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Black v. White Crime & Punishment..USA & Europe

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HumanRights

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May 22, 2000, 3:00:00 AM5/22/00

_________________________________________________________________

Reaching out to a Human Rights Victim & Prisoner of
Conscience
_________________________________________________________________

Please send a Message of Goodwill to help bouy up his moral and
to help keep him alive.

- As a tourist, wrongfully arrested & imprisoned on arriving
in France

- "Guilt by association" - held 2 yrs without trial, bail or
opportunity to defend himself

- Finally, sentenced to 18 yrs without possibility of appeal

- Soon to pass his 7th consecutive birthday behind bars;
hope vanishing for release

To help with this Human Rights case, please read the synopsis at
the end of this message.

http://www.poboxes.com/JUSTICE
http://x46.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=619882664

_________________________
_________________________

E U R O P E ~ A M E R I C A

PATTERNS OF CRIME & PUNISHMENT ALONG RACIAL LINES

o Although 13 percent of drug users in the U.S. are black,
blacks account for 74 percent of all those sentenced to prison
for drug offenses.

o Blacks who kill whites were sentenced to death 22 times more
frequently than blacks who kill blacks and seven times more
frequently than whites who kill blacks, according to crime
researcher David C. Baldus.

o Though blacks and whites have approximately the same rate of
drug use, blacks are one-third more likely to be arrested for
drug offenses

o Between 1985 and 1995, the rate of incarceration for
Hispanics more than doubled.

o The Asian-American population in federal prisons has
quadrupled in the past 20 years.

o Blacks are likely to receive 50 percent longer federal prison
sentences than whites.

o About 60 percent of the youths in federal custody are
American Indians.

o Minority youth are also more likely to be tried in adult
courts and incarcerated in adult prisons. In 1997, 7,400 youth
under the age of 18 were sent to adult prison. Three out of four
were minorities.

II.

Also, find below the research paper of Prof. Loic Wacquant, UC
Berkeley:

"FOREIGNERS AND IMMIGRANTS IN THE PRISONS OF EUROPE"

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http://www.sciam.com/1999/0899issue/0899numbers.html

Scientific American:

The system is biased against blacks ... such as in sentencing
for drug offenses: although 13 percent of drug users in the U.S.
are black, blacks account for 74 percent of all those sentenced
to prison for drug offenses. One in seven adult black males has
lost his voting rights because of a felony conviction.

BEHIND BARS IN THE U.S. AND EUROPE

Most Western countries have put more people behind bars in
recent years, but in none has the incarceration rate risen more
than in the U.S. The cause of the extraordinary American figure
is not higher levels of crime, for the crime rate in the U.S. is
about the same as in western Europe (except for the rate of
homicide, which is two to eight times greater, mostly because of
the ready availability of guns).

The high U.S. rate--which rivals those of former Soviet nations--
can be traced primarily to a shift in public attitudes toward
crime that began about 30 years ago as apprehension about
violence and drugs escalated. Politicians were soon exploiting
the new attitudes with promises to get criminals off the
streets. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush promoted tough-
on-crime measures, including the "War on Drugs." Bill Clinton,
breaking with previous Democratic candidates, endorsed the death
penalty and as president signed an anticrime bill that called
for more prisons and increases in mandatory sentencing.
Governors in about half the states signed "three strikes and
you're out" legislation. Local officials who make most of the
day-to-day decisions that affect incarceration, including
police, prosecutors, judges and probation officers, were
strongly influenced by the law-and-order rhetoric of governors
and presidents. Increasingly, they opted for incarceration of
lawbreakers in local jails or in state prisons.

As a result, the length of sentences, already severe by western
European standards, became even more punitive. Consequently, the
number of those locked up rose more than fivefold between 1972
and 1998, to more than 1.8 million. Most of those sentenced in
recent years are perpetrators of nonviolent crimes, such as drug
possession, that would not ordinarily be punished by long prison
terms in other Western countries. The rise in the population
behind bars happened while the rate of property crime
victimization was falling steeply and while the rate of violent
crime victimization was generally trending down.

Conclusive proof is lacking as to whether harsh sentences
actually deter crime. The most obvious result of harsh
sentencing is the disruption of the black community,
particularly as it bears on young black men. A substantial
minority of both white and black teenage boys engage in violent
behavior. In their twenties, most whites give up violence as
they take on the responsibility of jobs and families, but a
disproportionate number of African-Americans do not have jobs,
and they are most likely to contribute to crime and imprisonment
rates. The system is biased against blacks in other ways, such
as in sentencing for drug offenses: although 13 percent of drug
users in the U.S. are black, blacks account for 74 percent of
all those sentenced to prison for drug offenses. One in seven
adult black males has lost his voting rights because of a felony
conviction.

Two British criminologists, Leslie Wilkins (retired) and Ken
Pease of the University of Huddersfield, have theorized that
less egalitarian societies impose harsher penalties.
Imprisonment thus becomes a negative reward, in contrast to the
positive reward of wealth. The theory perhaps explains why the
U.S. has higher incarceration rates than other Western
countries, where income inequality is less extreme, and why
rates began to rise in the early 1970s, shortly after income
disparities began rising. If the theory is correct, high U.S.
incarceration rates are unlikely to decline until there is
greater equality of income.

--Rodger Doyle (rdo...@aol.com)

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2 CNN Reports

New report chronicles criminal justice system's racial bias
http://www.cnn.com/2000/LAW/05/04/civil.rights/index.html

Minority youth face tougher treatment in justice system
http://www.cnn.com/2000/LAW/04/25/juvenile.justice/index.html

Minority youth at a 'cumulative disadvantage'

[1]

New report chronicles criminal justice system's racial bias

May 4, 2000
Web posted at: 1:58 PM EDT (1758 GMT)

By Raju Chebium
CNN Interactive Correspondent

WASHINGTON (CNN) - Minorities are more likely than whites to be
put to death, imprisoned and pulled over by traffic police, a
civil rights group said Thursday in a report concluding that
U.S. law enforcement agencies treat whites and people of color
in separate and unequal ways.

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights released the 90-page
report called "Justice on Trial: Racial Disparities in the
American Criminal Justice System," which chronicles what the
group calls the systematic and unfair treatment of blacks,
Hispanics and other minorities.

FULL TEXT:

"Justice on Trial: Racial Disparities in the American Criminal
Justice System"

"The color of a person's skin is a better indicator of how long
a person's sentence will be, whether or not a person will be
pulled over by police, whether or not a person is given the
death penalty, what kind of plea bargain a person is offered or
whether or not a juvenile is tried as an adult," the group said
in a statement.

Wade Henderson, the group's executive director, said the
findings show that U.S. lawmakers need to reexamine their
approaches to criminal justice.

"There should not be a different level of justice for people who
are not white. We're not suggesting that we establish laws
that 'take it easy' on minorities. We want fairness," he said.

The most disturbing aspect of the report is that police officers
and prosecutors may be subconsciously discriminating against
minorities without meaning to, said Karen McGill Lawson,
executive director of the Leadership Conference Education Fund,
a sister organization of the civil rights group.

Two problems greatly contribute to the unequal treatment of
blacks and whites, according to the report: the war on drugs and
racial profiling.

The war on drugs, which began in the early 1980s, called for
longer prison terms for drug offenders. Lawson said lawmakers
over the years adopted a "lock 'em up" approach to all crimes.

Racial profiling, a police practice in which minorities are more
likely to be targeted, has led to the incarceration of
minorities in disproportionately large numbers.

Additionally, reforms in federal sentencing guidelines over the
years have increased the length of prison sentences, keeping the
already large minority populations behind bars longer than
whites, the report said.

For instance, Lawson said, blacks comprise 12 percent of the
nation's population and 13 percent of the drug users. Yet, they
constitute 38 percent of those arrested for drug-related crimes
and 59 percent of those convicted of drug crimes, she said.

Some police groups agreed with the findings, calling them a wake-
up call for an overhaul of the nation's criminal justice system.

"These problems are like termites that are eating away at the
foundations of a building," acknowledged Hubert Williams,
president of the Police Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit
group that strives to improve police work through research and
training. "High-level government officials understand the
gravity of this situation, the inequities and disparities and
the perceived inequities and disparities."

Noting efforts to end racial profiling in New Jersey and
elsewhere, Williams said law enforcement agencies must act
with "deliberate speed" to correct problems that have been
identified. He also urged lawmakers to further study the issue.

Among the report's findings:

o Though blacks and whites have approximately the same rate of
drug use, blacks are one-third more likely to be arrested for
drug offenses

o Between 1985 and 1995, the rate of incarceration for
Hispanics more than doubled.

o The Asian-American population in federal prisons has
quadrupled in the past 20 years.

o Blacks are likely to receive 50 percent longer federal prison
sentences than whites.

o About 60 percent of the youths in federal custody are
American Indians.

The report offered a variety of solutions, including
accreditation of law enforcement agencies, hiring more minority
officers, abolishing or suspending the death penalty and
reforming sentencing guidelines.

Lawson said two solutions that would help correct the situation
in the short run are ending racial profiling and increasing
money for crime- and drug-prevention programs.

The Leadership Conference, which is celebrating its 50th
anniversary Thursday, is a coalition of 180 civil rights groups.
Members include leading groups such as the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Civil
Liberties Union and the National Council of La Raza.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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http://www.cnn.com/2000/LAW/04/25/juvenile.justice/index.html

[2]

Minority youth face tougher treatment in justice system

April 25, 2000
Web posted at: 2:51 p.m. EDT (1851 GMT)

-----------------------------------------------------------------

In this story:

Minority youth at a 'cumulative disadvantage'

Complicated problem

-----------------------------------------------------------------

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- African-American youths face tougher
treatment throughout the juvenile justice system, according to a
report released Tuesday by a children's advocacy group.

Law Dictionary

The report found that in 1998, 71 percent of juvenile arrests
involved white youth, 26 percent of the arrests involved black
youth. However, of the age group of 10- to 17-year-olds, African-
Americans make up just 15 percent of the group.

Once they are in custody, black youth are more likely than
whites to be formally charged and jailed, and far more likely to
have their cases referred to adult courts. The study found this
difference was present, even when black and white youth are
charged with the same crime.

White youth were more likely than black youth to be sentenced to
probation.

The study's authors say the data suggests the justice system is
not "racially neutral" and states have not done enough to
address racial disparities. They say recent trends to "get
tough" on juvenile offenders makes dealing with the problem more
important.

"As the blurring of the line between juvenile and criminal court
increases, so does the likelihood that these trends will
disproportionately affect minority youth," the report says.

Minority youth at a 'cumulative disadvantage'

The study found that when white and African-American youth are
charged with the same offense, black students are five times
more likely to be detained. Custody rates for Latino and Native
American youth are 2.5 times higher than those of white youth.

Minority youth are also more likely to be tried in adult courts
and incarcerated in adult prisons. In 1997, 7,400 youth under
the age of 18 were sent to adult prison. Three out of four were
minorities, the study says.

The report, was conducted by Building Blocks for Youth, an
alliance of child advocacy groups promoting fairer juvenile
justice policies. Its authors studied state and federal data on
arrests, juvenile court actions, detention and other factors.

Complicated problem
Some people have argued that a disproportionate number of
minorities are in the justice system because minority youth
commit more crimes than white youth. The authors of the study
say the problem is "much more complicated." They say police
policies, such as targeting patrols in certain low-income areas
and group arrest procedures could impact minority and white
youth differently.

The report suggests broader social issues could be factors. It
says crime victims may be more likely to think that offenses
were committed by minority youth than white youth. The study
also said policies requiring youth to be released to biological
parents could put offenders who live in single-parent homes, or
are in foster care at a disadvantage.

The authors of the report called for a "nationwide effort to
identify the causes of this differential treatment of minority
youth."

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Re:

Dr. Loic Wacquant
Centre de sociologie europeenne du College de France
University of California at Berkeley

Wacquant's article, below, is MUST reading.

He succeeds in showing clearly what
the disproportionate representation of
blacks and minorities (in America
and Europe, alike) as wards of
the criminal justice system
is really all about -- with a great
many non-whites being snared for drugs.

This is a TIMELY piece of scholarship.

It shows in numbers and stats a picture that we tend
not to see in its entirety but only in snippets.

These processes that victimize persons of foreign,
non-European and/or minority descent, as presented here,
take on a three-dimensionality.

When a member of an underclass complains, he may well
be accused of having a "victim complex" or of "playing the
race card."

This scholarship makes it all the more ludicrous that
any Frenchman (or Dutchman or Italian or even
Brit) could hold doggishly onto the delusion that
their systems of criminal justice are immune to the
pitfalls of the American -- vis-a-vis the underclasses.

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Wacquant writes:

Prison and the branding it effects thus
actively participate in the fabrication of a European category
of
"sub-whites" tailor-made to legitimize a drift towards the penal
management of poverty which, thanks to a halo effect, tends to
apply to the
ensemble of working-class strata undermined by mass joblessness
and
flexible labor, regardless of nationality.

On this account, imprisonment and the police and court treatment
of
foreigners, immigrants, and assimilated categories (Arabs
and "beurs"* in
France, West-Indians in England, Turks and Gypsies in Germany,
Tunisians in
Italy, Africans in Belgium, Surinamese and Moroccans in Holland,
etc.)
constitute a veritable litmus test, a shibboleth for Europe:
their
evolution allows us to assess the degree to which the European
Union
resists or, on the contrary, conforms to the American policy of
criminalization of poverty as complement to the generalization
of wage
instability and social insecurity. Like the carceral fate of
blacks in
America, it gives a precious and prescient indication of the
type of
society and state that Europe is in the process of building.

*****************************************************************
*

[Full Text]

FOREIGNERS AND IMMIGRANTS IN THE PRISONS OF EUROPE

In 1989, for the first time in history, the population consigned
in prisons
of the United States turned majority black. As a result of the
decade-long
"War on Drugs" waged by the federal government as part of a
broad "law and
order" policy, the incarceration rate of African-Americans
doubled in a
short ten years, rising from 3,544 inmates per 100,000 adults in
1985 to
6,926 per 100,000 in 1995, which is nearly seven times the rate
of their
white compatriots (919 per 100,000) and over twenty times the
rates posted
by France, England, or Italy. If persons sentenced to probation
or released
on parole are taken into account, it turns out that more than
one of every
three young black men (and close to two in three in the big
cities of the
Rust Belt) find themselves under supervision of the criminal
justice
system. This makes prison and its extensions the public service
to which
they have readiest access, well ahead of higher education or
unemployment
benefits for example. Based on the figures for 1991, the
statisticians of
the Department of Justice have computed that, over a lifetime,
the
cumulative probability that a black American has of being sent
to prison
(i.e., being sentenced to over a year of detention) exceeds 28%,
compared
to 16% for a Latino and 4.4% for a white man.

If blacks have become the foremost "clients" of the penitentiary
system of the United States, it is not on account of some
special
propensity that this community would have for crime and
deviance. It is
because it stands at the point of intersection of the three
systems of
forces that, together, determine and feed the unprecedented
regime of
carceral hyperinflation that America has experienced for the
past quarter
century following the denunciation of the Fordist-Keynesian
social compact
and the contestation of the caste regime by the Civil Rights
Movement:
first, the dualization of the labor market and the
generalization of
precarious employment and un(der)employment at its lower end;
second, the
dismantling of public assistance programs for the most
vulnerable members
of society (itself necessitated by the onset of desocialized
wage-labor);
and third, the crisis of the ghetto as instrument of control and
confinement of a stigmatized population considered alien to the
national
body and supernumerary on both economic and political grounds.
This leads
one to think that, extreme though it may be, the carceral
trajectory of
blacks in the United States could be less idiosyncratic than the
catch-all
theory of "American exceptionalism" would have one think. One
can even
hypothesize that, the same causes producing the same effects,
there is
every chance that the societies of Western Europe will generate
analogous,
albeit less pronounced, situations to the extent that they, too,
embark on
the path of the penal management of poverty and inequality and
ask their
prison system, not only to curb crime, but also to regulate the
lower
segments of the labor market and to hold at bay populations
judged to be
disreputable, derelict, and unwanted. From this point of view,
foreigners
and quasi-foreigners would be "the blacks" of Europe.

In point of fact, most of the countries of the European Union
have
witnessed a significant increase in their prison population,
coinciding
with the onset of the era of mass unemployment and the
flexibilization of
labor: between 1983 and 1995, the number of prisoners rose from
43,000 to
55,000 in England, from 39,000 to 53,000 in France, from 41,000
to 50,000
in Italy, from 14,000 to 40,000 in Spain, and from 4,000 to
nearly 10,000
in Holland and 7,000 in Greece. Despite periodic recourse to
mass pardons
(for example, in France on Bastille Day every year since 1991)
and waves of
early releases that have become commonplace (in Italy, Spain,
Belgium, and
Portugal), the continent's stock of prisoners has continued to
swell and
penitentiaries everywhere are overflowing with inmates. But,
above all,
throughout Europe, it is foreigners, so-called "second-
generation"
immigrants who precisely are not immigrants of non-Western
extraction, and
persons of color, who are known to figure among the most
vulnerable
categories both on the labor market and vis-a-vis the public
assistance
sector of the state, owing to their lower class distribution and
to the
multiple discriminations they suffer, who are massively over-
represented
within the imprisoned population, and this to a degree
comparable, nay in
some places superior, to the "racial disproportionality" that
afflicts
blacks in the United States (cf. Table 1).

Thus it is that in England, where the question of so-called
"street" crime tends to be confounded, in public perception as
well as in
the practices of the police, with the visible presence and
demands of
subjects of the Empire come from the Caribbean, blacks are seven
times more
likely to be incarcerated than their white or Asian counterparts
(and
West-Indian women ten times as likely). In 1993, persons of West
Indian,
Guyanese, and African ancestry made up 11% of all prisoners,
while they
represent a mere 1.8% of the country's population ages 18 to 39.
This
over-representation is especially flagrant among prisoners "put
away" for
possession or distribution of drugs, of whom more than half are
black, and
among those in for burglary, where the proportion approaches two-
thirds.
A similar phenomenon can be observed in Germany. In Northern
Rhineland, for example, the "gypsies" originating from Romania
sport
incarceration rates more than twenty times greater than do
native citizens;
for Moroccans, the figure is eight times, and for Turks, between
three and
four times. And the proportion of foreigners among those
awaiting trial in
detention has risen from one-third in 1989 to one-half five
years later.

Indeed, in the Land of Hessen, the number of foreign prisoners
has grown
each year since 1987, whereas the number of nationals in
detention fell
each year. As for this swelling of the number of non-nationals
behind
bars, it is almost entirely due to infractions of the drug laws.
In the
Netherlands, whose prison population has tripled in fifteen
years and
comprised 43% foreigners in 1993, the probability of being
sanctioned with
an unsuspended prison sentence is systematically higher for even
the same
first offense when the person convicted is of Surinamese or
Moroccan
origin.

Table 1. Foreigners in the prison population of the European
Union in 1997

Country Foreign Prisoners Proportion of Total
Germany 25,000 34%
France 14,200 26%
Italy 10,900 22%
Spain 7,700 18%
England 4,800 8% *
Belgium 3,200 38%
Netherlands 3,700 32%
Greece 2,200 39%
Austria 1,900 27% *
Portugal 1,600 11%
Sweden 1,100 26% *
Denmark 450 14%

* Estimate

Source: Pierre Tournier, Statistique penale annuelle du Conseil
de l'Europe, Enquete 1997, Strasbourg, 1999.

In France, the share of foreigners in the prison population has
gone from 18% in 1975 to 29% twenty years later (whereas
foreigners make up
only 6% of the country's population), a figure that does not
take account
of the pronounced "carceral overconsumption" of nationals
perceived and
treated as foreigners by the police and judicial apparatus, such
as the
youth born to North African immigrants or come from the
predominantly black
French overseas dominions and territories. Which is tantamount
ot saying
that the cells of France have grown distinctly "colored" these
past years
since two-thirds of the 15,000-odd foreign prisoners officially
recorded in
1995 originated from North Africa (53%) and Sub-Saharan Africa
(16%).
The "ethnonational disproportionality" that afflicts residents
from
France's former colonies stems from the fact that, for the same
offense,
the courts more readily resort to imprisonment when the
condemned does not
possess French citizenship, suspended sentences and community
sanctions
being practically monopolized by nationals. The demographer
Pierre Tournier
has shown that, depending on the charges, the probability of
being
sentenced to prison is 1.8 to 2.4 times higher for a foreigner
than for a
Frenchman (all persons tried taken together, without regard to
prior
records). Next, the number of foreigners implicated in illegal
immigration
has rocketed from 7,000 in 1976 to 44,000 in 1993. Now, three-
fourths of
those sanctioned for violating "Article 19," relating to
unlawful entry and
residence, are thrown behind barsfor one of the sixteen
misdemeanors most
often tried before the courts, this is the one most frequently
hit with an
unsuspended prison sentence: it is in effect repressed as
severely as a
felony. Thus it turns out that, far from resulting from a
hypothetical
increase in their delinquency, as some xenophobic discourses
would have it,
the growing share of foreigners in the prison population of
France is due
exclusively to the tripling in twenty years of incarcerations
for
violations of immigration statutes. In point of fact, if
prisoners
sentenced for this administrative infringement are excluded from
carceral
statistics, the ratio of overimprisonment of foreigners in
relation to
citizens in France drops from 6 to 3. As in the case of blacks
in the
United States, aside from the fact of a qualification that
cannot be
overemphasized that African-Americans have, on paper at any
rate, been
citizens of the Union for at least a century, the over-
representation of
foreigners in French prisons expresses, not only their inferior
class
composition, but also, on the one hand, the greater severity of
the penal
institution towards them and, on the other, the deliberate
choice to
repress illegal immigration by means of imprisonment. We are
indeed
dealing here with what is first and foremost a confinement of
differentiation or segregation, aiming to keep a group separate
and to
facilitate its substraction from the societal body (it results
more and
more frequently in deportation and banishment from the national
territory),
as distinct from confinement of authority or confinement of
safety.

To the foreigners and quasi-foreigners held in jails and
prisons, often in
tiers segregated according to ethnonational origin (as at La
Sante , in the
heart of Paris, where inmates are distributed into four separate
and
hostile wards, "white," "African," "Arab," and "rest of the
world"), one
must still add the thousands of immigrants without papers or
awaiting
deportation, especially by virtue of "double sentencing",
arbitrarily
detained in those state-sponsored enclaves of non-existent
rights, the
"waiting areas" and "retention centersi"that have proliferated
in the past
decade throughout the European Union. Like the camps
for "undesirable
foreigners, Spanish refugees and other agitators" created by
Daladier in
1938, the thirty-some centers presently in operation on French
territory
-they were less than a dozen fifteen years ago - are so many
prisons that
do not speak their name, and for good reason: they do not belong
to the
prison administration, their inmates are held in violation of
Article 66 of
the Constitution (which stipulates that no one can be detained
arbitrarily
), and conditions of confinement in them are typically in
violation of both
the law and basic standards of human dignity. This is the case,
inter alia,
at the infamous center of Arenq, near the Marseille harbor
station, where a
dilapidated hangar built in 1917 and lacking in the minimum
comfort
necessary for human habitation serves to warehouse some 1,500
foreigners
deported each year to North Africa.

In Belgium, where the number of foreigners imprisoned in the
custody of the
Office for Foreigners increased ninefold between 1974 and 1994,
persons
consigned in the detention centers for foreigners "en situation
irregulier"
fall under the authority of the Interior Ministry (in charge of
public
order) and not of Justice, and they are therefore omitted from
the
statistics of the penitentiary system. Five so-called closed
centers,
surrounded by a double row of barbed-wire fencing and under
permanent video
surveillance, serve as lauching pad for the deportation of
15,000
foreigners each year: this is the official government target
number given
as express proof of the realistic immigration policy carried out
with the
supposed aim of cutting the ground out from under the far right,
which
meanwhile prospers like never before. In Italy, deportation
orders
quintupled in only four years to peak at 57,000 in 1994, even
though there
is every indication that illegal immigration has subsided and
that the
great majority of foreigners who do not have proper papers
entered the
country legally to fill "black market" jobs disdained by the
native
population as the government of Massimo d'Alema implicitly
recognized when
it increased by a factor of six the number of residence and work
permits
initially granted as part of the "regularization" program
launched in early
winter 1998.

More generally, it is well documented that those judicial
practices that
are seemingly the most neutral and the most routine, beginning
with
preventative (remand) detention, tend systematically to
disadvantage
persons of foreign origin or perceived to be such. And "la
justice
quarante vitesses", to borrow the revealing expression of the
youth of the
declining housing estates of Longwy, knows too well how to shift
into high
gear when it comes to arresting, prosecuting, and incarcerating
the
residents of stigmatized areas with a heavy concentration of the
jobless
and of families issued from the labor migrations of the thirty-
year boom of
the postwar period who settled into those neighborhoods now
designated as
"sensitive" by official state jargon. Indeed, under the
provisions of the
Schengen and Maastricht treaties aiming to accelerate juridical
integration
so as to ensure the effective free circulation of European
citizens,
immigration has been redefined by the signatory countries as a
continental
and, by implication, national matter of security, under the same
heading as
organized crime and terrorism, to which it has been grafted on
the level of
both discourse and administrative regulation. Thus it is that,
throughout
Europe, police, judicial, and penal practices converge at least
in that
they are applied with special diligence and severity to persons
of
non-European phenotype, who are easily spotted and made to bend
to the
police and juridical arbitrary, to the point that one may speak
of a
veritable process of criminalization of immigrants that tends,
by its
destructuring and criminogenic effects, to (co)produce the very
phenomenon
that it is supposed to combat, in accord with the well-known
mechanism of
the self-fulfilling prophecy. Its main impact is indeed to push
its target
populations deeper into clandestinity and illegality and to
encourage the
durable structuring of specific networks of sociability and
mutual help as
well as of a parallel economy that escapes all state regulation,
a result
that is evidently well suited to justify in return the special
attention
given to them by the police services.

This process is powerfully reinforced and amplified by the media
and by
politicians of all stripes, eager to surf the xenophobic wave
that has been
sweeping across Europe since the neoliberal turn of the eighties
by making
an amalgam, sincerely or cynically, directly or indirectly, but
with ever
more banality, of immigration, illegality, and criminality.
Ceaselessly
blacklisted, suspected in advance if not in principle, driven
back to the
margins of society and hounded by the authorities with unmatched
zeal, the
(non-European) foreigner mutates into a "suitable enemy" to use
the
expression of the Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie at once
symbol of
and target for all social anxieties, as are poor African-
Americans in the
major cities of their society. Prison and the branding it
effects thus
actively participate in the fabrication of a European category
of
"sub-whites" tailor-made to legitimize a drift towards the penal
management of poverty which, thanks to a halo effect, tends to
apply to the
ensemble of working-class strata undermined by mass joblessness
and
flexible labor, regardless of nationality.

Loic Wacquant
Centre de sociologie europeenne du College de France
University of California at Berkeley
Revised 2/26/99

Forthcoming in Punishment and Society (vol. 1, n.2, 1999)

= = = = = = = = =

* This article draws on a lecture given in December 1998 while a
Visiting
Professor at the Facult de Droit of the University of Paris I-
Panth on (I
thank Remi Lenoir and his colleagues at the Credhess for their
kind
hospitality). It is based on the last chapter of a forthcoming
book, Les
prisons de la misere (Editions Liber-Raisons d'agir, 1999). The
translation
from the French is by Tarik Wareh and the author.

For a rigorous and in-depth analysis of the problem, cf. the two
essential
books by Michael Tonry, Malign Neglect: Race, Crime and
Punishment in
America, New York, Oxford University Press, 1995, and Jerome
Miller, Search
and Destroy: African-American Males in the Criminal Justice
System,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997; for an analysis of
the
political determinants of the rise of ilaw and orderi during
this period,
Katherine Beckett, Making Crime Pay, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 1998.
Thomas Bonczar and Allen Beck, "Lifetime Likelihood of Going to
State or
Federal Prison," Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report,
Washington,
BJS, March 1997, p. 1; more complete and updated data on this
subject can
be found in Marc Maurer, "Racial Disparities in Prison Getting
Worse in the
1990s," Overcrowded Times 8:1 (February 1997), pp. 9-13.

Loi c Wacquant, "L'ascension de l'etat penal en Amerique," Actes
de la
recherche en sciences sociales 124 (September 1998), pp. 7-26,
and "Crime
et chatiment en Amerique de Nixon a Clinton, Archives de
politique
criminelle 20 (Spring 1998), pp. 123-138.

Pierre Tournier, Statistique penale annuelle du Conseil de
l'Europe,
Enquete 1997, Strasbourg, forthcoming (I thank the author for
communicating
these data to me in advance). For a more nuanced and in-depth
analysis,
Andre Kuhn, "Populations carce- rales: Combien? Pourquoi? Que
faire?"
Archives de politique criminelle 20 (Spring 1998), pp. 47-99,
and S.
Snacken, K. Beyens, and H. Tubex, "Changing Prison Populations
in Western
Countries: Fate or Policy?" European Journal of Crime, Criminal
Law and
Criminal Justice 3:1 (1995), pp. 18-53; and the classic work of
Nils
Christie, Crime Control as Industry: Towards Gulags, Western
Style, London,
Routledge, 1994 (2nd expanded, edition, for which the author has
revealingly dropped the question mark from the original title).

For an overview, Hans-Joerg Allbrecht, "Ethnic Minorities, Crime
and
Criminal Justice in Europe," in Francis Heidensohn and Michael
Farrell
(eds.), Crime in Europe, London, Routledge, 1993. I link the
rise in the
imprisonment of foreigners to the "temptation" of the penal
management of
poverty in Europe in Les prisons de la misere,
Paris, ...Editions
Liber-Raisons d'agir, in press.

David J. Smith, "Ethnic Origins, Crime, and Criminal Justice in
England
and Wales," in Michael Tonry (ed.), Ethnicity, Crime, and
Immigration:
Comparative and Cross-National Perspectives, Chicago, The
University of
Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 101-182; also, Ellis Cashmore and
Edward
McLaughlin (eds.), Out of Order? Policing Black People, London,
Routledge,
1991; J.H. Smith, "Race, Crime and Criminal Justice," in The
Oxford
Handbook of Criminology, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993.
Hans-Joerg Albrecht, "Ethnic Minority, Crime, and Criminal
Justice in
Germany," in Michael Tonry (ed.), Ethnicity, Crime, and
Immigration, op.
cit., pp. 101-182, citation p. 87.

Josine Junger-Tas, "Ethnic Minorities and Criminal Justice in
the
Netherlands," in Michael Tonry (ed.), Ethnicity, Crime, and
Immigration,
op. cit., pp. 257-310.

The most insidious of these are not the shrill and paranoid
delusions of
the representatives of the Front National during their electoral
meetings,
whose excessive and hate-filled tenor "republicans" at heart are
unanimous
in deploring, but the soft-spoken discourses that are held
within the state
apparatus, for example in the National Assembly, courteously,
between
reasonable and respectable people, with all the juridical
euphemisms and
oratorical denegations that make for the charm - and the force -
of
official language (as shown by Charlotte Lessana in "La loi
Debr : la
fabrique de l'immigre" Cultures et conflits 31-32, Autumn/Winter
1998, pp.
125-159).

Pierre Tournier, "La delinquance des etrangers en France:
analyse des
statistiques pe- nales," in Salvatore Palidda (ed.), Delit
d'immigration/Immigrant Delinquency, Brussels, European
Commission, 1996,
p. 158.

According to the ideal-typical distinction introduced by Claude
Faugeron, "La derive pe nale," Esprit 215 (October 1995), pp.
132-144.
* [Translator's note] The term "double peine" refers to the fact
that
foreigners can be and are frequently sanctioned twice by French
law: first
by imprisonment for the specific crime they committed and second
by
banishment from the national territory after they have served
their prison
sentence via administrative decree or judicial sanction (in
violation of
the European Convention on the Rights of Man).

Jean-Pierre Perrin-Martin, La retention, Paris, L'Harmattan,
1996, and
for a comparison between France, the United Kingdom, and
Germany, as well
as with the United States, see the issue of Culture et conflits
(23, 1996),
devoted to the theme: "Circuler, enfermer, eloigner: Zones
d'attente et
centres de retention des democraties occidentales."

Laurence Vanpaeschen, Barbeles de la honte, Brussels, Luc Pire,
1998;
Fabienne Brion, "Chiffrer, dechiffrer: Incarceration des
etrangers et
construction sociale de la criminalite des immigres en
Belgique," in
Salvatore Palidda (ed.), Delit d'immigration/Immigrant
Delinquency, op.
cit., pp. 163-223.

Salvatore Palidda, "La construction sociale de la deviance et de
la
criminalite parmi les immigres: le cas italien," in Salvatore
Palidda
(ed.), Delit d'immigration/Immigrant Deliquency, op. cit., pp.
231-266.
* [Translator's note] Literally "justice with forty gears,"
implying
grossly unequal treatment at the hands of the criminal justice
system for
different social categories and infractions. Longwy is a
formerly
monoindustrial town in the northeastern region of Lorraine
plagued by high
unemployment following the collapse of the steel industry in the
seventies.
Didier Bigo, L'Europe des polices et la securite interieure,
Brussels,
Editions Complexe, 1992, and "Securite et immigration: vers une
gouvernementalite de l'inquie tude?" Cultures et conflits 31-32
(Autumn-Winter 1998), pp. 13-38, as well as the other articles
in this
issue on the theme "Securite et immigration," notably Monica den
Boer,
iCrime et immigration dans l'Union europeenne" (pp. 101-124).
Robert K. Merton, "The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy," in Social
Theory and
Social Structure, New York, The Free Press, 1968 (3rd expanded
edition),
pp. 475-490.

On this process of the criminalization of immigrants, see the
comparative works assembled by Allesandro Dal Lago (ed.), Lo
straniero e il
nemico, Genoa, Costa e Nolan, 1998; on the Dutch case, Godfried
Engbersen,
In de schaduw van morgen: Stedlijke marginaliteit in Nederland,
Amsterdam,
Boom, 1997; and on the German case, Michael Kubink, Verst ndnis
und
Bedeutung von Auslaenderkriminalit t: Eine Analyse der
Konstitution
sozialer Probleme, Pfaffenweiler, Centaurus, 1993.

Nils Christie, "Suitable Enemy," in Herman Bianchi and Ren van
Swaaningen (eds.), Abolitionism: Toward a Non-Repressive
Approach to Crime,
Amsterdam, Free University Press, 1986.

The notion of "sub-white" is borrowed from the sociologist Andre
a R a
(who himself borrows it from the French rap band IAM), cf. "Le
racisme
europeen et la fabrication du sous-blanc , in Andre a R a (ed.),
Immigration et racisme en Europe, Brussels, Editions Complexe,
1998, pp.
167-202.

* [Translatoris note] Beur, a street slang (verlan) term
for "arabe,"
designates so-called second-generation No
rth Africans, the French offspring of Algerian, Moroccan and
Tunisian
immigrants who came to France during the "thirty glorious years"
of postwar
economic growth.

Pierre Bourdieu, Contre-feux, Paris, ...Editions Liber-Raisons
d'agir,
1998, "Le sort des etrangers comme shibboleth," pp. 21-24.

......

H E L P ~ R E Q U E S T E D

BLACK PRISONER OF CONSCIENCE / HUMAN RIGHTS VICTIM

Please help with a Human Rights case; go to:

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http://members.aol.com/FreeBarry1/index.html
http://www.poboxes.com/DROITS

[Find prison address at above sites]

As a tourist in France, Barry was wrongfully arrested and
sentenced to 18 yrs without right to appeal. In July,
he will pass his 7th consecutive birthday behind
French bars, isolated, in a small space that does not
even permit him to stretch out his 6'4" (1.93m) frame.

Please help send cards and messages of encouragement and
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