminal justice system. Racial differences in criminal justice contact that are closely linked to the social structure of stratification may be sustained and amplified across the stages of criminal processing. Read the entire page →
From page 28... ... Racial disparity in criminal justice involvement can also further contribute to social and economic racial inequality. Racial inequality also exists in a wide variety of domains, in addition to the criminal justice system, including neighborhoods, schools, and governmental agencies. Read the entire page →
From page 29... ... Large racial inequalities in housing, jobs, and quality education can persist even if racial disparities in criminal justice contact are reduced. For example, while absolute racial disparity in imprisonment is highest in southern states compared to those in the Northeast, relative disparities are sometimes lower due to harsher sentencing in the South for both Black and White people not because of less overall racial inequality in socio-economic outcomes (C. Read the entire page →
From page 30... ... . Structural racism is reflected in the distribution of political power, economic wealth, material conditions, and equal access to, or fair treatment by, social systems over time, from housing to health care and, in particular, the criminal justice system (see below; Feagin and Elias, 2013) Read the entire page →
From page 31... ... These disparities, as we understand today, were the evidence and mech anism for the problem of racial inequality resulting, for Black people, in second-class citizenship and an extremely low level of democratic partici pation for much of the 20th century. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a second a ttempt to address the structural racism of racially neutral dis enfranchisement laws. Read the entire page →
From page 32... ... Where applicable, other populations or distinct subgroups, such as Asian Americans or immigrants, are discussed in subsequent chapters. HISTORICAL ROOTS OF RACIAL INEQUALITY IN CRIME AND JUSTICE To elaborate on structural racism in the criminal justice system, the persistent racial and ethnic disparities in crime and justice that are documented in this report can be better understood when placed in historical context. Read the entire page →
From page 33... ... . "Controlling slaves was one of the m ajor purposes of the criminal justice system," as Samuel Walker wrote in his comprehensive history of American criminal justice (Walker, 1998, p. Read the entire page →
From page 34... ... . Although most law enforcement and criminal justice institutions were idiosyncratic and decentralized during the antebellum period, law-and- order systems in the southern, western, and northern free-state regions of the United States were all tightly bound to the enforcement of slavery, es pecially after the passage of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Read the entire page →

From page 12...

... Reducing racial inequality must involve coordinated reforms across stages of the criminal justice system that will reduce the racial disadvantage that accumulates from police contact, to court processing and sentencing, to correctional supervision. Reducing Racial Inequalities in Criminal Justice Outcomes Although some jurisdictions have significantly reduced specific kinds of criminal justice contacts that have, in turn, reduced absolute disparities, wide racial inequality in the criminal justice system remains.