Rich Thanks to Racism: How the Ultra-Wealthy Profit from Racial Injustice
Jim Freeman
312 pages, ILR Press, 2021
In Rich Thanks to Racism: How the Ultra Wealthy Profit from Racial Injustice, I introduce the concept of “strategic racism,” which is when efforts to defend or expand systemic racism result in greater economic or political power for oneself. Perhaps the quintessential example of strategic racism is the pushback against criminal justice reform in the US. For example, there has been a determined effort to portray the killing of George Floyd, Daunte Wright, and so many other Black and Brown people as anomalies, or as the result of a few “bad cops.” The reality, however, is that they are the predictable results of a vastly oversized, overbroad, and violent criminal justice system that is being used within Black and Brown communities as a catch-all solution for an enormous variety of public health and safety issues. And as should be obvious by now, they will continue to occur until we collectively decide to eliminate this particularly virulent form of systemic racism.
The challenge, of course, is what to do about it. Most of us have become so accustomed to our current system of mass criminalization and incarceration that it can be difficult to imagine something different. However, it really shouldn’t be that difficult. There are superior options virtually everywhere we look.
For example, in the early 1970s our public investment in the criminal justice system was only about one-fifth of what it is now, and our incarcerated population was 85 percent lower than it is currently.
Additionally, there are already numerous places in the US where we have been able to advance public safety without creating the type of police state that exists within many Black and Brown communities—namely, virtually every predominantly white community in the country.
In fact, if we are looking for other models of places that don’t rely on incarceration as much as we do, we can just pull out a map and throw a dart. Any other country in the world that we hit is going to have a lower incarceration rate than we do.
The fact is that almost every other place in the world, at almost every point in history, has used criminalization and incarceration less than the US does within communities of color. So it shouldn’t be that hard to envision something better.
To actually implement a more just and humane approach, we will need to engage in a comprehensive overhaul of our approach to public safety, including substantially adjusting the roles and budgets of all components of the criminal justice system. We will also need to reassess our understanding of what and who actually makes us safe.—Jim Freeman
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As anyone who has been personally affected by crime or violence can attest, the experience can be deeply traumatic, with profound and long-lasting effects. It can be almost like getting infected with a highly resilient and extremely contagious virus. Not only are you harmed personally, but it can be very easy to then pass that harm along to others. Once others around you become affected, they often pass it along to more people, who pass it along to more people, and then quite often the effects of that initial harm circle back around to affect you negatively again, creating a vicious cycle of crime and violence that can be difficult to interrupt.
But it can be interrupted. Doing so, however, requires that we ask the right questions. Currently, our typical approach after a crime is committed is to merely ask, “What should the punishment for that crime be?” The question we should be asking is: “How could we have prevented the crime from happening in the first place, and what is the best way to respond to it that meets the needs of everyone involved and makes it less likely to happen again?”
In other words, we should be looking at crime the same way epidemiologists look at diseases. Their focus is on examining the causes of a disease, how it spreads, and how it can be prevented and minimized. They focus on the big picture and try to insulate their decisions from irrational fears, anxieties, and biases. For them, diseases that pop up are clues to be followed. They recognize that such outbreaks are actually symptoms of larger, underlying problems, and the key to creating a healthier society is to attack the root causes while managing the symptoms with the most effective treatments available.
Similarly, the types of crimes being committed can be clues that tell us quite a lot about where the most pressing unmet needs are in our society. We should be following those clues and directing our attention to addressing the issues they uncover. While we cannot eliminate all the wrongdoing that we inflict on each other, we can make it far less frequent and far less damaging. That comes from how we choose to allocate our resources and how we choose to respond to crimes when they happen. In other words, to create truly safe communities, we need to move from a reactive public safety approach to a proactive, preventive, and holistic public safety approach.
To do so, we need to start with an honest assessment of community needs. We must analyze what is driving crime and violence and proceed from there. Within many communities of color, in particular, what we will find is that while we have been overinvesting in the justice system, we have also been underinvesting in, or divesting from, strategies that are critical for stopping crime before it starts, including the following:
- Improving educational opportunities
- Creating more living-wage jobs and financial supports for low-income families
- Providing higher-quality, trauma-informed physical, mental, and behavioral health care
- Expanding early childhood education, afterschool programs, job opportunities for youth, and other wraparound supports for young people
- Increasing affordable housing options
- Providing extensive wraparound supports for crime survivors/victims
Not only are such investments necessary to address underlying causes of crime, but studies also show that they are far more effective than police or prisons at preventing crime.1
Alongside these investments, we must also rethink how we respond to crime. Instead of making police the first responders to almost all public safety and public health issues, as we have within many Black and Brown communities, we need to start using all the tools in our toolbox. Our responses should be tailored to fit the problems that arise, and in all cases, the goals in responding to crime should be minimizing the harm, promoting healing, providing for authentic accountability, and preventing such incidents from recurring. Thus, instead of criminalizing people who use drugs, we should be connecting them with treatment and support. Instead of criminalizing those suffering from mental illness, we should be connecting them with mental health professionals who can help treat their underlying conditions. Instead of criminalizing the homeless, we should be connecting them with social workers, nurses, and opportunities to improve their quality of life. Instead of criminalizing violent acts, we should be using restorative and transformative justice practitioners, and other violence intervention experts, whenever possible to break the cycle of violence and ensure that both offenders and survivors/victims get the support they need. Instead of criminalizing K–12 students, we should be providing them with the developmental supports they need. And yes, when the need arises for someone trained in the use of force, and there are no other options for handling the situation appropriately, then we can bring in the police, but only in the most carefully considered and narrowly focused way.
The operative question should always be: Who is best equipped to solve the problem at hand? Most of the time, that is not going to be the police and prosecutors. Even though there will be circumstances within the near future in which they will continue to be the right call, we should be actively working as a society to build communities’ capacity to address public safety issues without having to rely on the incapacitation of people or the threat of violence.
The vast majority of US residents agree with these ideas.2 The ones lagging behind in recognizing the need for a more comprehensive and nuanced problem-solving approach to public safety are policy makers. They seem to intuitively understand the need to be multidisciplinary in other areas, but not in this one. For example, nobody has any problem understanding that in schools, you have teachers who specialize in different subjects, support personnel like social workers, psychologists, and nurses to address non-academic needs, special education teachers to assist students with disabilities, specially trained teachers to meet the language needs of English learners, and so on. The same is true for home maintenance and health care services, where we have dozens of particular specialties designed around the variety of needs that exist in the population. However, with regard to public safety, our policy makers continue to be one-trick ponies. Not only do they rely too much on police departments; they also fail to see that even the idea of a police department as the filter through which public safety and health issues must pass is outdated, unnecessary, and ineffective.
Rather than a local police department, shouldn’t each community have a public health and safety department? Police wouldn’t lead such a department; they would be at most just one spoke within a comprehensive, community-problem-solving wheel. For example, such a department would have the full spectrum of professionals who have been identified to best address the needs of the community, such as social workers, psychologists, substance use counselors, conflict mediators, mental and behavioral health specialists, nurses, restorative and transformative justice practitioners, violence intervention experts, public health specialists, harm reduction practitioners, gang intervention workers, and trauma-informed healing practitioners. Rather than just having police on patrol throughout the community, you would have a variety of trained professionals with a diverse set of skills available to respond to and, more importantly, prevent crime and violence. When you called 911, switchboard operators would have a menu of options available to craft the appropriate response, depending on the circumstances.3 Crime survivors/victims would have access to a far more robust set of resources to better meet their needs. Rather than simply meting out punishment as a reflexive response to crime, we would develop capacity to address and resolve such threats within communities while holding offenders responsible for their actions in more meaningful ways. In schools, educators would have access to the same collection of support services to meet the full array of student needs instead of simply resorting to out-of-school suspensions, expulsions, arrests, and referrals to the juvenile justice system. Ultimately, not only would we wind up criminalizing far less behavior; we would become far more effective at solving community problems and improving community health and safety. Thus, we could expect that what we currently think of as the criminal justice system would progressively shrink over time, in contrast to the steady growth of the past several decades.
Many of the component parts of this idea are already in existence. There are highly effective restorative justice and transformative justice programs in existence across the country.4 There are numerous jurisdictions with initiatives that refer what had long been law enforcement matters to community-based services.5 There are some cities that are expanding the notion of who can be a first responder to public health and safety issues.6 There are others that have been effectively deploying violence intervention and gang intervention workers to address persistent issues of street violence.7 A number of cities are also taking a far more holistic and prevention-focused approach around issues of crime, violence, and trauma.8 And many cities and states are pursuing justice reinvestment (or “divest/invest”) efforts.9
The problem is that no cities, counties, or states are doing all these things in a robust, comprehensive way. We remain far too reliant on a criminalization-centric system that routinely produces poorly designed responses that are delivered by individuals with the wrong skill sets for the tasks they are asked to perform.
The reality that we all must come to terms with is that safety doesn’t come from police, prosecutors, jails, and prisons. Instead, true safety comes from healthy, well-resourced, and equitable communities employing the best available strategies for both preventing and responding to crime and violence. It comes from building and expanding multidisciplinary systems of care. The sooner we collectively realize how much more effective and beneficial this approach is for all people than our current system of mass criminalization, the sooner we can finally put an end to this devastating systemic racism that has needlessly harmed and taken far too many lives.