RECOGNIZING THE ELEPHANT IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

Chapel Hill lawyer Bill Massengale represents Death Row inmates. In recent
cases of two African-American clients, there was a disturbing pattern.

"Both were tried by white judges. They each had two white lawyers, two
white prosecutors and 28 white jurors. They never saw a black man in the
courtrooms where there were being tried for their lives."

It's a phenomenon all too common in the criminal justice system in North
Carolina. Not just in death penalty cases, but throughout the legal system
the burden of crime and punishment falls more heavily on black people than
whites -- not just disproportionately in percentages of blacks and whites,
but in absolute numbers of black people, especially men, passing through
our criminal legal system. Here are some of the numbers:

Sixty-seven percent of the 32,000 inmates in the state's prisons are
African-American, most of them young men.

From 1988 to 1999, the white male prison population increased 43 percent.
The black male population increased 100 percent.

Sixty-one percent of prisoners on North Carolina's Death Row are
minorities. All but one of the people executed in North Carolina since 1984
were convicted of killing white people, even though many more blacks than
whites are murder victims.

These and other statistics on race and justice in North Carolina prompted
the N.C. Council of Churches last year to issue a report called "The
Elephant in the Courtroom." The title refers to the fact that race is such
a dominant factor in our criminal justice system, but no one pays attention
to it. We are, says Lao Rubert, head of the Carolina Justice Policy Center,
in denial.

"When it comes to race in the criminal justice system, it is an elephant
sitting there right in our living room," she says. "We need to ... get the
courage to look at the elephant and to acknowledge that it's there. Because
if we don't see it, we can't do anything about it."

Last weekend, some 50 people gathered at Binkley Memorial Baptist Church in
Raleigh to try to do something about it. They talked about the roots of the
racial injustice issue and possible solutions.

One problem, as Massengale pointed out, is that the state's court system is
an overwhelmingly white institution passing judgment largely on
African-Americans and other minorities. One solution offered at last week's
discussion is to scrap the system of electing judges, which favors whites,
and replace it with appointment of judges.

Carl Fox, district attorney for Orange and Chatham counties, is one of the
two African-American DAs in the state. He calls for a reordering of the
enforcement priorities of local police departments that, he says, divert
resources from attacking the roots of crime. "If we spent the kind of
effort keeping the drug traffic out of African-American communities that we
spend keeping people off of Franklin Street on Halloween," he said, "we
wouldn't have a drug problem."

Drugs clearly are intricately tied up in the problem of crime, particularly
among young black men, and again the concern is about priorities. Rather
than focusing on punishing people for drug-related crime, society should be
providing drug treatment resources to stem the demand for drugs and the
crime associated with it. Between 60 percent and 80 percent of people in
prison have a drug problem, says Rubert, but there is little effort to
treat their problem in prison and virtually no safety net for addicted
people after they leave prison.

Drug crime enforcement also falls most heavily on the black community, in
part because the open air market of drug dealing is so visible and in part
because it generates so much drug-related crime -- theft, armed robbery,
breaking and entering, assault and murder. There is just as much drug use
in white society, experts say, but it is not prosecuted because the crime
is victimless.

Massengale is a former assistant DA under Fox who recalls participating in
police raids in which an entire street in the African-American neighborhood
was targeted. "You have incredible amounts of drugs in the fraternities in
Chapel Hill," he said. "There are more drugs there than in the entire
African-American community. Why don't you ever bust them?" The answer is
that it's easier to identify and prosecute African-American street dealing,
while drug use in the white community is more difficult to prosecute, both
legally and politically. "There's nothing that would be better for reform
of our drug laws than to have about 100 students for UNC and 100 from Duke
get caught for drugs," said Tye Hunter, head of the N.C. Office of Indigent
Defense. "Then there would be some activity for looking at drug offenders
in the court system."

There were other suggestions for addressing racism in the criminal justice
system: providing training and education for inmates while they are in
prison, recruiting employers to provide jobs for them when they emerge and,
perhaps most important, keeping young black males in school so they won't
stray into crime in the first place.

All of those are the hard part. There is no easy part. The first priority,
as Lao Rubert suggests, is seeing the elephant.