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Abstract
This article highlights racialized constructions of criminality that surfaced in the wake of mass migrations and immigrations of African American and European workers to the industrial North during the first few decades of the 20th century. This attention to historical patterns is critical to contemporary studies because it shows processes and dynamics that are far less visible in today's criminal justice landscape, overwhelmingly dominated by black and brown faces. Too often, policy researchers deem rehabilitative, nonpunitive approaches to illegality among marginalized and impoverished populations fanciful and too abstract to be implemented. The evidence here suggests that earlier responses to similarly stigmatized white immigrant populations actually led to more humane reforms and shifts away from harsh laws and incapacitation as preeminent responses to social inequality. This earlier reformist moment happened in direct relation to increasingly repressive criminal justice responses to African Americans, which shows how blackness was reconfigured as a more durable criminal identity. Understanding this crucial period also helps to map the long road to mass incarceration. In today's popular postracial discourse about personal responsibility, the guiding logic presumes that the relative absence of white criminals is a product of good citizenship and not discriminatory policies prefiguring the New Deal welfare state. Parables of hard work and law-abidingness have erased this crucial period in the history of incarceration.
Notes
Katheryn K. Russell, The Color of Crime: Racial Hoaxes, White Fear, Black Protectionism, Police Harassment, and Other Macroaggressions (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things (New York: Basic Books, 1999); and David Wilson, Inventing Black-on-Black Violence: Discourse, Space, and Representation (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2005).
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998), 698–699; George B. Tindall, South Carolina Negroes, 1877–1900 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952), 260–261; Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); David Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1996); Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor (New York: Verso, 1996); Nicole Hahn Rafter, Creating Born Criminals (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); and Mary Ellen Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World, 1865–1900 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000).
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Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).
Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2005), 18, 23.
Rebecca McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776–1941 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 126, 190–218; Marilynn S. Johnson, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 120.
Marc Mauer and Ryan S. King, Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration by Race and Ethnicity (Washington, D.C.: The Sentencing Project, 2007); Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History (December 2010): 1–2, 32.
Kali Gross, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006); Cheryl Hicks, Talk With You Like a Woman: Urban Reform, Criminal Justice, and African American Women in New York, 1890–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Douglass Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor Books, 2008).
Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 9; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
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Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: Free Press, 2010).
Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness, 8 and chapters 2–3; Katherine Beckett, Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment.
John F. Harris, “‘Clean Our House of Racism,’ Clinton Urges Nation,” Washington Post, October 17, 1995.
Randall Kennedy, Race, Crime, and the Law (New York: Random House, 1997), 134.
Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate (New York: Free Press, 1999), 93, 116.
David Cole, “Can Our Shameful Prisons Be Reformed,” New York Review of Books, November 19, 2009.
Human Rights Watch, Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drug, HRW Reports, 12:2 (May 2000), quoted in Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 96.
Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 7, 11, 57; Glenn C. Loury, Race, Incarceration, and American Values (Cambridge, Mass.: Boston Review, 2008); Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006); Bob Herbert, “Jim Crow Policing,” New York Times, February 1, 2010.
Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, xv.
New York State Crime Commission (hereafter NYSCC), Annual Report, 1927.
Humbert Nelli, The Business of Crime: Italians and Syndicate Crime in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Jenna Weissman Joselit, Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community, 1900–1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
New York Times, November 18, 1926.
New York Times, November 11, 1927.
New York Times, August 9, 1927.
New York Times, July 12, 1927.
New York Times, February 20, 1928.
New York Times, November 4, 1926; November 11, 1926; November 13, 1926; New York Amsterdam News, November 26, 1926.
On poverty policy, see Michael B. Katz, Poverty and Policy in American History (New York: Academic Press, 1981); James T. Patterson, America's Struggle Against Poverty, 1900–1980 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 20–36.
New York World, March 15, 1921.
New York Times, September 27, 1927.
Hazel Carby, “Policing the Black Woman's Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry (Summer 1992): 738–755; Kevin Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness, 140, 198; W. E. B. Du Bois, “Some Headlines,” Crisis 3 (December 1911).
New York Times, September 27, 1927.
NYSCC, Annual Report, 1928.
New York Times, January 9, 1927.
NYSCC, Annual Report, 1928.
Ibid.
August Vollmer, “Recidivist from the Point of View of the Police Official,” Journal of Delinquency 11 (June 1927): 72–80.
Caleb H. Baumes, “Baumes Laws and Legislative Program in New York,” American Bar Association Report 1927, 511–529.
Edwin H. Sutherland, Principles of Criminology (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1934), 115.
Washington Post, October 17, 1995.
Doris Marie Provine, Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 16–18.
NYSCC, Annual Report, 1929.
McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment, 451–455.
New York News, January 18, 1930.
New York News, May 21, 1927.
Colored Inmates of Auburn Prison to James Weldon Johnson, October 25, 1929, Box 265, Folder “Crime, 1929, July–August,” NAACP Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited NAACP Papers); “Death Inquiry Started by Kenyon,” October 24, 1929.
New York News, May 21, 1927.
New York Times, December 7, 1930.
New York Times, November 14, 1931.
Cole, “Can Our Shameful Prisons Be Reformed,” 42.
George Fald to James Weldon Johnson, January 21, 1922, Folder “Crime, 1922-Jan-May,” Box 264, NAACP Papers; Rupert Clarke to Walter White, July 23, 1931, Folder “Crime, 1931,” Box 265, NAACP Papers; and Muhammad, 226–268.
Arthur Bossman was released from prison, after serving eleven years of a Baumes conviction, when in 1950 he had all three prior convictions set aside for lack of counsel. New York Times, April 7, 1950; March 30 and April 9, 1954.
New York Times, March 24, 1967.