10.5: The Racialization of Crime and Deviance- Historical Foundations of Racial Criminalization

The contemporary racial disparities within the criminal legal system have deep historical roots in America’s legacy of slavery, segregation, and racial subordination. Following Reconstruction, southern states implemented Black Codes—laws that specifically targeted African Americans for behaviors that were either not criminalized or received lighter punishment when committed by Whites. These laws effectively criminalized Black existence and provided a legal mechanism to re-enslave African Americans through the convict leasing system; a system that allowed for convicted prisoners to be leased to private companies and other individuals as laborers. The association between Blackness and criminality became further entrenched through racial terror lynching, which was often justified through allegations of criminal behavior (particularly sexual violence against White women), regardless of evidence or due process.

The early 20th century witnessed the emergence of explicitly racially biased drug laws, such as anti-opium legislation targeting Chinese immigrants and early marijuana prohibitions associated with Mexican migrants. These laws established a pattern of using drug policy as a mechanism for racial control—a pattern that would reach its apex in the latter decades of the century with the War on Drugs. As legal scholar Michelle Alexander has compellingly argued, these historical practices evolved into the contemporary system of mass incarceration, which functions as a “New Jim Crow” (2010) by disproportionately targeting African Americans through ostensibly race-neutral laws and policies.