Reference Material on Discrimination in the Legal System

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Reference Material on Discrimination in the Legal System

Walker, Samuel, Miriam Delone, and Cassia C. Spohn. The Color of Justice: Race, Ethnicity, and Crime in America, 3d ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2003.
Extremely well organized. Provides the definitions and statistics you need to have a useful discussion of inequities in the legal system. Covers police, court, prison, and the death penalty. Includes convenient overviews of studies and theories on discrimination in criminal justice. (315 pages)

Mauer, Marc. Race to Incarcerate: The Sentencing Project. New York: New Press, 1999.
Investigates race and class in the context of prison. Examines the “Tough on Crime” Movement and the War on Drugs. Also brief but useful discussion of news coverage concerning crime and incarceration. (194 pages)

The Sentencing Project: http://www.sentencingproject.org/.
Various reports analyzing disparate treatment in sentencing on the basis of race, class, and gender. Also short “fact sheets,” useful for overviews or quick research.
Building Blocks for Youth: http://www.buildingblocksforyouth.org/.
Contains and cites many studies on minority youth in the justice system. Some studies concern the treatment of young women, and the report ¿Dónde está la Justicia? relates to Latino youth.

Harris, David. Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work. New York: New Press, 2002.
Everything you need to know about racial profiling: history, important court cases, and statistical studies. Moving descriptions of the impact of racial profiling on individuals, along with explanations of its unconstitutionality, and its ineffectiveness as a law enforcement technique. (227 pages)

Berry, Mary F. The Pig Farmer’s Daughter and Other Tales of American Justice: Episodes of Racism and Sexism in the Courts from 1865 to the Present. New York: Knopf, 1999.
Stories showing the effects of sexism and racism in court cases, both during trial and on appeal. Includes cases involving extramarital sex, gay and lesbian relationships, prostitution, seduction, child support, abortion, rape, and incest. (243 pages)

Miller, Jerome G. Search and Destroy: African-American Males in the Criminal Justice System. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Fairly intellectual analysis of racism in the legal system, but full of graphic accounts of official mistreatment and the horrifying complacency of those who condone it. (242 pages)

Reiman, Jeffrey. The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class and Criminal Justice. New York: Macmillan, 1990.
Very lively presentation on the nature of crime, and how class and race influence who is punished. Reminiscent of Michael Moore (director of Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, etc.), but with an explicitly Marxist slant. (178 pages)

Leonard, Kimberly K., C. Pope, and W. Feversherm, eds. Minorities in Juvenile Justice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995.
To understand every word of these articles, you’d need to have taken a class in statistics (and still remember some of it), but most of the tables and discussions are pretty clear. Chapters 2 and 7 summarize interviews with police, prosecutors, public defenders and judges, exposing their attitudes concerning race and class. (216 pages)
Lynch, Michael and E. Britt Patterson, eds. Justice With Prejudice: Race and Criminal Justice in America. Albany, NY: Harrow and Heston, 1996.
A collection of rather academic articles, but Chapter 5 provides important statistics and analysis on racism in media coverage of crime. (169 pages)
Up to date statistics on law enforcement, conviction, and sentencing can be obtained online. Good websites include:
Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/

National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS)
http://www.ncjrs.org/

Sourcebook of criminal justice statistics Online (SCJS)
http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/
However, the data is often presented in such a way that it’s hard to spot the instances of systemic discrimination. You may have to draw on several different tables and do a little math to get useful information. Before you start number-crunching, read some of the books listed above to see how they analyzed the statistical material, because you may want to follow their approach. The agencies that publish these statistics have staff who can help you find the right data, especially if you explain really clearly what you’re after. Check the websites to get up-to-date contact information (including 800 numbers)—look under “Contact” for BJS and NCJRS, and under “About Sourcebook” for SCJS.

There’s a great deal of reference material on discrimination in the legal system. The sources listed above are easy to find in large public libraries, up-to-date, and for the most part reasonable to read (not written for the edification of other academicians). They’re listed in order of how useful and readable they seemed. The number of pages listed for each book is generally just the text, not the notes, indices, bibliographies, etc.