In April 2016, Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters clashed with Bill Clinton over his role in the passage of the 1994 Crime Bill and Hillary Clinton's use of the term “super predators” to describe the involvement of black youth in criminal offenses. Demonstrators sought to highlight how policymakers and the general public construct narratives and social policies that fuel misperceptions, thereby deepening racial inequality in criminal justice practices throughout the United States. Political pundits largely glossed over the substance of protester concerns because the crime bill did not explicitly target specific racial groups. To address the essence of the BLM critique would require a theory of the policy process that explains racial inequality in criminal justice experiences. Nina Moore's book, The Political Roots of Racial Tracking in American Criminal Justice, provides such a policy process framework.
Moore examines the mechanisms that give rise to racial disparities in the criminal justice system and explains why these inequities persist despite considerable national attention to issues of fairness and justice. Her book makes two arguments. First, Moore argues that there are two racially distinct modes of criminal law enforcement in the United States: one white and one black. She contends that racial tracking in the criminal justice system must be evaluated sequentially, from initial contact with police officers to differences in plea negotiations with prosecutors, both of which culminate in racialized differences in pretrial court decisions and prison experiences.
The second argument advanced by Moore is that racial tracking in criminal justice persists precisely because policymakers and the American public allow different modalities of law enforcement, even when stark differences in applications of justice contravene constitutional rights to due process and equal protection. She presents a basic principles policy process that anchors empirical insights and disagreements in the study of policymaking with commonalities expressed in varied policy perspectives. By drawing on six policy process axioms—principles that focus on politics, systems, opportunities, multidimensionality, power players, and problem-process kinship—Moore articulates a seventh maxim, the public origins principle, that fully integrates these perspectives to produce a theory of racial tracking in criminal justice.
This is an impressive piece of socio-legal scholarship. Five empirical chapters thoroughly enumerate and rigorously evaluate how colorblind Supreme Court decisions, public opinion polls, political party politics, and congressional agendas impede racial equality in criminal justice. Moore critically analyzes twenty-three Sixth Amendment cases affecting the right to counsel, eighteen Fifth Amendment cases, and twenty of the most noted capital punishment decisions. In each instance, she shows how the Court's reasoning and decision-making process represents a longstanding use of colorblind jurisprudence that is not localized to any one decision or to a handful of cases; instead, her work uncovers how the Court systematically legitimates persistent racial inequalities in law enforcement methods.
Professor Moore also presents an in-depth analysis of public opinions on racial progress, criminal victimization, and criminal justice policy in America. She draws on quantitative data from a variety of sources—the National Crime Victimization Survey, the General Social Survey, Pew and Gallup Opinion Polls, and others—to show how there is little concern about racial disproportionality in the public consciousness because many people believe that an equitable resolution is in the works. Yet, where serious concerns about racial inequalities are observed, such anxieties focus on widespread racism against whites. Understanding why members of the public perceive anti-white racism to be more of a problem than racial inequality in criminal justice is an important step in explaining how and why policy reforms have stalled in America. To this point, Moore investigates why the racial justice agenda failed to “take off” in Congress between 1988 and 2012. She concludes that policies to address racial disparities floundered because members of Congress did not want to deviate from the core of criminal justice policymaking, with the disparate treatment of Blacks and their overrepresentation in the criminal justice system functioning as a lamentable but unavoidable collateral consequence of crime-fighting.
Despite the compelling and considerable empirical research on this topic, Moore tells an incomplete story about the political roots of racial tracking in America. In particular, by the end of the book, I found myself wondering about how felon disenfranchisement and gerrymandering contributed to the process of racial tracking. Court decisions that legitimated shifting electoral boundaries and the dilution of voting blocks certainly played some role in furthering racial inequality in criminal justice outcomes. Additionally, Latinos and other racial groups are not considered in the discussion of racial tracking. With increasing numbers of undocumented men, women, and children being processed by immigration and criminal justice officials, it is not a hard stretch to imagine why some neighborhoods are targeted for deportation raids in ways that are similar to drug raids in poor, Black neighborhoods. Furthermore, with significant percentages of Americans concerned about border security and immigration, an analysis of racial tracking for Latinos would have bolstered the author's arguments about different modalities of law enforcement by race. However, the absence of an analysis for Latinos renders Moore's arguments and findings incomplete not invalid.
Nevertheless, The Political Roots of Racial Tracking in American Criminal Justice makes an important contribution to the field through a detailed analysis of racial inequality in criminal justice. The political ideology that motivates the BLM movement has its roots in the belief that black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. Nina Moore's book provides a historical and socio-legal framework for understanding the emergence of the BLM social movement and its critique of racial differences in surveillance, arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. This book is appropriate for graduate and upper division undergraduate courses in sociology, political science, criminology, law, and African-American studies.
