Nearly 200 people attended a lecture on racial discrepancies in the criminal justice system Monday night featuring Georgetown University law professor David Cole and Princeton University professors Cornel West 'GS 80, Devah Pager and Bruce Western.
The lecture — "The New Apartheid State?" — was the third in a series presented by the Prison Reform group of the Princeton Justice Project titled "An Unjust Sentence?" and was organized by Spencer Compton '05 and Krista Brune '06. The event lasted two and a half hours.
West noted the high rate of people of color incarcerated for drug violations.
"As Princeton students know, if drug laws were enforced at this University like they are in Trenton, New Jersey jails would be much more colorful," he said.
Cole said U.S. policy results in some "shocking statistics."
"For every black male that graduates from college, 100 are arrested," he said.
According to Cole, the United States accounts for five percent of the world population, but it accounts for 25 percent of the world's prison population.
From 1925 to 1970, the rate of incarceration in the United States was 110 people for every 100,000. Today, the U.S. rate exceeds 700 per 100,000, the highest rate in the world.
"[The United States] can be at these incarceration levels because the burden of incarceration is not shared by all," Cole said.
Blacks are incarcerated at a rate seven times that of whites. While blacks represent 12 percent of the U.S. population, they represent over 50 percent of prisoners, he said.
Cole also stressed the exceptional disparities in drug-related violations. Blacks represent 14 percent of illegal drug users — a number consistent with their population — yet they represent 75 percent of those sentenced for drug use.
Pager focused on the stigma of having a criminal record. According to her, the probability of getting a job with a criminal record decreases significantly more for blacks than for whites.
"This shows that blacks are doubly affected by the stigma of a criminal record . . . but what is perhaps most surprising is that this means that a black male is the same as a white male with a criminal record [when looking for a job]," Pager said.
"We do in fact have courageous and visionary students here," West said as he approached the podium, applauding the work of Brune and Compton. "We have a responsibility as citizens, a moral responsibility to deal with these issues before they become as cataclysmic [as during the 1960s]."
West noted how America has reacted to the incarceration rates among blacks. "Hip hop injected prison culture into black culture and into American culture — 7.3 percent of all hip hop CDs are sold in vanilla suburbs," he said.
The organizers were excited with the large turnout. "I think it's amazing," Brune said. "I think it's great how we got a mix of students, professors and community members."
Response to the lecture seemed positive. During the half-hour question-and-answer period, no one challenged the speakers.
Brune plans to meet with the New Jersey sentencing commission next fall and talk to them about what she has learned from the lectures.
"I hope that people will realize that there is a problem and that these lectures will bring these issues into the mainstream," she said.
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