By Carl Gutierrez-Jones

The beating of Rodney King, the killing of Amadou Diallo, and the LAPD Rampart Scandal: these events have been interpreted by the courts, the media and the public in dramatically conflicting ways. Critical Race Narratives examines what is at stake in these conflicts and, in so doing, rethinks racial strife in the United States as a highly-charged struggle over different methods of reading and writing. Focusing in particular on the practice and theorization of narrative strategies, Gutiérrez-Jones engages many of the most influential texts in the recent race debates including The Bell Curve, America in Black and White, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, and The Mismeasure of Man. In the process, Critical Race Narratives pursues key questions posed by the texts as they work within, or against, disciplinary expectations: can critical engagements with narrative enable a more democratic dialogue regarding race? what promise does such experimentation hold for working through the traumatic legacy of racism in the United States? Throughout, Critical Race Narratives initiates a timely dialogue between race-focused narrative experiment in scholarly writing and similar work in literary texts and popular culture.

New York; London: NYU Press, 2001.

By Paul Harris

In 1971, Paul Harris pioneered the modern version of the black rage defense when he successfully defended a young black man charged with armed bank robbery. Dubbed one of the most novel criminal defenses in American history by Vanity Fair, the black rage defense is enormously controversial, frequently dismissed as irresponsible, nothing less than a harbinger of anarchy. Consider the firestorm of protest that resulted when the defense for Colin Ferguson, the gunman who murdered numerous passengers on a New York commuter train, claimed it was considering a black rage defense.

In this thought-provoking book, Harris traces the origins of the black rage defense back through American history, recreating numerous dramatic trials along the way. For example, he recounts in vivid detail how Clarence Darrow, defense attorney in the famous Scopes Monkey trial, first introduced the notion of an environmental hardship defense in 1925 while defending a black family who shot into a drunken white mob that had encircled their home.

Emphasizing that the black rage defense must be enlisted responsibly and selectively, Harris skillfully distinguishes between applying an environmental defense and simply blaming society, in the abstract, for individual crimes. If Ferguson had invoked such a defense, in Harris's words, it would have sent a superficial, wrong-headed, blame-everything-on-racism message. Careful not to succumb to easy generalizations, Harris also addresses the possibilities of a white rage defense and the more recent phenomenon of cultural defenses. He illustrates how a person's environment can, and does, affect his or her life and actions, how even the most rational person can become criminally deranged, when bludgeoned into hopelessness by exploitation, racism, and relentless poverty.

New York; London: NYU Press, 1996. 306p.

By Katie Zafft, et al.

In September 2022, the City of Duluth, with input from Duluth’s Racial Bias Audit Team (RBAT), contracted with the Crime and Justice Institute (CJI) to conduct a racial bias audit of the Duluth Police Department (DPD). CJI collaborated with the community and the Department to provide a holistic and comprehensive assessment of Department operations and interactions with the community with respect to the concerns raised about racial and ethnic disparities in police practices and operations. The scope of the audit largely reflects the status of the Department and experiences of community members within the past five years. Assessments of policies and trainings mainly represent the most recent versions of materials unless the audit team was provided materials that were previously used. The City/RBAT identified the following project scope in their request for services: • “Assess, monitor, and assist the DPD in concert with the community to uncover any aspects of implicit bias, as well as systemic and individual racial bias. • Assess the impact of enforcement operations on historically marginalized and discriminated against populations. • Provide recommendations for reforms that improve community-oriented policing practices, transparency, professionalism, non-discriminatory practices, accountability, community inclusion, effectiveness, equity and public trust. These recommendations should also consider statutory requirements, national best practices and current scientifically valid methodology, and community expectations. • Engage the community and employees of DPD to understand both experiences and expectations of interactions between both groups.”1 Assessment Goals and Objectives The scope of the audit, as directed by the audit goals developed by the Racial Bias Audit Team, focuses on eleven items that we consider to be three distinct areas of work: Department operations, Department interactions with the community, and the role of the Duluth Citizen Review Board (DCRB).

Boston: Crime and Justice Institute, 2023. 90p.

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.

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.