GOVT 2305: Civil Rights and the Equal Protection Clause, and Interest Groups
GOVT 2306: Local Government, Criminal Justice Policy, and Local Elections
The author argues that because most states elect their district attorneys - elections that in Texas are carried out at the county level - and because Whites are a majority in each state, as well as most counties, district attorneys are primarily White. This has consequences for the decisions that the criminal justice system makes regarding who gets prosecuted and who does not.
From the article:
Here are a few of the numbers, according to a report on elected prosecutors commissioned by the Women Donors Network and conducted by the Center for Technology and Civic Life, a nonpartisan group that grew out of the progressive National Organizing Institute:
- 95 percent of elected prosecutors are white;- 79 percent are white men;- three in five states have no black elected prosecutors;- 14 states have no elected prosecutors of color at all*;- just 1 percent of elected prosecutors are minority women.
This has consequences for who goes to trial and who does not:
In the U.S. legal system prosecutors may wield even more power than cops. Prosecutors decide whether to bring a case or drop charges against a defendant; charge a misdemeanor or a felony; demand a prison sentence or accept probation. Most cases are resolved through plea bargains, where prosecutors, not judges, negotiate whether and for how long a defendant goes to prison. And prosecutors make these judgments almost entirely outside public scrutiny.
Why does this matter?
This ought to be worrying in a democracy: Although trying to assemble a government that perfectly represents each minority population may be a recipe for disaster—ask Lebanon!—the magnitude of the disparity here should startle even jaded observers. At the federal, state, and local levels, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians hold elective office at rates lower than their percentages of the overall population, but even so, the gap among prosecutors is particularly large. There’s also little question that the U.S. justice system as it exists perpetuates and encourages huge racial gaps, leading to much higher incarceration rates for black men and serious social disparities in housing, education, employment, and beyond.
Which raises an important question regarding majoritarian democracy: If elected institutions do not have the same ethnic breakdown as the general population - if the majority is over represented - are the rights of minority populations in jeopardy? The author suggests that the answer is yes. This is central to the argument that the United States' governing system is systematically racist, that is, biased in favor of the majority due to winner take all electoral rules. Obviously this is an area of controversy. People are divided on the issue based on ideology. Liberals are more likely to see systemic racism at work, conservatives less likely.
Some important terms in the article:
These are related to the position of district attorney:
- Wikipedia: District Attorney.
- Wikipedia: Prosecutor.
- Texas Association of Counties: District and County Attorney.
- Texas District & County Attorneys Association.
- Harris County: Office of the District Attorney.
These are relate to the concept of systemic racism:
- Wikipedia: Institutional Racism.
- The Atlantic: Systemic Racism or Isolated Abuses? Americans Disagree.
- The Daily Beast: Supreme Court: Institutional Racism Is Real.
