By JustLeadership USA and the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys (APA)

JustLeadership USA and the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys (APA) released a new report, Building the Table: Advancing Race Equity in the Criminal Legal System, which provides a historic roadmap of strategies to advance race equity in the criminal legal system.

The report’s findings are the result of an unprecedented convening between representatives from all components of the justice system alongside community members, in particular those with lived experience, their families, and survivors of crime. This collaboration builds a foundation for policies that will successfully advance race equity, improve our approach to justice, and promote community safety and well-being.

“As people who are directly impacted and hurt by the criminal legal system, it is extremely important that our voices and leadership are a core part of any transformation that impacts our lives and those of our communities,” said DeAnna Hoskins, president and CEO of JustLeadershipUSA. “True authentic engagement is more than seeking our support at the end of systematic redesign, it occurs when the concepts of reimagining are led by those most affected, because our experience is our expertise. Our leadership as we ‘Build the Table’ is critical to advancing race equity and improving the system’s capacity to administer justice and promote community safety and well-being.”

This report and initiative were made possible through the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the efforts of those who volunteered their time and insights to produce this document.

“As we strive to advance racial and ethnic equity in the criminal justice system, it is critical that we elevate the leadership role of people with lived experience to ensure that their first-hand perspectives shape the creation of effective and meaningful solutions,” said Laurie Garduque, director of criminal justice at the MacArthur Foundation. “This report offers a framework for communities looking to advance community safety and wellbeing, and it starts with authentic community engagement and acknowledging the expertise of people with lived experience.”

This report is intended to equip federal, state and local legal system stakeholders to pursue new approaches to building stronger relationships with communities and the broader legal system. This consensus contains a unified statement of principles, policies and practical guidance to advance race equity in the criminal legal system, as well as recent real-world examples of policies and practices implemented by a variety of system stakeholders and community organizations throughout the country.

Washington, DC: Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, 2023. 27p.

By Alexandra Cox

There are stark racial and ethnic disparities which exist at all levels of the English and Welsh criminal justice systems (Lammy, 2017, Sveinsson, 2012, Chada, 2020). These disparities exist at the front end of the system in terms of the racially and ethnically disproportionate impact of stop and search; the racialised placement of individuals on police databases such as the Metropolitan Police’s Gangs Matrix; decision-making by magistrates and judges; and the barriers that people of colour face in accessing the legal profession, and, in particular, the judiciary (Williams and Clarke, 2016, Fatsis, 2019, Densley and Pyrooz, 2019, Centre for Justice Innovation, 2017, Gibbs and Kirby, 2014, The Law Society, 2020b).1 Defence practitioners can offer vital insights about criminal justice system practices as they are court ‘insiders’, with unprecedented access to legal procedures, negotiations, and practices, as well as access to legal cultures and cultural codes which are inherently racialised. They also have valuable knowledge about their clients’ lives and experiences in the system. However, this knowledge is rarely harnessed, despite the ways that it can be brought to bear in support of better outcomes for clients. Frontline legal practitioners also offer perspectives on the legitimacy of the justice system, both as individuals who have their own experiences of injustice, but also through an understanding of their clients’ experiences. There has been very little research on defence practitioners’ perceptions of the fairness of the criminal justice system landscape in England and Wales. Much of the research on defence practitioners has focused on the relationships that are established between practitioners and their clients and the role of trust in those relationships, and has been almost exclusively conducted in the United States (Flemming, 1986, Boccaccini et al., 2004, Sandys and Pruss, 2017, Campbell et al., 2015, Clair, 2020). There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that the experiences of lawyers of colour in the justice system in England and Wales are shaped by the dynamics of race, class and gender (Wilson, 2020, Johnson, 2020), and that their perspectives provide valuable insights into the working practices of the courts, but there is very little research evidence about these perspectives.

London: Howard League for Penal Reform, 2023. 11p.

By Keir Monteith K, et al.

As Bobb-Semple highlights, the entrenched racism of the British establishment did not disappear post emancipation. Judicial racism in the criminal courts is pronounced when looking at sentencing practices. The Lammy Review comprehensively lays bare this truth, reporting the results of a 2016 Ministry of Justice review of Crown Court sentencing for three groups of offences – offences involving acquisitive violence, sexual offences and drugs offences. Confirming what many in affected communities had long since suspected, this review found that “[u]nder similar criminal circumstances the odds of imprisonment for offenders from self-reported Black, Asian, and Chinese or other backgrounds were higher than for offenders from selfreported White backgrounds.” Starkly, it also found that “[w]ithin drug offences, the odds of receiving a prison sentence were around 240% higher for BAME offenders, compared to White offenders.” The systemic inequality and biases in the legal profession are reflected in the make-up of our judiciary. Nationally, only 1% of judges are Black, while 5% are Asian and 2% are mixed ethnicity and 1% were individuals with ethnicity other than Asian, black, mixed or white.5 And there is a big difference: between the junior and senior judiciary. While the junior judiciary is slowly diversifying - I stress slowly - the senior judiciary is not, and remains overwhelmingly white, and overwhelmingly from privileged backgrounds. In fact, there are currently no Black judges in the High Court, Court of Appeal or Supreme Court. Not one.

2022. 40p.