The Peculiar Journey: An Intellectual History of Race and Imprisonment

• In Event: Prisoners and Prisons (Panel 1 of 3)

Abstract

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” wrote W. E. B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). That remains true in twenty-first century America, especially in criminal justice systems generally and in prisons in particular. Racial disparities in sentencing and in imprisonment have declined somewhat from historic peaks in the 1980s and 1990s but remain extreme (the imprisonment rate in 2020 in state and federal prisons was nearly 6 times higher for Blacks than for Whites). Differential criminal justice system treatment of Blacks and Whites has changed form since the Civil War but endured—convict labor, prison farms, underenforcement of criminal laws in Black communities, imprisonment rate disparities, contemporary tough-on-crime laws and police practices that target members of minority groups, places they frequent, and behaviors for which they are disproportionately often arrested. In earlier times, differential treatment was often openly invidious. In more recent times it is nominally color-blind, but somehow in practice produces similarly skewed results. We need to understand why and how differential treatment of Black people has persisted through a century and a half of fundamental changes in criminal justice system policies and practices.

Author

• Robert D. Crutchfield, University of Washington