Pubdate: Sun, 25 Nov 2001
Source: Chapel Hill News (NC)
Copyright: 2001 Chapel Hill News
Contact:  http://www.chapelhillnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1081
Author: Ted Vaden

RECOGNIZING THE ELEPHANT IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

Chapel Hill lawyer Bill Massengale represents Death Row inmates. In recent 
cases of two African-American clients, there was a disturbing pattern.

"Both were tried by white judges. They each had two white lawyers, two 
white prosecutors and 28 white jurors. They never saw a black man in the 
courtrooms where there were being tried for their lives."

It's a phenomenon all too common in the criminal justice system in North 
Carolina. Not just in death penalty cases, but throughout the legal system 
the burden of crime and punishment falls more heavily on black people than 
whites -- not just disproportionately in percentages of blacks and whites, 
but in absolute numbers of black people, especially men, passing through 
our criminal legal system. Here are some of the numbers:

Sixty-seven percent of the 32,000 inmates in the state's prisons are 
African-American, most of them young men.

 From 1988 to 1999, the white male prison population increased 43 percent. 
The black male population increased 100 percent.

Sixty-one percent of prisoners on North Carolina's Death Row are 
minorities. All but one of the people executed in North Carolina since 1984 
were convicted of killing white people, even though many more blacks than 
whites are murder victims.

These and other statistics on race and justice in North Carolina prompted 
the N.C. Council of Churches last year to issue a report called "The 
Elephant in the Courtroom." The title refers to the fact that race is such 
a dominant factor in our criminal justice system, but no one pays attention 
to it. We are, says Lao Rubert, head of the Carolina Justice Policy Center, 
in denial.

"When it comes to race in the criminal justice system, it is an elephant 
sitting there right in our living room," she says. "We need to ... get the 
courage to look at the elephant and to acknowledge that it's there. Because 
if we don't see it, we can't do anything about it."

Last weekend, some 50 people gathered at Binkley Memorial Baptist Church in 
Raleigh to try to do something about it. They talked about the roots of the 
racial injustice issue and possible solutions.

One problem, as Massengale pointed out, is that the state's court system is 
an overwhelmingly white institution passing judgment largely on 
African-Americans and other minorities. One solution offered at last week's 
discussion is to scrap the system of electing judges, which favors whites, 
and replace it with appointment of judges.

Carl Fox, district attorney for Orange and Chatham counties, is one of the 
two African-American DAs in the state. He calls for a reordering of the 
enforcement priorities of local police departments that, he says, divert 
resources from attacking the roots of crime. "If we spent the kind of 
effort keeping the drug traffic out of African-American communities that we 
spend keeping people off of Franklin Street on Halloween," he said, "we 
wouldn't have a drug problem."

Drugs clearly are intricately tied up in the problem of crime, particularly 
among young black men, and again the concern is about priorities. Rather 
than focusing on punishing people for drug-related crime, society should be 
providing drug treatment resources to stem the demand for drugs and the 
crime associated with it. Between 60 percent and 80 percent of people in 
prison have a drug problem, says Rubert, but there is little effort to 
treat their problem in prison and virtually no safety net for addicted 
people after they leave prison.

Drug crime enforcement also falls most heavily on the black community, in 
part because the open air market of drug dealing is so visible and in part 
because it generates so much drug-related crime -- theft, armed robbery, 
breaking and entering, assault and murder. There is just as much drug use 
in white society, experts say, but it is not prosecuted because the crime 
is victimless.

Massengale is a former assistant DA under Fox who recalls participating in 
police raids in which an entire street in the African-American neighborhood 
was targeted. "You have incredible amounts of drugs in the fraternities in 
Chapel Hill," he said. "There are more drugs there than in the entire 
African-American community. Why don't you ever bust them?" The answer is 
that it's easier to identify and prosecute African-American street dealing, 
while drug use in the white community is more difficult to prosecute, both 
legally and politically. "There's nothing that would be better for reform 
of our drug laws than to have about 100 students for UNC and 100 from Duke 
get caught for drugs," said Tye Hunter, head of the N.C. Office of Indigent 
Defense. "Then there would be some activity for looking at drug offenders 
in the court system."

There were other suggestions for addressing racism in the criminal justice 
system: providing training and education for inmates while they are in 
prison, recruiting employers to provide jobs for them when they emerge and, 
perhaps most important, keeping young black males in school so they won't 
stray into crime in the first place.

All of those are the hard part. There is no easy part. The first priority, 
as Lao Rubert suggests, is seeing the elephant.
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