give your feedback on both student post…. This is just an feedback and comment on their post cite from the readings as well and you can add to their post too
Kaitlin
Throughout the history of the United States of America, there has been a conveyer belt of institutions, mechanisms and so called criminal punishments used by the white masses to control, isolate, subordinate, other, and police people of colour. Between 1890 and 1940, public and very brutal torture lynchings took place across the U.S. heavily focused in the deep southern states (Garland, 2005). Due to the penal nature of these lynchings, they were more likely to be condoned by local (and even national) audiences, making them a strategic form of violence in attempts to preserve racial supremacy (Garland, 2005). Spectacle lynchings were the extreme end of a spectrum of ruthlessly imposed racial restrictions. Along with lynchings, there has been a long history of ‘peculiar’ institutions tasked with restricting and controlling African Americans, including slavery, the Jim Crow system, and the ghetto (Wacquant, 2001).
Wacquant's (2001) peculiar institutions explain the tendency of a change in the carceral population to an overrepresentation of persons of colour because the institutions established and fostered a system that defines and confines African Americans. The current increase in black imprisonment is a result of the crisis of the ghetto as a case control instrument, as well as the corresponding necessity for a replacement infrastructure for the confinement of lower class African Americans. In the post-Civil Rights era, the remnants of the dark ghetto and the expanding prison system became linked by a triple relationship of functional equivalency, structural homology, and cultural fusion, spawning a carceral continuum that entraps a population of younger black men rejected by the deregulated wage-labor market (Wacquant, 2001). All of the institutions have persistently racialized the arbitrary barrier that separates African Americans from the rest of the population in the United States by aggressively denying its cultural basis in history, instead attributing it to untrue aspects of biology (Wacquant, 2001).
The function of the police during the decades of peculiar institutions has been that their enforcement or lack of action developed an intricate ideology justifying the subhuman circumstances imposed on black people (Wacquant, 2001). For example, from 1865 to 1965, the Jim Crow institution through the Dixie ruling class produced the Black Codes to impose forced labour and police regulations in order to reclaim control of the fields (Wacquant, 2001). All of the peculiar institutions were supported and encouraged by the forces of the state and impunity from the authorities including law enforcement.
Garland (2015) contributes to our understanding of the history of policing in the U.S. by positioning lynching as a form of criminal punishment as well as highlighting the unwillingness and inaction that often occurred and still occurs by police to act against community norms. The staging of a public lynching in blatant contravention of state law was a political statement that was confirmed and emphasized by audience support (Garland, 2015). Southern lynch mobs turned their perceived inferiority into a display of strength by "taking the law into their own hands," claiming the sovereign authority to govern their own affairs, beat their own adversaries, and ensure their own security. These spectacles generally had the implicit support of local community leaders, law enforcement personnel, and newspaper editors, despite the fact that word of these occurrences sometimes sparked anger and criticism in other places (Garland, 2015). This circumstance may be characterized as one of under-enforcement, in which a clearly unlawful conduct goes unpunished due to the state government's and its criminal justice system's weaknesses (Garland, 2015). This de facto suspension of state law happened not due to a lack of enforcement capability, but because local justice norms contradicted state law and disrupted its functioning in certain instances. The reality is that the lynchers' behaviour was generally seen favourably by significant portions of the communities where the lynchings took place, and it was condoned (and frequently cheered) by local politicians and law enforcement personnel (Garland, 2015). Racially coded community norms and state law standards fought for jurisdiction, and wherever lynchings happened, the actions of law enforcement officials, witnesses, and jurors guaranteed that local law norms typically triumphed (Garland, 2015). Constitutional provisions and state legal standards pertaining to the status and rights of African Americans were laxly enforced, hotly disputed, and sometimes of minimal importance in the everyday lives of these people (Garland, 2015). The rules of the Southern racial code, on the other hand, were specific, demanding, and aggressively enforced. When public torture lynchings occurred, it was the latter standards that dictated behaviour, not just of the lynchers but also of the local police officers and community leaders who condoned and provided impunity to the lynchers (Garland, 2005).
True improvements to the criminal justice system are impossible to achieve without acknowledging its racial foundations. True progress toward a racially equitable system necessitates knowledge of the variance in racial and ethnic disparities in incarceration between states, as well as the policies and day-to-day practices that contribute to these disparities. To begin to address the staggering disparities among Black people imprisoned in the United States as a result of the carceral continuum the Sentencing Project suggests that the legal system eliminate mandatory sentences for all crimes (Nellis, 2021). Forced minimum penalties, rules against chronic offenders, and the mandatory transfer of minors to the adult criminal system give prosecutors far too much power while limiting the discretion of impartial judges. These practices lead to a significant rise in sentence length and time served in jail, inflicting disproportionately severe penalties on Black and Latinx people (Nellis, 2021). Additionally, the legal system should decriminalize low-level drug offences (Nellis, 2021). They must halt arrests and prosecutions for low-level drug charges, which frequently result in the accumulation of past convictions, which disproportionately affect communities of colour (Nellis, 2021). These convictions, in general, lead to more and deeper participation in the criminal justice system.
References
Garland, D. (2005). Penal Excess and Surplus Meaning: Public Torture Lynchings in Twentieth-Century America. Law & Society Review, 39(4), 793–834. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5893.2005.00245.x
Nellis, A. The Sentencing Project, 2021, The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons, https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/color-of-justice-racial-and-ethnic-disparity-in-state-prisons/.
Wacquant, L. (2001). Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh. Punishment & Society, 3(1), 95–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/14624740122228276
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