Prof slams prisons as prejudiced

Faced with white supremacy, exclusionary social institutions and a criminal justice system that is "racist and deeply unfair," African Americans become trapped in a cycle of crime and incarceration, religion professor Cornel West GS '80 argued yesterday during a panel discussion in McCosh 50.

Part of Princeton's first-ever prison colloquium — "Locked Up and Locked Out" — the discussion was titled "Punishment and its widening circle of victims: The impact of incarceration on greater society." Focusing on how the criminal justice system in the United States disadvantages African-American citizens, the event drew an audience of around 50 people.

West described African Americans' and women's historical struggle for full citizenship, citing these legacies as influential factors in the current criminal system. "If you feel that you have no stake or hardly any stake at all in a society," he said, "then you are more likely to prey upon that society, especially the weaker members of it."

While these feelings of exclusion may spur minorities to commit crimes against other citizens, West stressed his belief that nonwhites are ultimately victims of racist ideology. "White supremacy makes it difficult for blacks and browns to feel as if they are full-fledged citizens," he said, "[which] socially, politically, [psychologically] results in them being the most vulnerable, and thereby finding themselves disproportionately represented within these [correctional] institutions."

Anthropology professor John Borneman, another panelist, described some of the challenges democracies face when striving to maintain prison systems. "Only democratic systems have to uphold the rule of law in order to maintain social solidarity," he said. "When societies become less democratic and their justice systems become corrupted — subject to the manipulations of the political and economic elites — they begin to seek substitute victims to punish."

Borneman pointed to the U.S. criminal justice system, citing the political purposes for which it can be manipulated. "Prisons are one of the primary institutions for creating an electoral majority in order to help Republican candidates win office," he said. "Disenfranchisement has been critical to this majority, accomplished largely by legal means preventing black prisoners and ex-prisoners from voting."

Psychology professor John Darley, the third faculty member on the panel, also pointed to problems in the politics of the criminal justice system. "Politicians want to be sure that they can never be accused of being 'soft on crime,' " he said.

Consequently, politicians have pushed notable increases in the length of sentences for convicted felons over the past few decades, Darley said. Nevertheless, he added, "no modern psychologist would assert that this incessant ramping up of penalty duration will have much effect on the rate of the commission of crime."

This growth in the number of people incarcerated in U.S. prisons — from around 350,000 prisoners in 1975 to 2.2 million today — has detracted from other sectors of society, Darley said. "The more we spend on prisons, the more we take away from educational institutions."

Panel member Celeste Fitzgerald, program director for New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, focused on the racial issues associated with capital punishment. The death penalty, she said, is highly unfair due to racial disparities in its implementation.

"If you kill a white victim in the state of New Jersey, you are 2.5 times as likely to get the death penalty than if you kill a black man," Fitzgerald said.