Lecturer talks racial disparity in prisons

The issue of racial disparity in prison systems and the ways to resolve it was the topic of Michael Tonry’s lecture Monday in the Maurer School of Law.

Tonry is the McKnight presidential professor of criminal law and policy at the University of Minnesota, and one of the country’s foremost experts on sentencing and criminal justice policy.

“The problem is, there are vastly more black people in American prisons, and in every category of American punishment, than can be justified in either black people’s involvement in crime or in terms of population presence,” Tonry said.

The only ways to fix this is to roll back the size of the American punished population and radically changing American law, Tonry said.

“The causes of racial disparities in sentencing and punishment in the U.S. are the conscious policy choices of American legislators and government officials to adopt particular kinds of sentencing and correctional policies,” Tonry said.

Though African Americans comprise 12 percent of the U.S. population, he said, 40 percent of America’s prisoners are black.

A black man, he said, is seven or eight times more likely to be in prison than a white man.

“The psychologists can tell us the causes of crime at the individual level — things that predict criminality — are the same for men and women, even though women have much lower offending rates than men, and they’re the same for blacks and whites,” Tonry said.

Black people are also much more likely to be arrested for drug crimes than whites, Tonry said, adding blacks use drugs less or about the same as whites do.

“All the evidence we have is, that as a population matter blacks don’t sell drugs more than whites do,” Tonry said. “They sell them at times and in places that attract police attention, which produce vast disparities in drug arrests.”

An example Tonry gave is whites are more likely to buy drugs only from those they know in a home or known place, while blacks are much more likely to buy drugs from a dealer off the street.

Tonry said though there are some racial differences in case prosecution level, at the convection level and at the sentencing level, they make little difference in the prison population numbers.

“Sentencing laws, though, make a giant difference,” Tonry said.

A few years ago, blacks in federal prison systems were serving vastly longer sentences for drug crimes than whites because of a federal law ­­— now called the 18 to 1 law — which punished offenses involving crack with sentences of the same severity involving cocaine in 100 times larger amounts, Tonry said.

Five grams of crack elicited the same minimum penalty as 500 grams of powder, he said.

“It comes down to policy, and that’s the point that needs to be addressed,” Francisco Guzman, a third year law student who attended the talk, said.

Tonry put America’s prison population in perspective by comparing it globally.
Since the 1960s, Canada and America have been almost identical in robbery and homicide rates, but America’s prison population is massively higher than Canada’s, Tonry said.

He said the difference comes when Canada didn’t enact the harsher laws for offenders that America did, like zero tolerance laws.

Additionally, most developed countries don’t have the option of life without parole, Tonry said. 

“If we can move to the world standard that criminal history only counts a little, we would greatly reduce some of the structural pressure that sends people to prison,” Tonry said.

Tonry gave four final solutions to the problem of racial disparity in the prison system: radically reducing the prison population, shifting drug policy to emphasize prevention and treatment, reducing racial profiling and reducing the weight of criminal history in sentencing guidelines.

Elisheva Aneke, a first year law student, said mass incarceration is one of her major concerns, because it’s a moral issue, too.

She said she thinks there should be more awareness of race-based differences in prisons, and society at large.

“Race is an awkward subject, I think for most people, in general,” Aneke said. “No matter what race you are, any talk like this where people are actually getting information, I think, is good.”