Pubdate: Mon, 09 Apr 2007
Source: Palo Alto Daily News (CA)
Copyright: 2007 Palo Alto Daily News
Contact:  http://www.paloaltodailynews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/965
Author: Banks Albach, Daily News Staff Writer
Cited: The Sentencing Project http://www.sentencingproject.org
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/racial.htm (Racial Issues)

STANFORD CONFERENCE TO EXPLORE PRISONS, RACE

Watchdog Group Claims Nearly Half of Nation's Inmates Are Black

American prisons hold roughly 2.1 million people today, two-thirds of 
whom are racial and ethnic minorities, according to the Sentencing 
Project, a prison reform group that will take part in a Stanford 
University conference this week on race, inequality and incarceration.

The Washington, D.C.-based project claims that almost half are 
African American and 17 percent are Hispanic.  African Americans and 
Hispanics make up 13 and 10 percent of the U.S. population, respectively.

Organized by the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, Wednesday's event 
will explore the factors causing these skewed incarceration numbers 
- -- factors that impact many young minorities starting at birth, the 
center's director Kara Dansky said.

The majority of the 13 professors slated to speak work in the field 
of sociology, meaning panels will focus mostly on issues like drug 
addiction, crime and policing patterns, and education, rather than 
the legal process, Dansky said.

"It's very easy to say that this is a natural consequence of racism 
in American history," Dansky said. "But that doesn't answer all the 
questions. It's not as simple as a sentencing system."

African American males in their 20s are hardest hit, according to an 
article by Marc Mauer, assistant director to the Sentencing Project 
and a speaker Wednesday. Nearly one in three are under "some form of 
criminal justice supervision on any given day," Mauer claims.

He noted that violent crime among African Americans - roughly the 
same since 1976, according to the Sentencing Project - is high 
compared to other groups, but that it does not correlate to their 
rate of incarceration, which has been rising since that same year.

The numbers are indisputable, said San Mateo County Chief Deputy 
District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe. He said his office ignores racial 
categories by not including them in case files and asking police to 
leave them out of case reports.

"We worry about it," Wagstaffe said. "We want to make all our 
decisions colorblind."

But his office has little control over how judges might set bail or 
how a jury perceives a person's race, Wagstaffe said.

"People have stereotypes," he said. "It's the biggest thing in 
selection of a jury and arguing to a jury."

Conference speakers will also discuss the disparities between 
sentencing for whites and African Americans who commit the same crime 
and why minorities face stiffer sentences for low-level property and 
drug offenses, both of which are analyzed in another Sentencing 
Project study titled "Racial Disparity in Sentencing: A Review of the 
Literature."

To register for the free conference, which runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. 
Wednesday in the Bechtel Conference Center at 616 Serra St., visit 
http://macula.stanford.edu:8080/opinio/s?s=53. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake