RIDEAU REPORTS

Rideau Reports

"The Nature of the Beast"

--Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it

America locks up more of its citizens than any nation in the world. According to U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics, 6,637,213 persons were under some sort of correctional supervision at the end of the year 2000. Over two million were in jail or prison; two-thirds of those were non-white.

Louisiana, the poorest state in the Union, boasts the highest lock-up rate in the world: 801 per 100,000 of its citizens. Blacks make up only a third of the population but account for three-fourths of the state’s prisoners. That didn’t just happen. It’s the way the system has always worked–what the system was designed to do.

The need for law and order is a legitimate one, achieved by societies through a criminal justice system. But the relationship of Louisiana’s system to its black population has itself been criminal, having historically been an instrument of white control, oppression, abuse, and violence.

Before the Civil War, most blacks were slaves–someone’s private property. Crime and justice for slaves was largely defined and administered on plantations by landowners. The official criminal justice system of the time was, with some exceptions, basically for white lawbreakers. This was true until the end of the War, which left a devastated Louisiana looking for ways to reduce the cost of government. To rid itself of the expense of caring for its prisoners, the state leased them all to Major Samuel James, who saw opportunity in the need for cheap labor to work the plantations and to build railroads and levees.

State slaves (prisoners) were even preferable to the former privately-owned slaves, who required care to protect the owner’s investment. Prisoners, on the other hand, could be worked until they literally dropped dead. There was no loss, as there was an inexhaustible supply of prisoners–mostly black men, women and children after the Civil War–committed to this brutal profiteer by the state’s criminal justice system for the most minor transgressions. The life expectancy of a convict in the lease system was only a few years, and thousands died from overwork, exposure, brutality and murder to produce wealth for Major James. Although the human toll evoked concern in some quarters, it was envy of James’ enormous profits that prompted the State to resume control of its prisoners in 1901 and to establish the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola with the goal of exploiting the mostly-black prison population to build an agri-business empire.

The Civil War ended official slavery and in 1870 the 15 Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave blacks voting power. But whites were determined to control and rule the freed blacks. And they did. Through a combination of vigilante terrorism after the Reconstruction Era and turn-of-the-century changes in voting requirements, Louisiana whites gradually stripped blacks of the vote, transforming the face of government into all white males, again.

White vigilantes lynched 390 people (334 were black) in Louisiana from 1882 to 1944. Only Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas experienced more lynching. Vigilante "justice" only subsided as the white populace became assured that the formal criminal justice system could be relied upon to dispense speedy "justice" to "coloreds" who got out of line. It was easy enough to do. After all, white police decided who got arrested, white district attorneys and grand juries decided who was prosecuted, all-white male juries sat in judgment, white attorneys were appointed to protect the defendant’s rights, and white judges made it all conform to "due process of law." The only role for blacks in the criminal justice system, until very recently, was as defendants in the courtroom and inmates in the prison system. The white press collaborated in this collaborative official lawlessness, asking few if any questions and sanitizing "justice taking its course." State appellate courts generally rubber-stamped convictions as constitutional, and the federal courts too often maintained a "hands-off" position.

The increased numbers of black voters in the decades following the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s brought some change. The biggest impact was the creation of judicial districts that enabled black judges to be elected. In Louisiana, this happened less than 10 years ago. The rural 20^th judicial district elected the state’s first African American district attorney only 5 years ago, and of 41 district attorneys across the state, he remains the only black. These very recent changes comprise only a small portion of the turf of the criminal justice system, which continues to be largely controlled by white judges, white district attorneys, white sheriffs, and white corrections and penal officials dispensing racially lopsided "justice."

Although increased voting by African Americans also sent blacks to the Louisiana Legislature, even today they remain greatly outnumbered by white lawmakers who consistently vote for an iron-fisted approach to criminal justice issues. For too many, the unspoken issue of crime and punishment is still a question of "what to do about the Negroes."

Can race really still be driving criminal justice in Louisiana, 137 years after the end of the Civil War? Many leaders say we have progressed beyond the race issue, but there may be more hopeful thinking than reality in their view. Consider that in the 1992 governor’s race, the majority of white voters in Louisiana cast their ballot for avowed white supremacist David Duke. Only a coalition of the black vote and white moderates kept him out of the Mansion. The vote for Duke certainly does not imply that all whites in the criminal justice system are out to do us in, but it does suggest that there is a substantial percentage who believe we deserve a particular sort of treatment when we fall into their hands.

Black History Month is good time to begin to reflect upon the criminal justice system because it has historically played a profound role in the Black Experience in America. And it still does. A 1995 study by Marc Mauer and Tracey Huling of the Sentencing Project in Washington found that one of every three black men in America between the ages of 20 and 29 was under the supervision of the criminal justice system–that is, incarceration, probation, or parole–on any given day. Malcolm Young, Executive Director of the Sentencing Project, says they believe that the ratio is even higher today.