The ability of the poor to adjust to social and economic disadvantage increased as the prosperity of the 1990s increased. As a result, the poor and less fortunate became alien to the well-to-do. The economic and criminal justice policies that resulted were focused increasingly on punishing the poor and people of color, and attempted to discredit social explanations of problematic behavior. This culminated in the vast array of zero-tolerance policies that emerged from the “broken windows” theory. The research, advanced by two criminologists, posited the theory that broken windows left unaddressed in a community would invite criminal conduct.
Policy makers, at a loss for answers in dealing with increasing homelessness, embedded poverty, and increasing petty crime, jumped on the theory and began treating manifestations of poverty as crime. Communities upset with graffiti, prostitution, and public drug use and the nuisance crimes that accompany these activities supported increased enforcement over social programs. As a result, the criminal justice infrastructure exploded. Community policing and community prosecution—programs that had initially come into being to be more sensitive to community needs—morphed into misdemeanor and petty crime enforcement. Community courts of all types sprang up. Many of these courts were modeled after drug courts, though they lacked the same rigorous empirical support for success, and were financed by the federal government and applauded by local communities. In some part, lack of services or treatment for the homeless and drug addicted increased the frustration of communities; the new criminal justice focus on enforcement and incarceration for petty crimes with some treatment available seemed to the public a more palatable approach.
Local television news and fictional programming as well as reality police shows substantially exaggerate the crime problem in the United States. Typically, law enforcement is shown in a somewhat flattering light on most programming, and crime and the circumstances of criminal conduct are not contextualized for the viewer. The result is the overwhelming impression that “these are just bad people.” Employment, housing, education, and opportunity are rarely, if ever, mentioned in descriptions of the commission of crimes or the investigation, trial, and sentencing of television suspects, defendants, and ex-offenders. The media not only contributes to the perception that ex-offenders cannot ever integrate into society; it also has profound effects on how race is perceived. Offenders are disproportionately shown as people of color and often in the role of violent psychopath or gang leader.
In addition to lack of context, there is a stereotyping of roles (also called “typification”) when it comes to the race of characters. Although some studies suggest that the actual number of minority offenders is less than that of White offenders, on television the percentage of minorities shown as offenders compared to those shown in other roles is much higher than with White characters. Consequently, it is not enough to know the content of television programming; it is also important to examine the consequences of viewing this content. The media’s perpetuation of racial stereotypes of the typical offender may not only be a function of African Americans being shown more frequently as offenders than in other roles; rather, it may include the way viewers process this information about race in making comparisons to their own knowledge (or assumed knowledge) about certain races.
G. What People Think They Know about Other Races
There is a good bit of research on the knowledge lens through which people develop opinions and strongly held beliefs. This “ordinary knowledge” is often hard to contradict even in light of specialized knowledge to the contrary produced by social science professionals.60 Ordinary knowledge is derived from many sources that most citizens would find difficult to identify. When consistent with ordinary knowledge, specialized findings of social science tend to enhance the validity of ordinary knowledge. However, when specialized findings are inconsistent with ordinary knowledge, they are generally ignored or dismissed as unreliable or irrelevant.61
The media news coverage of crime through a racialized lens has had a pronounced effect on the way Americans view people of color generally and African Americans in particular. Media portrayals of violent crime, especially visual images, are dominated by pictures of African Americans. The Washington Post reported that even when the racial identity of a criminal is not pictured on television, two-thirds of those who think that the perpetrator was shown believe that he was Black.62 This presents a very seductive picture in the minds of all Americans that Blacks are the primary perpetrators of crime, even when statistics objectively defy that picture. In situations when crime and race are linked, the crime is generally reported as involving violence—most particularly murder, robbery, and rape. This creates and solidifies in the mind of the American public the myth that Blacks are more often the worst criminals.63 This stereotype must surely cause excessive fear and create certain unwarranted beliefs about people of color. In circumstances where Whites have African American friends, the strength of the stereotype, reinforced by negative media portrayals, results in the belief that their Black friends are the exception to the “rule.”64
H. Impact of News Media on Public Policy
Crime coverage plays an agenda-setting role, and has a significant influence on the public’s perceptions of frequency and behavior. News media play a number of roles in the criminal justice debate and policy agenda that ultimately affect offender reentry. News coverage influences the public by “priming” certain perceptions through its coverage of an issue.65 Additionally, media coverage has systematically distorted reality by overreporting violent crime and by focusing on the race of the perpetrators in the coverage of violent crime.66
One of the ways in which the news media functions in an agenda-setting role is in the way it fosters public misperception, especially as public opinion relates to crime rates, the rates at which parolees become repeat offenders, and the nature and severity of punishment that the legal system metes out.67 Increasingly, people rely primarily on the media to get their information regarding what percentage of people on welfare use it as an alternative to seeking a job, the proportion of ex-mental patients who commit crimes, and which minority groups have criminal tendencies. These media messages are often very distorted or incorrect. Examination of media reporting on crime shows that the race of minority offenders, especially for violent crimes, is often disproportionately reported.68
One of the prime examples of the media’s influence on public policy can be seen in its description of the intersection of poverty and crime, both of which are portrayed as primarily an inner-city problem affecting people of color. Blacks are often shown not only as poor but also as overrepresented in the juvenile justice system. The public’s understanding of youth crime is shaped in large part by the media’s portrayal of disproportionate minority involvement. Meda Chesney-Lind, among others, has identified the common media practice of demonizing young women of color. Contemporary news accounts of young African American and Latino girls usually show them as gang members, despite the fact that there is little evidence to suggest any significant increase in female gang membership or involvement.69 These media distortions of juvenile crime, perpetrator race, and juvenile violence dramatically affect public consumer perception.
Media reports identified violent juvenile crime on the increase in the 1980s and 1990s. Lori Dorfman, director of the Berkley Media Studies Group, and Vincent Shiraldi, president of the Justice Policy Institute, coauthored a report entitled “Off Balance: Youth, Race, and Crime in the News.”70 That report discussed the impact of the media on the perceptions of youth violence. The authors examined more than one hundred studies of news content featuring youth and crime.71 The studies provided overwhelming evidence that news coverage of crime—especially violent crime—is out of proportion to its occurrence, distorts the proportion of crime committed by youth, and overrepresents perpetrators of color while underrepresenting victims of color. Acts of violence are pushed to the foreground despite occurring relatively infrequently.72 The end result is a change in public opinion and a corresponding change in public policy.
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