Race, Organizations, and the Organizing Process by Melissa E. Wooten

Author:Melissa E. Wooten [Wooten, Melissa E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Emerald Publishing
Published: 2019-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

Reinforcing Colorblindness

The local institutional environment played a particularly important role in shaping the assumptions and expectations of the criminal justice professionals I interviewed. In a state so actively engaged in crafting a “second-chance society,” many of the reentry workers I spoke with believed that former prisoners who did poorly after release had no one to blame but themselves for not seeking out and taking advantage of the resources available to them. I repeatedly heard high praise for state policymakers and Department of Corrections leaders who were integral players in the eventual implementation of important criminal justice reforms.

In 2015, Democratic Governor Dannel P. Malloy announced his office’s “Second Chance Society” initiative designed to reduce crime and reintegrate nonviolent offenders back into society. This widely heralded proposal sought to usher in a new era of smart on crime strategies that would chip away at the prison population and create safer communities. Four years later, it appears that many of the implemented reforms worked. Policy changes to reclassify certain nonviolent offenses as misdemeanors, decrease the reliance on cash bail, ban the box on employment applications,4 regulate the use of solitary confinement, and funnel more money to nonprofit service organizations have changed the way in which Connecticut operates its criminal justice system in meaningful ways. And although it is empirically difficult to attribute reductions in crime to any specific policy changes, it is evident that Connecticut is experience historically low violent and property crime rates while having reduced its incarcerated population to its mid 1990s levels. To the extent that decarceration is the benchmark, Connecticut’s experiment with reform has largely, if incrementally, worked.

Still, severe racial disparities continue to exist in Connecticut’s criminal justice system. Although Blacks made up only 10% of the state population in 2010, latest estimates show that they accounted for roughly 43% of all ex-prisoners in the state (Shannon et al. 2017). And as stated earlier, Black Connecticut residents are currently almost nine times more likely than their White peers to experience incarceration, giving pause to the idea that Connecticut has overcome its problems with mass incarceration. How then, in a state wrought racial inequality, could the respondents I interviewed and the organizations in which they worked fail to actively contend with the racial inequality embedded both in the local criminal justice field and more broadly? Part of the answer lies in a national mythology tradition that has failed to adequately confront the generational harms of historical oppression (Fox, 2012). But although the national picture tells an important story, it fails to reckon with local-level politics and cultural change that shape the lives of actors in more immediate ways (Fig. 2).

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