Vol. 3 No. 12 (December, 1993) pp. 130-132

UNEQUAL JUSTICE: A QUESTION OF COLOR by Coramae Richey Mann. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. 301 + xv pp. Cloth $35.00. Paper $14.95.

Reviewed by Marjorie S. Zatz, School of Justice Studies, Arizona State University.

UNEQUAL JUSTICE is a comprehensive review and critical assessment of the extant literature concerning racial minorities and the U.S. criminal justice system. It goes beyond summarizing this literature to offer an analysis of the relationship between racially disproportionate criminal justice processing decisions and the historic and current life experiences of racial minorities in the United States. Mann's writing is engaging and lively. UNEQUAL JUSTICE will be particularly useful as a primary text for undergraduate courses in criminology, criminal justice, law and society, politics and law, and race relations, as well as such special topics courses as race and crime and discretionary justice. It will also serve as a valuable resource for scholars, and one hopes, for criminal justice practitioners.

The book elaborates four central arguments. First, since racial discrimination is endemic to the United States, it permeates the criminal justice system and all other American institutions, resulting in the unjust treatment of racial minorities. Second, political-economic factors, including especially the exploitation of minority groups as sources of cheap labor, underlie this oppression and maltreatment. Third, patterns of racial discrimination are more subtle today than in the past. Fourth, by design and by implementation, laws and legal structures maintain the subordinate status of racial minorities.

This theoretic grounding and Professor Mann's comprehensive and generally even-handed review of the literature make UNEQUAL JUSTICE a solid contribution to the criminology literature. Three other features make UNEQUAL JUSTICE unique among criminology texts and add substantially to its appeal. First, Mann examines the involvement of American Indians, Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans, as well as African Americans, with the U.S. criminal justice system. Most prior research has focused on the experiences of African Americans, treating other major racial/ethnic groups tangentially if at all. Wherever possible, she also considers differences within these groups to demonstrate the cultural diversity and heterogeneity of life experiences between, for example, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban Americans.

Second, Mann's introductory chapter provides historical and cultural contexts for the analyses which follow in later chapters. In this first chapter, Mann examines the definitions, meanings, and significance of race in the U.S.; traces the life experiences of African American, Native American, Asian American, and Hispanic Americans from their early interactions with Euro- Americans to the present day; and provides descriptive demographics to draw a contemporary picture of these four racial minorities. Such a chapter is unique among criminology texts, yet having read it one wonders why others have not thought to do the same. This historical and social context will be particularly helpful for undergraduate readers.

Third, in a self-conscious response to a challenge posed by the National Minority Advisory Council on Criminal Justice in 1980, Mann concludes each chapter with a section entitled "A Minority View." These sections summarize problems delineated in the chapter and offer alternative analyses and interpretations from a minority perspective.

After setting the historical and social context for assessing the relationships between racial minorities and criminal justice, in Chapter Two, Mann provides an overview of criminal justice statistics and data sources. She pays careful attention here to types of crime within racial groups, finding that people in the U.S. are arrested for essentially the same kinds of crime regardless of race, although the extensiveness of crime differs between groups. This is an important point, given the widespread attention in the

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scholarly literature and the mass media to violent crime and drug-related crime by minorities. She is attentive to victimization of minorities and Euro-Americans as well as offense rates, and addresses the racial typing inherent in definitions of particular acts as crimes and as "serious" crimes. Mann then presents and critiques various explanations of minority crime in Chapter Three. Much of this chapter is a refutation of the subculture of violence thesis, with special attention to homicide.

The second part of the book focuses on responses to minority crime, including consideration of the intersections between class and race, and, where possible, between gender and race. The material covered in these chapters is organized sequentially, from law making and law enforcement in Chapter Four through court processing and sanctioning in Chapter Five, to corrections in Chapter Six. Chapter Four includes the usual analyses of policing, adding insights from minority perspectives. This chapter also includes a very nice overview of major federal and state legislation during the colonial, postbellum, and post World War I periods that differentially affected racial minorities. As Mann argues,

"American federal, state, and local governments have always enacted and enforced criminal laws which were custom-made for specific racial minority groups. When the more flagrant, systemic means of economic and political control of minorities used in the past were no longer feasible or morally acceptable ... criminal law began to be used to warehouse American minorities and maintain their unequal status." (p. 127).

Chapter Five covers the range of criminal justice decision points, from bail and indictment decisions through final sentencing. Special attention is given to processing events prior to sentencing, since research has shown that racial disparities are most likely to be evidenced today in these earlier stages and because there is already an abundance of literature on sentencing. Prosecutorial decisionmaking and sentencing patterns are also thoroughly discussed, with separate reviews of capital and noncapital cases. The various courtroom actors and the discretion available to each are also reviewed in this chapter, including the question of whether the type of defense attorney matters, the influential but often ignored recommendations of probation officers, and the selection and composition of grand and trial juries. While Chapters Four and Five are generally well-written, these lengthy chapters suffer from repetition. In places the repetition appears purposeful, when Mann wants to ensure that her readers understand the importance of key points, but in other places it suggests inadequate editing.

The book concludes in Chapter Six with analysis of the correctional system as a place where racial minorities are "warehoused." Race relations within prisons form the backdrop for this chapter, with attention given to relations among inmates and between inmates and guards, racial disparities in disciplinary write-ups and parole decisions, prisoners' rights and political prisoners, riots, overcrowding, and the extensiveness of AIDS within U.S. jails and prisons. In a very real sense, the warehousing of racial minorities in prison IS the concluding chapter of their experiences with the criminal justice system. Nevertheless, I wish that Professor Mann had added a more traditional "Conclusions" chapter which might have brought together some of the key findings in her literature review and analysis.

Throughout the book, Mann offers systematic and comprehensive reviews of the relevant literature, including Supreme Court cases. Her methodological and theoretical critiques of the literature are insightful, and her efforts to bring minority perspectives to bear on this literature are especially useful for Euro-American and minority researchers and students. Mann's careful attention to variation within the major racial groups and to their distinct histories within the U.S. is noteworthy.

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UNEQUAL JUSTICE speaks to the multiple ways in which racism has been and continues to be institutionalized in the criminal justice system. Mann considers alternative explanations to complement and/or compete with racial discrimination, although she very straightforwardly refuses to be forced to choose between economic considerations and race. This is not a minor point, since researchers seeking to show that the criminal justice system is no longer racist have conceded that it is class-biased. As Mann points out, since most members of racial minorities are poor and legislation against minority groups was often based on the threat they posed to Euro-American laborers, it is very difficult to disentangle class and race effects in criminal justice processing and sanctioning.

As Mann demonstrates, much important information on the etiology of minority crime and responses to minority crime is lost or misinterpreted by researchers who do not understand the nuances of the subject matter. Her insights as an African American woman, in combination with her thorough review and analysis of the literature on criminal justice processing and decisionmaking set in their historical, social, and cultural contexts, constitute the special appeal and major contribution of UNEQUAL JUSTICE.