In the 75 years after World War II, lawmakers have enacted, courts have pondered, and administrations have overseen policies that were supposedly designed to advance national interests but have affected the Black community. The Voting Rights Act, affirmative action, school desegregation, and housing desegregation are only a few of the key legislation that the political class passed in the post-civil rights era to provide black Americans equal access to life and liberty. From the centuries of slavery and colonial imperialism to the present era of mass incarceration and global counterinsurgency, historians of the American carceral state have written a growing wave of work on criminalization, law enforcement, and imprisonment in America (Suddler, 228). These histories of the anti-black punitive tradition in the United States give important background for understanding the overlapping and diverse racial, cultural, gendered, and socioeconomic components of police and punishment in the American criminal law system.
Effects of Criminal Policies in The Post-Civil Rights Era
Since the creation of contemporary police forces, law enforcement activities have categorized dangerous populations and people of color as internal adversaries, volatile dangers to established social systems, and internal opponents of state authority in US-controlled territories. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments all abolished slavery, extended citizenship rights, and gave black males the chance to vote in the wake of Emancipation. After Reconstruction came to an end in 1877, according to Hinton and Cook (264), national leaders and officials obstructed efforts to grant black citizens legal equality, and in their place, new criminal laws and penal systems, like Black Codes and convict leasing, arose at the state and local governments. In the post-Civil Rights Era, practices that restricted the rights of black Americans were built on political platforms that placed a strong emphasis on fighting crime.
The anti-crime initiatives of the United States had the opposite impact on black people. Newly freed people and their descendants were often criminalized and imprisoned during and after the Civil War, which influenced the policing and prison reforms that were put into place in the decades before Johnson’s War on Crime began in 1965 (Thompson, 226). Black Americans were increasingly the subject of criminal laws, enforcement techniques, and legal-cultural traditions during the so-called Progressive era of the early twentieth century. The entrenchment of Jim Crow laws led to the emergence of new mechanisms for geographical regulation and social control before, during, and after Prohibition, which eventually had an impact on black people’s social and physical mobility, economic opportunity, and life prospects.
Throughout the twentieth century, black activists and reformers fiercely opposed crime-control measures. However, federal, state, and municipal law enforcement agencies continued to mobilize against civil rights protestors, black power militants, and urban activists in the decades that followed the mainstream civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Law enforcement authorities used increasing media and government allegations of widespread protest, criminal fear, and civil unrest in the late 1960s to justify their presence, patrolling, and monitoring of high-risk, low-income communities of color (Thompson, 226). In the 1990s, local police forces and other law enforcement organizations deployed paramilitaries to monitor high-crime areas in teams while focusing on suspicious people and vehicles. This period also saw the acquisition of military-grade weapons and crime reporting technologies (Thompson, 229). Profiling of people of color in the United States began with the growth of the police, which eventually resulted in prejudiced crime prevention measures against them.
Discriminatory police tactics highlighted the goals of the War on Gangs since they adversely affected the nation’s minority populations. Key developments in crime reporting systems and surveillance technology in the 1990s that justified the deployment of hyper-policing in designated local hot spots also coincided with the rise of proactive police strategies (Balto et al., 30). National law enforcement programs that started in the middle of the 1960s provided the groundwork for proactive policy changes. They also prepared the way for community-based policing experiments and crime prevention strategies that were used domestically and abroad in the twenty-first century. The anti-crime initiatives that followed, implemented concurrently at the municipal and federal levels, exacerbated the arrest and imprisonment rates in county jails and state penitentiaries.
It is impossible to separate institutional racism in America, past and present, from the concurrent development of the country’s criminal legal system, despite the numerous complexities and nuanced issues highlighted in this historical and contemporary overview of criminal policies in the post-Civil Rights Era in America. This paper stresses the anti-black criminal policies as crucial to comprehend the progression of crime control and punishment throughout American history, from the emergence of mass incarceration and the specialization of police counterinsurgency tactics in the twenty-first century to the development of modern prisons and public law enforcement agencies in the nineteenth century.
Mandatory Sentencing Laws
I do not agree with mandatory sentencing laws since they cause serious inequalities in terms of which groups are most impacted, has significant challenges and issues for the judicial system as a whole, and has several detrimental social and economic repercussions. The concentration on certain types of crimes has a history of having a big detrimental influence on certain categories of offenders and specific social groups, and punishments are frequently considerably disproportionate to the gravity of the infraction. Additionally, there are little data that suggests mandatory sentences truly lower crime, and they offer little to no relief for victims. Because mandatory sentences are inadequate for achieving natural justice, I disagree with the policy aimed at fighting crime.
Works Cited
Balto, Simon, et al. Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago From Red Summer to Black Power. Amsterdam UP, 2019.
Hinton, Elizabeth, and DeAnza Cook. “The Mass Criminalization of Black Americans: A Historical Overview.” Annual Review of Criminology, vol. 4, no. 1, 2021, pp. 261–286.
Suddler, Carl. Presumed criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York. New York University Press, 2020.
Thompson, Heather Ann. “The Racial History of Criminal Justice in America.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, vol. 16, no. 1, 2019, pp. 221–241.