ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the relationship between sickle cell, racism and the criminal justice system. It deals with a brief review of a prevailing concern of criminal justice researchers in Europe and North America, namely, that both indirectly by criminalizing the poor and directly by racist practices, that discrimination and racism are central challenges in criminal justice systems. The chapter explains an overview of how sickle cell disease and its genetic carrier state, sickle cell trait are implicated in criminal justice issues. It looks at the theory of critical realism for an approach that distinguishes in time frames between the historical origins of contextual resources and the structural antecedents of institutional arrangements, and the historically produced, collective and relational agency of individuals in situated activity in the present. The problem with an analysis of “institutional racism” is that where a discriminatory outcome has non-ethnic structural antecedents, the argument collapses when non-ethnic social origins are shown.
