One of the rallying cries of the criminal justice
reform crowd, including us here at Reason, is that
American policing policies disproportionately harm blacks and other
minorities. These days even mainstream politicians like Rand Paul
have been sounding this alarm—he recently told a Rotary Club
crowd in Shelbyville, Kentucky, that “the war on drugs
has had a disproportionate racial outcome.” The ostensible purpose
of pointing to these disparities is to showcase how unfair and
subjective our law enforcement can be. But according to a new
study
published in Psychological Science, this may not be
what the average white person takes away.
Being made aware of the racial composition of America’s
prisons actually
bolsters white Americans’ support for intrusive policing and harsh
sentencing policies, according to Stanford University
researchers Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt.
In one of their experiments, 62 white Californians watched a
video showing mug shots of male prison inmates. Some saw a video in
which only a quarter of the men were black; in another video, 45
percent were. Afterward, participants were given the opportunity to
sign a real petition to amend California’s severe three-strike
sentencing statute, which currently mandates 25-years to life in
prison upon a third felony offense with no excemptions.
The results: More than half of participants who saw the video
with less black men signed the petition. But only 27 percent of
those who saw the video with more black inmates signed.
In a second experiment, 164 white New Yorkers were given
statistics about prison populations. Some heard about how
blacks—who make up 12 percent of the U.S. population total—account
for 40 percent of those in American prisons, with white Americans
accounting for 32 percent. Others heard the New York City
incarceration stats, where blacks make up 60 percent of those
incarcerated and whites just under 12 percent.
Participants were then asked if they wanted to sign a petition
to end
New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy. About a third (33
percent) of participants who heard the national statistic were
willing to sign the petition, while only 12 percent of those who
heard the New York City stat would do so. The second group was more
likely to say concern over crime made them hesitant to support
ending stop-and-frisk policies.
“Many legal advocates and social activists seem to assume that
bombarding the public with images, statistics, and other evidence
of racial disparities will motivate people to join the cause and
fight inequality,” said Hetey. “But we found that, ironically,
exposure to extreme racial disparities may make the public less,
and not more, responsive to attempts to lessen the severity of
policies that help maintain those disparities.”
A good reminder to heed the work of British sociologist Stuart
Hall and similar communication scholars: Never assume your audience
will take away what you intend for them to take away. Between the
producing (“encoding”
in Hall-speak) and the receiving (“decoding”) of a message,
there’s a lot of space for conscious or unconscious fears and
prejudices to meander in.
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