After the protests and riots of 2020, considerable attention focused on the U.S. criminal justice system.
Much interest understandably focused on police misconduct, but the larger criminal justice system also came under scrutiny. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, although Black Americans make up approximately 13% of the U.S. population, they make up 38% of the population of federal prisons. Similar figures are seen for state prisons and local jails. Is this evidence for systemic racism in the U.S. criminal justice system?
To answer this, myself and Stetson University colleague Sven Smith conducted a meta-analytic study of research regarding the impact of race on criminal sentencing and other adjudication. We found that — controlling for prior criminal history — race did not predict criminal justice outcomes for violent, property, or juvenile crimes. There were small effects favoring Asian and White defendants over Black and Latino defendants for drug crimes only, and even these were far smaller than most people might imagine. Better-quality studies were less likely to provide evidence for racial biases.
At least on the issue of racial biases, our study showed that our criminal justice system is functioning well. This is a resounding success of the civil rights movement, and a mark of pride for the U.S. Nonetheless, I suspect this news will still be resisted by those for whom racial division is morally gratifying or profitable.
What accounts for the overrepresentation of young Black and, to a lesser extent, Latino men in prison populations? People tend to assume that any disparity can only be explained by racism, but that’s not true. The simple, if somewhat uncomfortable, answer is that Black and Latino men commit more crimes on average. It’s become somewhat taboo to say this fact out loud, though it’s statistically uncontroversial.
Ignoring this reality does more harm than good.
Some might argue that disparities in reported crime might represent “overpolicing,” wherein police are harsher in Black neighborhoods. Once again, the evidence doesn’t bear this out. For instance, when looking at homicide rates, Black citizens are overrepresented as victims of homicides, with most of those offenders also Black. Surely the lives of these Black victims matter. Of course, police put more resources toward higher crime neighborhoods, but these discrepancies in victimization can’t be explained by over-policing.
This doesn’t mean Black or Latino men are inherently prone to violent crime. Nor, we should be careful to note, are most Black or Latino men involved in crime. Indeed, I find the evidence for some kind of biological essentialism to be thin. This is one danger in using correlational data to argue for systemic racism, as the New York Times once did: that same data can often be turned around to argue for inherent racial differences.
Instead, the key issue explaining disparities between different ethnic groups may be fatherlessness. Mother-only households rose for all ethnic groups during the 1970s and ’80s, but remain highest for Black families. That Times data suggests that Black women are actually doing about as well as White women (Asian women’s outcomes are the best in the United States), so fatherlessness may be particularly bad for boys. This is nothing inherent about race and is a fixable problem. Tackling this will require us to be honest about disparities in crime commission, and examine policies that may encourage nuclear, two-parent families with fathers present.
In the meantime, we should celebrate that we have achieved a remarkable level of racial egalitarianism in our criminal justice system. Falsely portraying it as “systemically racist” comes with real consequences. Distrust in our criminal justice system may result in people being less cooperative. Witnesses may not help police, letting violent perpetrators go free. Suspects may not comply with police requests, escalating the risk of injury or death. Racial polarization may continue to purposelessly worsen.
There are reasonable critiques of our criminal justice system. Our incarceration rate, though declining in recent years, remains high. Men may be treated more harshly than women. But overall, our system is working better than we may have thought. And the public deserves to know this.
Christopher J. Ferguson is a professor of psychology at Stetson University.
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