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.