Responding to Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System

The Sentencing Project has just published a new edition of Reducing Racial Disparity in the Criminal Justice System, a manual for policymakers that describes numerous best practices for addressing disparities.  This publication should be of particular interest in Milwaukee and Wisconsin, which have some of the worst criminal justice disparities in the nation.  As The Sentencing Project described in a May publication, blacks in Milwaukee are seven times more likely than whites to be arrested for a drug offense, the second-highest such disparity among the forty-three major American cities analyzed.  Similarly, a state-level analysis by Human Rights Watch determined that blacks in Wisconsin are forty-two times more likely than whites to receive a prison term for a drug conviction, the highest such disparity among the thirty-four states studied.

Of course, to say that there are racial disparities is not to say the disparities are necessarily unwarranted.  For instance, if it turned out that blacks committed serious drug crimes more frequently than whites, then at least some of statistical disparities might be warranted.  Still, the magnitude of the racial disparities in Milwaukee and Wisconsin is so high, particularly in comparison to national norms, that there is good reason to believe we do indeed have a serious problem.

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What Is an “Offense”?: Another ACCA Puzzle for the Courts

I’ve posted a few times on recent Armed Career Criminal Act cases (e.g., here).  With several Supreme Court decisions last term on the scope of the ACCA, this has been an especially dynamic area of federal sentencing law.  The cases nicely illustrate one of the fundamental problems with the ACCA, which is that Congress sought to single out certain categories of prior state convictions as triggers for the ACCA fifteen-year mandatory minimum, when each state criminal justice system has its own idiosyncratic structure, terminology, and practice norms.  Congress did not, and could not, take into account the particularities of fifty different systems when drafting the ACCA.  As a result, the courts have faced a steady stream of difficult cases requiring them to determine which types of prior convictions from which states actually count as a “violent felony” or a “serious drug offense” (three of which trigger the fifteen-year minimum).  The Supreme Court’s May decision in United States v. Rodriquez provides a good example of the difficulty.

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A Professorial President?

Before last night’s presidential debate, the pundits were saying that Obama had to be less “professorial” and “nuanced” than in his prior debates.  And the post-mortems today seem to indicate that he was successful on this count.  Call it self-serving, but I dislike the implication that being professorial should be regarded as disabling for a presidential candidate.  To be sure, this view has deep roots in our political culture.  For instance, in lieu of watching the debate last night, I attended the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s production of a 1945 play, State of the Union, in which a neophyte presidential candidate is repeatedly urged by his handlers to avoid specifics and dumb down the language in his campaign speeches.  I take it that this view reflects, at least in part, an assumption that uninformed voters want to be reassured that the world is a simple place; that public policy questions have clear, easily comprehensible right answers; and that their own intuitive, emotion-driven responses are as sound a basis for making policy judgments as expertise and rigorous analysis.  The assumption may or may not be true–perhaps uninformed voters would rather be educated than pandered to–but indulging the assumption ultimately does a disservice to the quality of our political culture and democratic processes.

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