ABSTRACT
In Chapter 9, we review the much discussed relationship between minority people and communities and the criminal justice system – police, courts, and jails and prisons. All aspects of the criminal justice system, throughout the nation’s history, have been created by White authorities to limit and control threats from the poor and marginalized. Plantation justice, chains and whips, were replaced by police, courts, and prisons in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Prisoner leasing preserved slavery’s control of many Black men into the twentieth century and in the second half of the century the “carceral” state arose to control Black people, Hispanic people, and others. Today, we have the largest system of jails and prisons in the world, we cling to execution as a punishment for some crimes, and the victims of both incarceration and execution in the U.S. are disproportionately Black and minority.
