By Susan Nembhard and Lily Robin

Differential treatment on the basis of race is well documented in the US criminal legal system. Definitions of criminality and criminal activity are rooted in structural inequalities between people of color and white people, and racist policies and practices have been used to control and separate communities of color. In addition, discretion given to individual system actors at each decision point in the system creates opportunities for racial biases to influence practices toward and outcomes for system-involved people. Racial biases are so deeply embedded in the criminal legal system that disparities based on race exist at each decision point, impacting subsequent decision points and resulting in negative outcomes for Black people and other people of color. It is imperative that researchers approach their work with an understanding of how racist policies and implicit biases interact within and throughout different aspects of the criminal legal system if they want to identify and promulgate more equitable policies and research.

Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2021. 14o,

By Keith L. Camacho

Between 1944 and 1949 the United States Navy held a war crimes tribunal that tried Japanese nationals and members of Guam's indigenous Chamorro population who had worked for Japan's military government. In Sacred Men Keith L. Camacho traces the tribunal's legacy and its role in shaping contemporary domestic and international laws regarding combatants, jurisdiction, and property. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's notions of bare life and Chamorro concepts of retribution, Camacho demonstrates how the U.S. tribunal used and justified the imprisonment, torture, murder, and exiling of accused Japanese and Chamorro war criminals in order to institute a new American political order. This U.S. disciplinary logic in Guam, Camacho argues, continues to directly inform the ideology used to justify the Guantánamo Bay detention center, the torture and enhanced interrogation of enemy combatants, and the American carceral state.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 313p.

Edited by Michael J. Lynch and E. Britt Patterson.

"Nothing has changed" is the conclusion to be drawn from reading the collection of original articles that describe and analyze the countless ways in which racial prejudice affects the processing and outcomes of minority offenders in the American criminal justice system. Written in the 1990s, most of the observations still apply. CONTENTS: 1. Thinking About Race and Criminal Justice: Racism, Stereotypes, Politics, Academia, and the Need for Context; 2. Moral Panic as Ideology: Drugs, Violence, Race and Punishment in America; 3. "The Tangle of Pathology" and the Lower Class African American Family: Historical and Social Science Perspectives; 4. The Image of Black Women in Criminology: Historical Stereotypes as Theoretical Foundation; 5. Race, Popular Culture, And The News; 6. Vice and Social Control: Predispositional Detention and the Juvenile Drug Offender; 7. Race, Contextual Factors, and the Waiver Decision Within Juvenile Court Proceedings: Preliminary Findings From a Test of The Symbolic Threat Thesis; 8. Race and Criminal Justice: Employment of Minorities in the Criminal Justice System; 9. Race And Social Class in the Examination of Punishment; References; Notes.

Harrow and Heston Publishers. 1992. 246p.