DISCRIMINATION AND DENIAL: SYSTEMIC RACISM IN ONTARIO'S LEGAL AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEMS, 1892-1961 by Clayton James Mosher. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. 258 pp. Cloth $55.00, paper $19.95. ISBN 0-8020-7149-X.

Reviewed by Sandra Clancy, Department of Political Science, Stonehill College. E-mail: sclancy@stonehill.edu.

Clayton James Mosher has written a book that is valuable to all scholars interested in the field of race and law. The book is rich with historical detail about the treatment of Asians and Blacks in the Canadian criminal justice system, but it addresses broader theoretical issues regarding the processes of law formation. American scholars will benefit both from considering familiar problems in an unfamiliar setting and from Mosher's theoretical advances.

Mosher takes as his starting point the fact that minorities in Canada, as in the United States, are over-represented in crime and incarceration statistics relative to their proportion in the population. While there exists a good deal of academic literature on the differential treatment of minority groups in the American criminal justice system, Mosher convincingly demonstrates through a content analysis of Canadian criminal case books that there is comparatively little in Canada. This may be caused, as Mosher points out, by "the widespread belief that race relations in Canada are characterized by tolerance and compassion and that Canada is a more egalitarian country than the United States" (p. 3).

Alongside this lack of attention on the part of social scientists however, Mosher provides evidence of the "racialization of crime" on the part of the Canadian media, that is, their growing tendency to attribute crime problems to minority groups, particularly Blacks and to a lesser extent Asians. For example, in the last ten years, the Canadian media has reported with growing frequency about the violence associated with Jamaican, Chinese and Vietnamese gangs in major Canadian cities. But while the media have devoted a good deal of attention to minority crime, they have not provided detailed objective analysis and explanations of the causes of the problem. Therefore, both the academic community and the media have failed to adequately examine the issue of race and the Canadian justice system. Mosher conceives of his project as one way to fill this void. He argues that in order to understand the current status of race, crime and the criminal justice system in Canada, it is imperative to explore the historical legacies of racism in Canada.

Mosher's primary research focus is the treatment of Blacks and Asians in Ontario's criminal justice system from 1892-1961. He effectively reveals the role of racism against Asians in the very development of narcotics law in Canada, as well as in enforcement and sentencing. He further shows that Blacks were singled out for differential negative treatment at the hands of the criminal justice system in the areas of property and violent crimes.

Mosher's methodology is original. He attempts to refine conflict theories of law foundation which stress that laws emerge when powerful groups are able to impose their definitions of deviance on less powerful groups. Conflict theories correctly perceive the processes of law creation and enforcement as part of the structures of political and economic power in society but scholars employing conflict theories often fail to specify exactly who the most important dominant actors were and precisely how they succeeded in creating and enforcing law targeted toward racial minorities. Mosher employs an approach which closely examines the concrete actions of specific individuals over time and assesses their influence on broad legal change. As he puts it, theories of law formation should "begin at the macro level, move down to the micro level of individual action, and then go back up again" (59). Further, Mosher wants to correct the historical myopia of conflict theories by looking at 70 years of the criminal justice system's response to Blacks and Asians.

Mosher's sources consist of an impressive mixture of quantitative and qualitative data. He analyzed the jail records for approximately 23,000 criminal cases which took place in six large Ontario cities between 1892 and 1962. These records provided, among other things, information on the offenders' age, sex, race, country of birth, number of offenses charged, sentencing judge and sentence. In order to gain a clear understanding of the legal culture existing in the courts and jurisdictions under review, he also examined qualitative historical data about courts in these 6 cities. These sources included annual police department reports, criminal casebooks, legislative debates, government commission reports, popular magazine and newspaper articles and academic literature.

Mosher argues that racist attitudes toward Asians were responsible for generating Canada's initial drug legislation. Up until the late 1880s, the federal government was unwilling to criminalize the use of opium because it was used primarily by the middle class. However, by the turn of the century there was a significant amount of opium use by the socially disadvantaged immigrant Chinese population. Mosher carefully demonstrates how media sources of the late 1800s to the middle 1900s spent a good deal of energy on stories describing the alleged moral depravity of Chinese, their proclivity to visit opium dens, and their involvement in gambling offenses. It was within this atmosphere that the federal government passed several major pieces of legislation outlawing the use and sale of the drug. Criminal justice officials shared the negative views expressed by the media. Mosher's analysis of the police enforcement and sentencing of Asian drug crimes is detailed and nuanced. The police focused almost exclusively on the Chinese community in their drug law enforcement activities, often using legally questionable methods. Mosher finds, surprisingly, that Chinese defendants actually received shorter sentences than other drug offenders. He explains this finding by hypothesizing that sentencing judges were aware of the discriminatory treatment received by the Chinese at the hands of police and therefore attempted to compensate for it in their sentencing decisions. However, Chinese who were charged with trafficking in drugs, especially to Whites, were treated much more severely by sentencing judges.

While Asians were the target of racism in the area of drug law from 1892 to 1961, Black Canadians were singled out for discriminatory treatment in the areas of property and violent crimes. Mosher points out that while police discretion figured prominently in the area of Asian drug offenses because police chose to target the Asian community, police discretion was not as prominent in the area of property and violent crimes because these were brought to the attention of police by citizen complaints. Rather, judicial discretion was an important factor. Blacks were more likely than other groups to be convicted of property offenses, and were sentenced to lengthier terms of imprisonment. Similarly, they were more likely to be charged with serious violent offenses, more likely to be imprisoned for them, and received the longest sentences. Blacks were treated much more severely when their victims were White and more leniently when their victims were Black. Again, Mosher sets this quantitative data in the context of media and police report representations of Blacks as dangerous, prone to violence, and untrustworthy. The media often reported on the large physical size of Black offenders as evidence of their threat to public order.

Mosher's attention to media coverage throughout his book is effective. He demonstrates that in the case of Asians and Blacks in Canada the media was able to influence the boundaries of social discourse from which law and policy was set, resulting in discriminatory treatment of these groups in the criminal justice system. Mosher correctly spends a great deal of time analyzing current negative media depictions of minority criminals, and urges scholars to undertake the kind of rigorous investigations needed to avoid history repeating itself. His excellent study serves as a solid foundation upon which to build a body of research in the area of race and the Canadian criminal justice system.