Black Women and The Criminal Justice System

Towards the Decolonisation of Victimisation

Biko Agozino

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138608580
• eBook ISBN: 9780429860874
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1997, this book identifies the problems that face black women in the criminal justice system as the result of the articulation of unequal and oppressive class, race and gender relations; the research aims to be aware of all three rather than prioritising, isolating or reducing one or two of these relations. The focus of this research primarily on black women is based on the belief that they are marginalised in both society and criminological research. Black women are poorly represented in education, employment, the professions, commerce, industry and politics while in prison their presence is highly disproportionate to their wider numbers in society. The author examines the problems facing black women and compares these with those facing black men and white women to demonstrate the articulation of social relations. He addresses the structural positions of black women in society, their social relations and the nature of the institutional practices of the criminal justice system.

1. Analytical Framework

Introduction

Brothers and sisters, Hail! Hail! … As the brothers in the street would say, I man Ire, I man dread, which simply means that whatever pressures may be coming down we are determined to resist. Our will to struggle has not in any way been lessened; on the contrary, today we feel stronger than ever, we feel more confident than ever, not simply in our own ability and capacity, because that would be incorrect. We feel mure confident because of the demonstrated ability and capacity of the people as a whole (Rodney, 1981: 5, his last public address exactly one week before he was assassinated on 13 June 1980).

The choice to focus this research primarily on black women is based on the belief that they are marginalised in both society and in criminological research. In education, employment, the professions, commerce, industry, and politics, black women are poorly represented. But in the prisons, their presence is highly disproportionate to their numbers in the wider society.

It was reported by the Home Office that in June 1988,

About 9.5 per cent of the male prison population and 19 per cent of the females were known to be of West Indian or African origin, compared to 9 per cent and 17.5 per cent respectively in mid 1987 and thus continuing the increases from 8 per cent and 12 per cent respectively, in mid-1985 (Home Office Statistical Bulletin, hereafter referred to as H.O.S.B, 12/89, ‘The prison population in 1988’, p. 10).

This is out of line with their proportional distribution of less than three per cent in the total population. It is also out of tune with the relative lack of criminological interest in Black women (Rice, 1990; Agozino, 1995a). Yet some criminologists and administrators interpret these statistics to mean that black people are disproportionately involved in criminality. See Fitzgerald (1993) a Home Office review of the literature on this for The Royal Commission on Criminal Justice. She concluded that it is not possible to tell the level of involvement in criminality by whole groups and categories. She also conceded that it is possible that some of the over-representation of black people in the criminal justice system is as a result of discriminatory treatment at different stages of the criminal justice process. Hudson (1987) is surprised to find similar scepticism among criminal justice officials while it is becoming fashionable for many left-wing and right-wing criminologists. to argue that black people must be more involved in (street) crime simply because black people are relatively poor. It will be argued in this book that this pattern of relative presence (in prisons) and relative absence (in research) is symptomatic of marginalisation which needs to be properly understood in order to be overcome.

Marginalised groups such as the poor, it has been argued, are traditionally the focus of criminological research because of their relative powerlessness and also due to their over-representation in control institutions (Box, 1983). The criminological interest in the poor is justifiable because the majority of those arrested and those held in custody are poor. What is difficult to justify is the assumption of some criminologists that the marginalised poor only constitute problems that could be solved through the discovery of more effective control mechanisms (Wilson and Hermstein, 1985, for example). This book focuses on the problems that the theory and practice of criminal justice pose for the marginalised.

Another research tendency that has been widely criticised is that of drawing generalisations tor all poor people from studies that focus on a specific category of poor men. Women as a category of marginalised people tend to be denied the traditional focus of conventional criminology, perhaps, because most of the researchers are men or because women have not tended to end up in prison as frequently as men. Feminist scholars have convincingly argued that better criminological knowledge could be gained by studying women with equal emphasis and by limiting conclusions to those studied (Smart, 1990). Black women have similarly criticised research in criminology for focusing almost exclusively on white women or on black men while claiming to be writing generally on gender or race relations (Rice, 1990; Chigwada, 1991; Agozino, 1997).

By generalising for black women from studies that do not focus on black women, researchers who exclude black women from their studies give the impression that the problems facing black women are not significantly different from the problems facing those studied. Examples of such studies will soon be discussed under the guiding assumptions of the present research. Whether researchers assume that the problems facing black women are unique or that they are common, there is a need to study such problems compared to the problems of similar categories of people in order to understand them and help to overcome them.

This book assumes that the race and class relations of black women are shared (to a large extent) by black men and that their gender and class relations are shared, to some extent, by white women. This means that race relations reflect and are reflected by class and gender relations and these relations should be analysed together in order to understand fully the problems that face black women (see Daly, 1993; Hall, 1988; hooks, 1984; Agozino, 1991, 1995a-c, 1996a&b, 1997). The nature of the outcome of all three relations for black women can be best understood in this book along with outcomes for categories of people who share these relations to some extent.

There is now a growing literature in criminological research on gender, race, and class but their analyses rarely tend to be brought together and are often treated separately. For example, Hall, et al (1978), Policing The Crisis, focused on race and class but made only passing remarks on black women probably because the reaction to the crime of mugging, with which they were concerned, affected black men almost exclusively. Even so. one would like to know how much the policing of mugging affected the women in the lives of the suspects because, as we shall see, there is evidence that the policing of men affects the women in their family or in their lives. Similarly, Naffine (1990) analysed the impacts of gender and class relations on the treatment of people by the criminal justice system but she was silent on race relations even though she writes from a highly racialised society. Australia. Another example is that of the black feminist activist, Ware (1970) who looked at race and gender relations but narrowed it down to quarrels between black men and black women without mentioning the impacts of class relations in this context.

Likewise, although there is a growing literature on black women, most of it relates to their family life or employment opportunities (Gregory, 1987; Crenshaw, 1991; James and Busia, eds, 1993). Those that have direct relevance to criminology tend to be positivistic in the sense of trying to identify what makes black women commit crimes. For example, Carlen (1992), in a review of her earlier work Women, Crime and Poverty (1988), indicated that black women were included in her sample but what she wanted to find out from the women was why they broke the law or why they failed to conform to societal norms.

Carlen’s approach is inadequate for at least three reasons. Firstly, her questions presupposed that the women had what she called ‘criminal careers’ or that they were exposed to overcriminalisation or excessive punishment relative to the seriousness of their deviance. The criminal career approach ignored the fact that some of the women were first time offenders who might have normal rather than criminal careers. However, Ciirlen used the term ‘criminal careers’ differently compared to longitudinal studies that follow a given age cohort. She seems to have used the term to refer to the occurrence of criminality in the life histories of the women.

Secondly, it is possible that some of the poor and marginalised women that Carlen studied may have been processed through the criminal justice system, not always because their marginalisation forced them into a criminal career as left realists would predict (see Young and Matthews, 1992), but, perhaps, because their marginalisation exposed them to severe surveillance and, possibly, to Victimisation-As-Mere-Punishment (soon to be clarified). If Carlen did not find any such women, it may be because she started with a leading question that is ideologically loaded. Instead of asking them why they broke the law or why they found it difficult to conform, she should have started with an inquiry into the possibility of their innocence. To assume their guilt from court verdicts is to ignore the fact that many convicts go down still protesting their innocence (see Eaton, 1993).

Thirdly, Carlen failed to analyse the impact of race relations on the women she studied. She merely stated in passing that race was an additional factor for the marginalisation of some of the women and presumably, an additional variable for the causation of the criminality of those (black) women. This qualification is inadequate for the first two reasons stated above and also because when Carlen summarised her findings, there was no mention of race at all, implying that the politics of race was irrelevant to how white women were treated in the criminal justice system.

According to Lardner (1987), most criminological writings on black people maintain a ‘deviant perspective’ because black people lack adequate power to resist the stereotypes and labels applied to them. She argues that future research should abandon the search for ‘problems’ of (i.e. caused by) the black community and focus on ‘the nature of oppression and the mechanism by which institutionalised forms of subjugation are initiated and act to maintain the system intact.’ This is the approach that is adopted in this book.

The small amount of literature that exists on the ways black women are treated in the criminal justice system tends to focus on one institution such as the police or the prison (Chigwada, 1991; French, 1981). Some, like Rice (1990), only complain about the relative absence of black women in criminological literature and call for the criminality of black women to be studied alongside the criminality of white women. As we have seen with reference to Carlen (and with reference to the theory and philosophy of the Punishment-Of-Offenders, POO, more on this soon), the prioritisation of the criminality of black women or that of any group of people in the conceptual focus of any research could lead to the concealment or distortion of some of the problems that the criminal justice system poses for some of the people who might be innocent. The contention in this book is that it is necessary to go beyond these approaches by examining the criminal justice system as a whole with a view to understanding the problems different institutions cumulatively pose for black women.

Further, this book contends that it is equally necessary to see the social relations of black women concurrently, as Dill (1987) implies, instead of looking at their race, class, gender, or culture separately as if these do not operate in articulation. In this connection, Dill (1987) and Gilroy (1990) warn that black culture should not be equated with working class culture since black people have variable class relations.

The fact that most earlier studies of race and gender in criminology focus exclusively on black men or on white women implies that the racial experiences of black women could be represented by those of black men and that the gender experiences of black women could be inferred from those of white women (Rice, 1990; Harding, 1987). Some writers have noticed this and called for the study of black women in class relations (Morris, 1987; 1988) but this call tends to be answered in exclusive dualities of race and gender or race and class, rather than in the broad comparative way that has been suggested by Hall (1980, 1988, 1996), hooks (1981, 1984, 1994), Daly (1993), Agozino (1995a-d, 1996a&b, 1997), Crenshaw (1991) and others.

Following Cain’s warning against the use of men as false standards in comparing men with women (Cain, 1990), there are no assumptions in this book that black men and white women are standard bearers of social justice against whom black women are to be measured. However, the solution to false standards does not lie in different standards, as Cain seems to suggest, by calling for women to be compared with other women while opposing comparisons of men with women. This book does not see what makes the comparison of black women with black men unacceptable if it is permissible to compare poor women with rich women and black women with white women.

Nevertheless, the warning against false standards - such as regarding female prisons to be holiday camps because they appear to be less over-crowded and better-kept than male ones in what Carlen (1983) called ‘female imprisonment (as) female imprisonment denied’ - is taken seriously here. There is no assumption that if black women are treated in exactly the same way as black men and as white women, they would have no problem at all or vice versa.

Moreover, differences between black men and black women or between the latter and white women may not be related to gender or racial differences as such. A poor black man may face problems that a rich black woman may escape and a poor black woman may share the problems of a poor white woman. Therefore, there is an attempt here to see what ways class relations articulate with race and gender relations for people with similar and variable class, race or gender relations in the criminal justice system. This means that neither class, nor race, nor gender would be analysed exclusively without indicating how far they are articulated.

Given similar circumstances before the law, this book hopes to demonstrate how the problems faced by black women vary according to their gender, race, class, and the historical point in time when they are confronted by the criminal justice system. The relations of race, class, and gender are analysed in historically specific contexts to make sense of the problems that black women face in the criminal justice system.

This does not mean that these social relations are separate and independent of one another. Rather, the claim in this book is that race, gender and class relations are socially articulated with one another. In other words, the meanings of femininity (for example) vary with race, class, time, and place. Black women are different from white women in many ways but they are similar enough to be classified together as women. A rich black woman may not face significant problems that a poor black woman may share with poor black men and poor white women. This seems to be what Hall (1988) referred to when he said that race, class and gender are socially articulated, disarticulated and rearticulated dialectically. Naffine (1990) has also argued that gender and class, and by extension, race, should be analysed together because their meanings and impacts are compounded. However, this does not mean that they are all identical social relations, it only suggests that although they are different issues, they do not operate separately and so should be analysed jointly.

This book will look at similarities in the class-race-gender (as Daly, 1993, put it) relations of black women, black men and white women in society to see whether or not these can explain similarities and differences in the problems that they face in the criminal justice system. Of course, differences and similarities in problems could be due to factors other than race, gender, or class. They could be due to circumstances surrounding the cases but if different cases tend to raise similar problems or if similar cases raise different problems, they may also have to do with the social relations of the people involved.

Another objective of this book is to examine whether existing theories in criminology adequately account for any evidence of differences in the problems faced, and modes of struggle for survival, by women of different races and classes and those of men and women of one race and class in the criminal justice system. The emphasis is on the tendency to victimise innocent people and in what ways such victimisation follows gender, racial, class, or historical patterns. However, the relative victimisation of offenders through disproportionate criminalisation is also considered.

In line with this objective, three related guiding assumptions that are implicit in existing criminological theories and methods will be examined and debated. These are:

1.Black women do not face unique problems in the criminal justice system compared to white women,

2.Black women do not face different problems in the criminal justice system compared to black men and,

3.Poor black women do not face peculiar problems in the criminal justice system compared to rich black women.

Although very few researchers make explicit claims that all black women, or all black people, or all women, or all poor people face the same problems irrespective of variable race, gender, and class relations, those who do not theorise these internal differences leave the assumption of sameness intact, albeit implicitly, in their generalised conclusions. For example, O’Dyer, Wilson and Carlen (1987: 178) explicitly claimed that ‘women in prison suffer all the same deprivation, indignities and degradations as male prisoners. Additionally they suffer other problems that are specific to them as imprisoned women.’ The authors could have qualified their claim by adding that black women also suffer additional problems based on race relations.

They did not see the need for such a qualification probably because they were not studying black women as well, otherwise, they would have seen the danger of generalising for all women from the experiences of some. Besides, even if they gave such a qualification, it would prove inadequate for two reasons. First, it still implies that all men face the same problems in prison in spite of different race and class relations. Secondly, such a ritualistic qualification would still beg the question of what the nature of the specific problems facing black women are, demanding that they be directly studied.

Similarly, Hall, et al (1978) and Gilroy (1987a) have made significant contributions towards the understanding of the politics of race in society and in the criminal justice system. However, they based their conclusions almost exclusively on encounters between young black men and the police without showing the unique predicament of black women. The present book is directly aimed at understanding the problems that poor black women share or do not share with poor black men and poor white women in the criminal justice system. The emphasis on poor black women, black men and white women is noteworthy here because a majority of those processed through the criminal justice system are poor. Unless otherwise indicated, wherever these categories of people are mentioned in this book, the reference is to the poor.

This is different from those approaches that represent black women as if they all face the same problems in spite of different class relations. For example, Ruth Hall (1985) talked about ‘racist-sexist violence’ in the same manner that French (1981) identified a ‘double jeopardy’ of race and gender as the major problem facing black women. The theme of double jeopardy is reflected in many studies of black women even when a sloganeering call for race, class and gender to be analysed together is made (see Chigwada, 1991). The guiding assumptions of this book, opposite of those stated above, make differences within categories of people problematic without denying that some problems ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1. Analytical Framework
• 2. Black Women and Justice in History
• 3. Black Women and Policing
• 4. Black Women and the Courts
• 5. Black Women in Prison
• 6. Summary, Implications and Limitations
• Bibliography