RACE AND THE CRIMINAL

JUSTICE SYSTEM
DR ALPA PARMAR
ap239@cam.ac.uk
CSPS 2022-23
LENT TERM
LECTURE 24
 Outline of Lectures

Justice in Practice: Three lectures on Race and the CJS

Lecture 1 Concepts, Measurement, Journey through the
stages of the CJS through the prism of race
Lecture 2 Latter stages of the CJS, Explanations for racial
disproportionality
Lecture 3 Examining Criminology’s response, New spaces
where race impacts and shapes the CJS, Representation in
the CJS, What is being done and what still needs to be
done?
2
Lecture Two

• Guilty Plea

• Sentencing

• Prisons

• Probation

• Criminological Explanations for Racial

Disproportionality
3
 Guilty Plea

• In 2020 Black defendants were 16%

less likely than White defendants to
enter a guilty plea in Crown Court
(Ministry of Justice 2021)
• Why?
• Trust and legitimacy deficit?
• Poorer legal advice?
• Time related sentencing discount?
Consequences:
• Cases more likely to be heard
at Crown Court
• Severity of sentence increases
- jury decisions, custodial
sentence more likely and longer
4
Plea Decisions

5
Examining Court Outcomes

• Later research 10 years on confirmed the same patterns of

uneven sentencing outcomes for racial minority adults and
youth (Feilzer and Hood 2003, Race for Justice Report by CPS)

• More recent study suggested that perceptions of the court

process were mixed – the system was perceived to be fair by
minority ethnic groups though it was thought that harsher
sentences were given to minority ethnic groups (Hood, Shute
and Seemungal 2003)

6
Race and Sentencing: A Study in the
Crown Court
• Roger Hood (1992) study of five Crown
Courts in West Midlands

• Black people had a 5% greater probability of

being sentenced to custody that their white
counterparts once all legally relevant case
characteristics were controlled for

• Discriminatory factors at play

7
Sentencing
• Offenders in the Crown Court in 2015 – association
between ethnicity and being sentenced to prison
(Hopkins, Uhrig and Colahan, MoJ 2016)

• Strong effect within drug offences – the odds of

imprisonment were around 240% higher for offenders from
self-identified BAME backgrounds combined, compared to
those from a self-identified White background

• Discretion of judges under scrutiny

8
Sentencing

9
Custodial Sentence Length

• 2020 Average Custodial Sentence Length was

lower for white defendants
• White defendants = 19.6 months
• Asian defendants = 28.6 months
• Black defendants = 26.8 months
• Mixed and Chinese of Other = 24.4 months

(Ministry of Justice, 2021)

10
Sentencing Guidelines
• Provide guidance to judges about sentencing offenders – 3 step
process:
(1) Assessing seriousness by determining offence category (harm
and culpability)
(2) Starting point and category range
(3) Further steps – reduction for guilty pleas
Sentencing Council’s own analysis on Crown Court
Sentencing Data (2012-2015)
- After controlling for case mix factors, male offenders more likely
to be sentenced to immediate custody
- Black, Asian and Other offenders more likely to receive an
immediate custodial sentence than White offenders
- Asian offenders found to receive longer sentences than white
offenders
• Increasingly aim to have regard to issues of equality and diversity
in their approach
11
Sentencing Council Drugs Offences
Analysis

12
Recent Sentencing Research
• Hopkins (2015) 40% and 30% higher odds of custodial
sentencing for minority ethnic male and female defendants
compared with white defendants regardless of criminal
history

• Pina Sanchez et al (2018) sentence transcripts for violent

and sexual offences for those sentenced in the Crown Court
2007-2017 found offenders with Muslim-sounding names
were not more likely to receive a custodial sentence. Note
but spurious method of establishing race/ethnicity

13
Sentencing: Lammy Recommendations
• The need for pre-sentence reports so that judges
have the information they need –important for
shedding light on individuals from backgrounds
unfamiliar to the judge – large social class, ethnicity
and age gaps between judges and those they
sentence
• Sentencing remarks in the Crown Court should be
published in written or audio form
• Would build trust and make the system more
comprehensible for victims, witnesses and offenders
• Clear language in sentencing remarks – so that
offenders can understand the process and accept
outcome

14
Prison Population: Ethnicity

15
Prison Population: Age and Ethnicity

16
Zahid Mubarek
• Zahid a 19 year old British Pakistani killed in 2000
after being placed in a prison cell with a man known
to be a violent racist at Feltham Young Offender’s
Institute
• The prison service’s Stephen Lawrence moment
• Commission for Racial Equality (2003) laid 17
counts of unlawful racial discrimination against the
Prison Service

17
 Sarah Reed
• Mental illness among Black prisoners is often overlooked

• Sarah was a mixed-race Black woman who died while on remand in Holloway

Prison

• The denial of medical treatment had led to her death and she would not have

been able to plead

• She had been a victim of police brutality in 2012 and had spent time in a

psychiatric hospital since then

• Staff’s monitoring of Reed was down-graded as she was considered at low risk

• She was found to be unresponsive on her prison bed in January 2016

18
Foreign Nationals in Prison

19
Religion in Prison

20
 Race Relations in Prison
• Genders and Player (1989)
• First comprehensive study based on 5 prisons
• Pervasive racial prejudice among prisoners, which largely resulted in
verbal aggression and avoidance of contact rather than physical
conflict
• Black prisoners negatively stereotyped on physical, intellectual and
moral grounds by staff
• Seen as presenting control and management difficulties
• Officers saw black prisoners as arrogant, hostile, resentful of white
authority, lazy, noisy, belligerent, unintelligent and with ‘chips on their
shoulders’
• Asian prisoners were seen as ‘model’ prisoners – hardworking, polite,
unobtrusive
• More direct racial bias in disciplinary proceedings, work allocation
which were seen to favour white prisoners
21
Quality of Life Survey in Prisons
• Cheliotis and Liebling (2006)
• Race relations in prisons
• 42% of Black NOMS Race Review 2008 – blatant forms of
• 41% Asian racism excised but 50% more likely to be in
• 30% Chinese or Other segregation and 60% more likely to have force
• 9% white used against them than white prisoners
• All felt that race relations in prisons were HMIP (2010) Thematic Report on Muslim
poor
prisoner’s experiences – negative assessments
particularly if mixed race or black – felt less safe
• Linked to views about prison officer’s
in prison, higher levels of assault, prison
unfair exercise of their discretion in
experienced as more coercive
distributing privileges, controlling
Beckford (2005) Worship facilities for Muslim
discipline, providing access to information
prisoners inferior, prisoners officers felt minority
and responding to requests and
ethnic groups ‘played the race card’
applications
22
The Multicultural Prison?
• Muslim prisoners forming a cohesive group which was resented among
white and black prisoners (Crewe 2009, The Prisoner Society)
• Muslim prisoners were increasingly seen as disruptive and vociferous
in contrast to the perceptions indicated in earlier studies which
suggested that Asian people were submissive and compliant
• Phillips (2012) White and minority ethnic faith identities are
(re)constituted during incarceration and pains of racism, subordination
and inequality are acute
• Indignant victimhood felt by growing numbers of white prisoners as the
traditional ‘white hegemony’ of the prison breaks down and ‘blackness’
is now a marker of prestige
• Prisoners’ identities are not bound by predefined cultural practices and
rather are in flux, subject to the confines of prison
• Solidarity and dominance and multiculturalism alive and kicking in the
late modern prison

23
Experiences of Black Male Prisoners and Black
Male Prison Officers
• HMIP Thematic Review (Dec 2022)
• Subtle forms of racism, harder to
identify
• Fear of repercussions from reporting
racism for being seen to be a
trouble-maker
• Ethnic monitoring data inadequate
or not used properly in prisons
• Black prisoners significantly more
negative about prison staff than
other ethnic groups
24
Probation
• Needs of minority ethnic groups only recognised in
probation policies from the 1980s

• Quality of supervision of minority ethnic individuals and

probation officers’ understanding of the role of racism

• Need to acknowledge the trauma associated with

racialization, criminalization, father absence,
neighbourhood deprivation and negative conceptions of
blackness (Glynn 2014)

25
Probation

• Desistance and family networks in Indian and Bangladeshi

communities (Calverley 2012)

• Little is known about minority ethnic group girls and women

(Gelsthorpe 2005)

• Prison’s inspectorate report noted the absence of a national

race strategy for service uses and little understanding of the
cultural needs of minority ethnic populations service
community sentences (HMIP 2021)

26
Explanations for Racial Disproportionality
in the CJS
• Demography
• Availability
• Biosocial
• Socio-economic
• Environmental
• Cultural
• Racism and cumulative disadvantage

27
Demography

• Younger age structure of

minority ethnic groups –
more Mixed, Black and
Asian people falling into
15-17 and 18-24 age
category
• Therefore, more likely to
fall into the age where
people engage in
offending and also more
subject to police activity

28
Biological and Biosocial Approaches
• Lombroso 1876 – crime attributed to race

• Biological approaches linked intelligence, race and crime (e.g.; Hirschi and
Hindelang 1977; Herrnstein and Murray 1994; Gould 1996)

• Discredited for validity – e.g. IQ measures are culturally and class biased

• Biosocial criminology – biological and environmental factors indirectly or directly

point to race and crime linkage, increasingly make genetic based explanations – but
largely criticised and discredited for making problematic race-based claims through
the guise of biosociality (Larregue and Rollins 2019)

29
 Socio-economic
• Low educational attainment (Racial Disparity Unit
2021)

• Looked after status more common among black and

mixed race children (Racial Disparity Unit 2021)

• High unemployment and low pay for black men,

Pakistani and Black African women (Phillips and
Platt 2016)

• School exclusion highest among boys of Irish

Traveller, Gypsy, Roma, Black Caribbean and mixed
race origins (Racial Disparity Unit 2021)
30
Environmental Theories
• Shaw and McKay (1942) crime in certain areas caused by
social disorganisation – new communities and new migrants
moving into residential areas meaning that a culmination of
factors including high levels of unemployment, high truancy
rates etc all contributed to minority ethnic groups being drawn
into offending
• Sampson and Wilson (1995) The Truly Disadvantaged
macro social patterns of residential inequality give rise to the social isolation and
ecological concentration of the truly disadvantaged, which in turn leads to structural
barriers and cultural adaptations that undermine social organization and hence the
control of crime. This thesis is grounded in what is actually an old idea in criminology
that has been overlooked in the race and crime debate—the importance of
communities

31
Social Construction of Crime
• Self-report studies have found lower reported
rates of offending and drug use among Asians
and higher rates for mixed race group and
black offending rates a little lower than or
similar to the white majority (Sharp and Budd
2005)
• Labelling and moral panics (Hall et al 1978
Policing the Crisis)
• Asian ‘gang’ as the new folk devil (Alexander
2000)

32
Cultural Theories/Approaches

• Qasim (2018) study of The Boys of Pakistani origin in

Bradford – small scale drug-dealing collaborations to fund
consumerist lifestyles
• Gunter (2017) Fun and solidarity of being ‘on road’ for
black Londoners
• Code of the Street (Anderson 1994) Philadelphia –
respect and being treated right – if violated can easily
lead to violence
• Criminalisation of blackness
• Fatsis (2019) discriminatory risk assessment of events
featuring drill, grime and other black music genres
• Owusu-Bempah (2022) straightforward and uncritical
criminalisation of rap music and used as evidence of
crime within trials

33
Racism and Cumulative Disadvantage
• Direct and indirect racism

• Alice Goffman On The Run (2014)

• Risk that racism has become a catch all concept which obscures as much as it reveals (Gans 2012) and can

see this in Criminal Justice research

• Pains of Racism Phillips (2020) Shows how racism affects the daily lives of young minority ethnic groups

caught up in the CJS –material and symbolic and which elicit emotional responses including anger, anxiety,

confusion, hopelessness, humiliation.

• Racialized worldview – produced from historically rooted and contemporarily experienced collective

memories of racialized humiliation, pejorative stereotyping, unfair treatment and inhumanity – African

Americans experience their present in light of their past – creating weak bonds to educational and workplace

institutions and increases chances of being drawn into offending (Unnever and Gabbidon 2011)

• Minority Ethnic Group Life Styles (MELS) Research Study by Parmar and Phillips (ongoing) – Life stories

and photo-elicitation
34
Excerpt from MELS Study
Alpa: Do you think the police would treat you worse than
people of other races or better?

Mike: I don’t know. They would treat me worse.

Alpa: Why?

Mike: Because its stereotype. That’s stereotype again.

Mike: But did you see that there’s one guy? He lives round
here. He’s a Muslim boy. Yeah he got stopped. He was
running to the mosque. And cause it was a hot day and he
was wearing layers they stopped him and arrested him for
wearing too much clothes.
Mike: Yeah, that’s bad. That’s normal,
everyday man. Look how many hands are
on him and he’s restrained. Look. Just wow.
Alpa: Yes
Mike: That’s happened to me loads of times.

35
Next Time

• Criminology’s response

• New areas where race and criminal justice

intersect

• Representation amongst CJ professionals – does

it matter?

• Policy response

• The future
36
RACE AND THE CRIMINAL
JUSTICE SYSTEM
DR ALPA PARMAR
ap239@cam.ac.uk
CSPS 2022-23
LENT TERM
LECTURE 24