On August 9, 2014, an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, by a white police officer, Darren Wilson. The deadly confrontation occurred under disputed circumstances and led to weeks of racially charged protests in the small, predominantly African American community. On November 24, 2014, St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch announced that Officer Wilson would not be indicted for the fatal shooting of Brown. A CBS news poll conducted shortly after these events in early December found that whites and African Americans had starkly different reactions to the decision not to indict Wilson. ^{Footnote 1} In response to a question asking whether the shooting was “justified, not justified, or don’t you know enough to say,” the survey found that 64% of black respondents thought the shooting was not justified, compared to only 20% of whites. Conversely, a plurality of white respondents (43%) thought the shooting justified, compared to only 6% of blacks.

Public opinion researchers have known for some time that racial divides of this magnitude are not uncommon. ^{Footnote 2} In its September 3, 2014, report entitled Race and Punishment: Racial Perceptions of Crime and Support for Punitive Policies, The Sentencing Project provides an excellent summary of this literature. ^{Footnote 3} The Sentencing Project is a nonprofit organization that has sought since its establishment in 1986 to promote reforms to the criminal justice system, mostly by advocating for alternatives to incarceration and reductions in unjust racial disparities. The primary author of the report, Nazgol Ghandnoosh, does more than simply document and explain the differing perceptions of blacks and whites, however; she also details how racial prejudice contributes to the maintenance of a biased and punitive criminal justice system. Ghandnoosh’s training as a sociologist is clearly on display in the report, which relies on a broad array of sociological, psychological, and political science scholarship. As the country continues to grapple with a series of controversial police shootings of unarmed black men, women, and children over the past several months, The Sentencing Project’s report provides a sobering account of the ways in which racial bias, in one form or another, is implicated in these tragedies.

What is responsible for the racial divide on criminal justice matters? One potential explanation is dispensed with quickly in the nearly 50-page report: differing victimization rates. Ghandnoosh summarizes information from the most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics, which demonstrates that blacks, and to a somewhat lesser degree Hispanics, are considerably more likely than whites to be victimized by both property and violent crime. Thus, whites are on average more attracted to punitive solutions to crime, even as they experience far less of it than do people of color. Moreover, the report indicates that blacks express more fear of crime than do whites. In short, neither objective victimization rates nor subjective concerns about crime are responsible for whites’ greater willingness to endorse tougher criminal justice policies.

Ghandnoosh identifies a number of factors that contribute to racial differences in support for punitive crime policies. One of these is the differential perception across racial groups of the perpetrators of crime. Basically, although African Americans do in fact commit more violent crimes, and some types of property crime, whites exaggerate the degree to which blacks are overrepresented among these perpetrators. ^{Footnote 4} And, not surprisingly, these misperceptions are associated with greater support for punitive crime policies. ^{Footnote 5}

In order to more fully examine the issue of perceptions of crime, The Sentencing Project report relies heavily on the extensive social psychological literature on unconscious bias. This literature primarily utilizes the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to uncover these biases. The IAT measures in milliseconds the speed at which the “appropriate” pairs of objects can be identified. Psychologists have found that more familiar pairings are more quickly identified than less familiar pairings. Consequently, study participants usually respond more quickly to words or images associated with African Americans when paired with negative adjectives—such as violent—than when paired with positive adjectives. Conversely, words or images linked with whites are typically identified more rapidly when paired with positive adjectives. Most importantly, because this task happens so quickly the rate at which the subject responds occurs outside of conscious awareness. The report summarizes a vast literature showing that whites’ greater support for punitive crime policies is due in part to their heightened levels of implicit antiblack bias.

A promising line of research that was not cited in the report offers an interesting, albeit disturbing, twist on the role of implicit attitudes. This literature suggests that racial prejudice per se, whether implicit or explicit, is not the only attitudinal factor influencing policy preferences in the domain of criminal justice. Whites might also systematically dehumanize African Americans such that it becomes acceptable to impose the most punitive remedies on black criminal suspects and defendants. Specifically, social psychologist Phillip Goff and his colleagues have argued that many ordinary citizens as well as police officers implicitly associate African Americans with apes. ^{Footnote 6} This linkage has a long and deplorable history in this country and, although it is no longer acceptable to publicly characterize blacks as apelike, these researchers argue that whites who implicitly endorse this connection are also more likely to condone police brutality directed at blacks, to overestimate the age of African American children suspected of committing crimes, to overestimate the criminal culpability of these children, and to underestimate the culpability of comparable white children. So, in short, elevated levels of support for punitive crime policies among whites may be due to systematic dehumanization of blacks, rather than more traditional forms of prejudice.

The Report’s emphasis on unconscious bias is understandable, given the voluminous literature on the subject, but I nevertheless found this somewhat dissatisfying. For one thing, it is not altogether clear whether the IAT is detecting bias that the individual is unaware of or if some participants are simply reluctant to report their biases using explicit measures (due to social desirability concerns). This distinction is important because what the report often presumes to be “unconscious, and unintentional racial biases” could in fact be motivated by a very deliberate and intentional prejudice (p. 17). Specifying the mechanism or mechanisms for findings of implicit bias may also have implications for some of the solutions proposed near the end of the report. For example, Ghandnoosh cites a recent report from the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity that highlights the importance of education campaigns to raise awareness about implicit bias (p. 39). However, if IATs are measuring forms of bias that an individual is aware of but unwilling to admit to in public, then this strategy may prove ineffective or even counterproductive. ^{Footnote 7}

Another, perhaps more fundamental, problem with relying on implicit association tests to explain support for punitive crime policies is that the evidence for such a linkage is mixed. The report does a great job of citing the numerous studies that show a strong correlation between implicit associations and prejudicial attitudes and behaviors. This research is especially impressive when focusing on elites in the criminal justice system. However, owing in part to their complexity, implicit association tests are rarely conducted on representative samples. One of the first representative surveys to include such a test was the American National Election Studies (ANES). In 2008, the principal investigators of the ANES, Jon Krosnick and Arthur Lupia, included the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) on their survey. As with the IAT, the AMP is designed to measure implicit or unconscious attitudes. With the AMP, participants are very briefly (in roughly 75–250 milliseconds) exposed to one of several randomized pictures of either a white or African American male face. Following each exposure, respondents are asked to evaluate a different Chinese pictograph as either “pleasant” or “unpleasant.” Researchers have shown that, on average, individuals who respond negatively to black faces are also inclined to provide negative evaluations of the otherwise neutral Chinese pictographs they view, thus suggesting an implicit bias against African Americans. ^{Footnote 8}

Does the AMP detect politically relevant forms of bias when conducted on representative samples? When Nathan Kalmoe and Spencer Piston examined whether scores on the AMP were associated with support for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, they found mostly null results after controlling for explicit racial attitudes. ^{Footnote 9} These authors also examined the influence of the AMP on support for various policy preferences associated directly or indirectly with race, including affirmative action, welfare, and—most relevant for present purposes—the death penalty. Again, after controlling for explicit measures of prejudice, they found virtually no association between the AMP and policy support. None of this should suggest that implicit or unconscious racial biases do not exist, that they cannot be measured, or that they are inconsequential. The pattern of results across multiple studies, and literally millions of test takers, are too consistent with theoretical expectations to easily dismiss. ^{Footnote 10} Nevertheless, researchers in this literature are not typically interested in linking implicit associations with policy preferences. In this domain, at least, it would seem that more explicit considerations—including overt prejudice—represent a more persuasive explanation.

Although much of The Sentencing Project report focuses on mass attitudes, it does not let elites off the hook. It identifies several reasons why the American public, particularly whites, are inclined to associate crime with African Americans and Hispanics. First, as indicated previously, the report does not shy away from the uncomfortable reality that racial and ethnic minorities disproportionately commit many forms of crime. To its credit, the report does not stop there, as it also notes that this is primarily due to the fact that African Americans and Hispanics are far more likely than whites to live in the midst of concentrated urban poverty. In spite of these enduring racial segregation patterns, blacks and Hispanics are not disproportionately more likely to either use or sell illegal drugs. Unfortunately, these figures are not reflected in state prison populations, which suggest that minorities are disproportionately targeted for drug crime arrests. In any case, Ghandnoosh concludes that while perceptions about race and crime are in part a function of racial differences in the commission of crime, this represents only a partial explanation.

A second contributor to stereotyped perceptions of crime is the mass media. The Sentencing Project notes that media accounts, particularly television news stories, systematically overreport the number of white (often female) crime victims and black (typically male) perpetrators. Additionally, black criminal victimization is consistently underreported. Similar biases have also been uncovered regarding Hispanic perpetrators and victims. To give some sense of the magnitude of these biases, Ghandnoosh refers to one study of crime reporting in Los Angeles by Travis Dixon and Daniel Linz, which found that although whites made up only about 10% of victims according to local crime reports, they represented over 40% of victims in televised accounts. ^{Footnote 11}

Political candidates and elected officials also share some responsibility for racialized perceptions of crime. Indeed, at least some studies suggest that commentary from political elites exerts a greater influence on public opinion about crime than the actual incidence of crime (p. 24). Politicians face an almost irresistible temptation to exploit whites’ racialized fears of crime, as when the George H. W. Bush campaign relentlessly publicized the misdeeds of “Willie” Horton, during the 1988 presidential campaign. Horton—who had always gone by the first name William but was renamed “Willie,” presumably to sound more menacing—was a black convicted murderer in Massachusetts who subsequently raped a white woman and assaulted her fiancé while on a weekend furlough. The incident was used ostensibly to suggest that Bush’s Democratic opponent, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, was soft on crime. The Sentencing Project report cites the work of Tali Mendelberg, which showed that exposure to the Horton message was in fact mostly effective at activating antiblack prejudice rather than attitudes about crime. ^{Footnote 12}

Although the report does not make this point, it is worth emphasizing that politicians in both parties play to these racial fears. For example, in the midst of his campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for president in 1992, then-Governor Bill Clinton generated considerable media attention by returning to his home state of Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally challenged African American on death row. In all likelihood, this effort was designed to avoid the perceived mistakes of the failed Dukakis campaign of 1988 and to signal that Clinton was not a traditional, racially liberal Democrat.

In addition to the incidence of crime, mass media reports, and political appeals, The Sentencing Project report also attributes racialized perceptions of crime to overt racial prejudice. Ghandnoosh points out, in keeping with the consensus in the literature on racial attitudes, that contemporary prejudice is far less likely to involve open acceptance of the notion that blacks and other minorities are biologically inferior. There is considerable evidence of a dramatic decline in such attitudes among whites over the last several decades. However, according to some researchers, a more modern form of racial prejudice has emerged that focuses less on the presumed genetic failings of minorities and instead emphasizes their cultural deficiencies (p. 30). One of the most enduring negative stereotypes about minorities is that they do not try hard enough to get ahead. The report cites data from the 2008 General Social Survey (GSS), which found that over 40% of whites characterize African Americans as less hardworking than their own racial group. Although not mentioned in the report, the ANES has asked an identical question since the 1990s. In the 2012 ANES survey, about 50% of whites rated blacks as less hardworking than their own racial group. The comparable figure for white attitudes about Hispanics was 27%. These attitudes are important because, as indicated in the report, “the prevalence of lingering prejudices and the reluctance to acknowledge structural racism creates a schism for many whites between widely-held egalitarian principles and support for policies to address racial gaps” (p. 30).

The role that prejudice, or antiminority bias more broadly, might play in structuring public opinion—and ultimately public policy—on matters of criminal justice is critical. It is, however controversial, the most straightforward explanation for why some whites seem to prefer a racially biased criminal justice system. For example, Mark Peffley and Jon Hurwitz, relying upon a 2000-2001 national survey, found that white support for the death penalty actually increased when they were informed that “most of the people who are executed are African American.” ^{Footnote 13} Similarly, Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt reported in separate experiments that when whites are informed about racial disparities in incarceration rates, they become more supportive of punitive policies such as three-strikes laws and New York’s notorious stop-and-frisk policy. ^{Footnote 14} Racially motivated bias, of one sort or another, also helps to account for an emerging literature showing that skin color and Afrocentric facial features are associated with length of sentence, the frequency of being stopped or arrested by the police, and even whether a defendant receives the death penalty. In each case, individuals with darker skin colors and/or more Afrocentric facial features were more likely to receive more punitive treatment.

Thus, perhaps the chief advantage of The Sentencing Project report is that it draws our attention to persistent racial disparities in the criminal justice system even as it highlights the role that public opinion plays in sustaining these inequities. Needless to say, this comes at an especially important time given the unprecedented media attention that has been devoted to allegations of police misconduct in African American communities. As indicated previously, there is at least some evidence that various forms of racial prejudice, as well as the dehumanization of African Americans, can help to explain these encounters. Political scientists who examine issues of criminal justice would do well to consider both sources of bias, especially dehumanization. This latter explanation is typically overlooked in the literature, in part because of the near consensus among scholars that more modern forms of prejudice have generally displaced “old-fashioned” forms of racial bias.

This conclusion may be premature. At the time of this writing, several controversies involving police shootings of unarmed black men and boys have yet to be legally resolved. Nevertheless, it is hard to reflect upon the case of Tamir Rice—a 12-year-old black boy who was playing with a toy gun before being shot and killed by police—or the case of Walter Scott—an African American man pulled over for a broken taillight who was subsequently shot in the back as he was running away from a police officer—without wondering whether deadly force was used against them because they were not viewed as fully human. Social psychologists have shown that individuals belonging to more powerful groups are inclined to dehumanize people who belong to less powerful groups. ^{Footnote 15} Stark power imbalances have been an inescapable feature of race relations in this country since before the founding. As a result, it is hardly far-fetched to suggest that these enduring inequities might also encourage the devaluing of black lives.