defy that picture. In situations when crime and race are linked, the crime is generally reported as involving violence—most particularly murder, robbery, and rape. This creates and solidifies in the mind of the American public the myth that Blacks are more often the worst criminals.63 This stereotype must surely cause excessive fear and create certain unwarranted beliefs about people of color. In circumstances where Whites have African American friends, the strength of the stereotype, reinforced by negative media portrayals, results in the belief that their Black friends are the exception to the “rule.”64
H. Impact of News Media on Public Policy
Crime coverage plays an agenda-setting role, and has a significant influence on the public’s perceptions of frequency and behavior. News media play a number of roles in the criminal justice debate and policy agenda that ultimately affect offender reentry. News coverage influences the public by “priming” certain perceptions through its coverage of an issue.65 Additionally, media coverage has systematically distorted reality by overreporting violent crime and by focusing on the race of the perpetrators in the coverage of violent crime.66
One of the ways in which the news media functions in an agenda-setting role is in the way it fosters public misperception, especially as public opinion relates to crime rates, the rates at which parolees become repeat offenders, and the nature and severity of punishment that the legal system metes out.67 Increasingly, people rely primarily on the media to get their information regarding what percentage of people on welfare use it as an alternative to seeking a job, the proportion of ex-mental patients who commit crimes, and which minority groups have criminal tendencies. These media messages are often very distorted or incorrect. Examination of media reporting on crime shows that the race of minority offenders, especially for violent crimes, is often disproportionately reported.68
One of the prime examples of the media’s influence on public policy can be seen in its description of the intersection of poverty and crime, both of which are portrayed as primarily an inner-city problem affecting people of color. Blacks are often shown not only as poor but also as overrepresented in the juvenile justice system. The public’s understanding of youth crime is shaped in large part by the media’s portrayal of disproportionate minority involvement. Meda Chesney-Lind, among others, has identified the common media practice of demonizing young women of color. Contemporary news accounts of young African American and Latino girls usually show them as gang members, despite the fact that there is little evidence to suggest any significant increase in female gang membership or involvement.69 These media distortions of juvenile crime, perpetrator race, and juvenile violence dramatically affect public consumer perception.
Media reports identified violent juvenile crime on the increase in the 1980s and 1990s. Lori Dorfman, director of the Berkley Media Studies Group, and Vincent Shiraldi, president of the Justice Policy Institute, coauthored a report entitled “Off Balance: Youth, Race, and Crime in the News.”70 That report discussed the impact of the media on the perceptions of youth violence. The authors examined more than one hundred studies of news content featuring youth and crime.71 The studies provided overwhelming evidence that news coverage of crime—especially violent crime—is out of proportion to its occurrence, distorts the proportion of crime committed by youth, and overrepresents perpetrators of color while underrepresenting victims of color. Acts of violence are pushed to the foreground despite occurring relatively infrequently.72 The end result is a change in public opinion and a corresponding change in public policy.
Some authors have argued convincingly that the popular and political link between serious juvenile crime and race has had a primary effect on the increasingly punitive focus of juvenile justice policy nationwide.73 Much of this coverage has caused the public to lose faith in treatment as a component of the juvenile justice system, just as it lost faith in rehabilitation in adult prisons. The juvenile court is also often portrayed as ineffectual and lenient, without any real effort to analyze, or cover, the working of the court in any systematic fashion. The description of youths of color as predators, thugs, and gangsters has successfully ramped up political efforts to streamline these youths into the adult criminal justice system and ultimately into prison. National and political divisions about race enabled conservative Republican politicians to advocate particular crime and welfare policies for electoral advantage. During this period, news media coverage put a Black face on youth crime, and political campaigns to get “tough on crime” and on youth violence turned juveniles into symbols of race and crime.74
I. Conclusions
In thinking about potential remedies for media depictions of race, poverty, and crime, one can easily become pessimistic about any hope of progress because the negative images of people of color are so deeply ingrained in our social fabric. Indeed, Derrick Bell’s notion of the “permanence of racism” in American culture has an uneasy ring of truth, notwithstanding the fact that there are some small, identifiable examples of progress.
In the entertainment industry, there are a few glimmers of hope. At one time, the number of movie directors who were people of color was so small as to make these directors a novelty. While their numbers are nowhere near what they should be, many directors of color are more established and now have the opportunity to paint pictures of characters of color that are less stereotypical and refreshingly different from historical representations. Taking people of color, particularly African American actors, out of the stereotypical roles of pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, and police informants also helps. The African American media purchasing dollar is very strong. Advertising aimed at people of color during sporting events, targeted television programs, and movies confirms this fact. Movies that focus on audiences of color do well at the box office. In the future, coordinated efforts to lobby movie companies to create more balanced scripts, taking people of color and putting them in different situations, will continue this positive trend. Urging news writers, producers, and outlets to focus on the quantity and quality of their coverage in communities of color will also help in developing more accurate portrayals of what is actually going on in these communities.
Unfortunately, none of these remedies is totally satisfying. If you live in, work in, or are concerned with communities of color, it seems there is little hope that current policies will change in the near future. Journalists, television and movie writers, producers, and corporate advertisers have no vested interest in turning from their established operating procedures. There is no constituency to influence them, no government incentive to lure them toward the truth.
3
Women
The Afterthought in Reentry Planning
LaDonna Cissell is a single mother of three who grew up on the east side of Indianapolis. She became pregnant with her first child at fourteen and never completed school. She was incarcerated after cashing a series of counterfeit checks worth about forty-five hundred dollars. Sometimes she cashed as many as four a day, spending the money on clothing, meals, and cars. Her crimes were nonviolent. Nationally, about 50 percent of the total crimes committed by women are nonviolent. Cissell describes her time in custody as the “worst six months of my life.” She points out that her mother did not want to bring her children to see her while she was locked up and that the separation was hard on both her and her children. Her experience is not unlike that of many women who interact with the criminal justice system.1
Women have unique experiences arriving in, getting through, and recovering from the criminal justice experience. Women continue to be the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. prison population, and they bring a unique set of problems into the criminal justice system. According to a Rocky Mountain News story on women in recovery:
Women are more likely than men to be addicted to more than one mood altering substance, and many addicted women report that they began using drugs after
