has actually increased over the last two decades, and sentenced prisoners tend to serve longer portions of their sentence in most states. Parole has decreased—there is less potential for a prisoner to get out “too early.”
Politicians and others seeking to build reputations on law and order as well as those opposed to training and work-release–type programs for offenders all attack any form of furlough for those charged with a crime. The notion of early release and “putting communities in danger” is also a characterization that serves the media well, allowing another level of drama.
F. Race and the Media
Media descriptions of offenders tend to make reentry a difficult policy initiative to champion. Shorthand descriptions of crimes and perpetrators, often engaging animal metaphors, create hostility and fear. Frontpage articles of crime and victimization often get politicians to call for sympathetic laws in the name of a victim rather than spurring them to focus on the root causes of the crime. The media uses the same shorthand to link race with poverty and crime in ways that caricature offenders of color and characterize them as particularly unworthy of our compassion or assistance.
The 1980s and 1990s saw a shift in the way poverty, public political dissent, and crime were characterized in print and electronic media as well as in political circles. After the riots of the late 1960s and civil unrest in the 1970s, conservative politicians recast the political unrest as an issue of “law and order” rather than of human rights and social justice. At the same time, new “coded” terminology was employed to recast public welfare as an issue of race. Increasingly, White America found itself hostile to public welfare. This stemmed in large part from the erroneous perception, often bolstered by media coverage, that most welfare recipients are Black. This also led to the conclusion of many that Blacks evince less commitment to the work ethic.
The United States Supreme Court decision Bakke v. California Board of Regents and the line of cases about affirmative action that it spawned have also influenced the national debate on race. Media coverage and depictions of “worthy Whites” being denied jobs and admission to college or graduate school because of “less worthy” Blacks and other people of color have each contributed to the impression that deserving Whites were being displaced by “unqualified” Blacks. Indeed, the double impact of media portrayals of poor African Americans as criminals and middle-class African Americans as unworthy (due to affirmative action) spurred public debate. Indeed, it became commonplace for politicians to voice concerns about “welfare queens” and “lazy, shiftless” prisoners as a way of rousing public anger and rallying public support for particularly draconian—and not necessarily effective—crime policies. Conservative politics and backlashes against civil rights gained ground and mainstream support.
The obvious shift from support and encouragement to attacks on—and distrust for—people of color seeking higher education, seeking employment, and seeking to support their children in difficult economic conditions laid the groundwork for public opinion to demonize those individuals with criminal convictions. Politicians soon capitalized on the prevailing sentiments that people of color tended to be dangerous, unworthy of rehabilitation. The country was well on its way toward turning young men of color, particularly those who came from low-income communities, into an underclass. By the end of the 1980s, the assumption that Black men were dangerous had soaked deeply into America’s consciousness, powerfully sustained by the steady flow of news coverage depicting Black men under arrest, in court, and incarcerated.58 This strategy incited racial prejudices rather than concerns about crime and fostered great resistance to public policy efforts to reduce racial inequality.59
The ability of the poor to adjust to social and economic disadvantage increased as the prosperity of the 1990s increased. As a result, the poor and less fortunate became alien to the well-to-do. The economic and criminal justice policies that resulted were focused increasingly on punishing the poor and people of color, and attempted to discredit social explanations of problematic behavior. This culminated in the vast array of zero-tolerance policies that emerged from the “broken windows” theory. The research, advanced by two criminologists, posited the theory that broken windows left unaddressed in a community would invite criminal conduct.
Policy makers, at a loss for answers in dealing with increasing homelessness, embedded poverty, and increasing petty crime, jumped on the theory and began treating manifestations of poverty as crime. Communities upset with graffiti, prostitution, and public drug use and the nuisance crimes that accompany these activities supported increased enforcement over social programs. As a result, the criminal justice infrastructure exploded. Community policing and community prosecution—programs that had initially come into being to be more sensitive to community needs—morphed into misdemeanor and petty crime enforcement. Community courts of all types sprang up. Many of these courts were modeled after drug courts, though they lacked the same rigorous empirical support for success, and were financed by the federal government and applauded by local communities. In some part, lack of services or treatment for the homeless and drug addicted increased the frustration of communities; the new criminal justice focus on enforcement and incarceration for petty crimes with some treatment available seemed to the public a more palatable approach.
Local television news and fictional programming as well as reality police shows substantially exaggerate the crime problem in the United States. Typically, law enforcement is shown in a somewhat flattering light on most programming, and crime and the circumstances of criminal conduct are not contextualized for the viewer. The result is the overwhelming impression that “these are just bad people.” Employment, housing, education, and opportunity are rarely, if ever, mentioned in descriptions of the commission of crimes or the investigation, trial, and sentencing of television suspects, defendants, and ex-offenders. The media not only contributes to the perception that ex-offenders cannot ever integrate into society; it also has profound effects on how race is perceived. Offenders are disproportionately shown as people of color and often in the role of violent psychopath or gang leader.
In addition to lack of context, there is a stereotyping of roles (also called “typification”) when it comes to the race of characters. Although some studies suggest that the actual number of minority offenders is less than that of White offenders, on television the percentage of minorities shown as offenders compared to those shown in other roles is much higher than with White characters. Consequently, it is not enough to know the content of television programming; it is also important to examine the consequences of viewing this content. The media’s perpetuation of racial stereotypes of the typical offender may not only be a function of African Americans being shown more frequently as offenders than in other roles; rather, it may include the way viewers process this information about race in making comparisons to their own knowledge (or assumed knowledge) about certain races.
G. What People Think They Know about Other Races
There is a good bit of research on the knowledge lens through which people develop opinions and strongly held beliefs. This “ordinary knowledge” is often hard to contradict even in light of specialized knowledge to the contrary produced by social science professionals.60 Ordinary knowledge is derived from many sources that most citizens would find difficult to identify. When consistent with ordinary knowledge, specialized findings of social science tend to enhance the validity of ordinary knowledge. However, when specialized findings are inconsistent with ordinary knowledge, they are generally ignored or dismissed as unreliable or irrelevant.61
The media news coverage of crime through a racialized lens has had a pronounced effect on the way Americans view people of color generally and African Americans in particular. Media portrayals of violent crime, especially visual images, are dominated by pictures of African Americans. The Washington Post reported that even when the racial identity of a criminal is not pictured on television, two-thirds of those who think that the perpetrator was shown believe that he was Black.62 This presents a very seductive picture in the minds of all Americans that Blacks are the primary perpetrators
