Essay 3 Draft

               It is clear to Scholars that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) manipulate crime statistics to increase funding for police forces consequently increasing incarceration rates. So why do others view the issue of mass incarceration as a plot to keep racism alive in America? One sticking point in the debate is how the FBI unified state-collected crime data into one federalized network called the Uniform Crime Reporting program (UCR) starting in the 1970s. Scholars disagree as to whether mass incarceration is linked to the UCR or racist politicians wishing to decrease rights in minority demographics. Michelle Alexander argues that the mass incarceration of minority groups is due to policies which push racial control such as the War on drugs to create a “New Jim Crow”. In contrast, Elizabeth Hinton asserts that the increase in mass incarceration was caused by the FBI using the UCR program to overinflate crime rates to receive more funding. Underlying this discrepancy are conflicting assumptions over race versus economic policy. In this essay, I will examine the methods in which the FBI began collecting violent crime rate data in the 1970s to argue that the rise of mass incarceration in America is due more so to bureaucratic greed, rather than the Facilitation of a political system which supports racial segregation.

Michelle Alexander jump started the conversation of Mass Incarceration in 2010 with her thought-provoking analogy the “New Jim Crow”. She argued that the primary reason minority groups in America were disproportionately imprisoned, was due to an hidden political system directly aimed at taking away the rights of African Americans and other minorities, much like the Jim Crow laws of old. She supports this theory explaining “… People who have been incarcerated rarely have difficulty identifying the parallels between these systems of control [US justice system and Jim crow laws]” (Alexander 5). She contends the US justice system was purposefully built to hinder those leaving the penal system rather than functioning as a correction center (Alexander 111). Since African Americans are incarcerated at significantly higher rates in relation to population, there are consequently more African Americans with limited rights post release. Although I am about to pick apart Alexander’s “New Jim Crow” analogy, I cannot deny America’s racist justice system is due to aspects of the laws politicians have enacted, however I will argue that these systems were put in place not directly with racial segregation in mind, but rather, program funding.     

If I am going to argue that America’s mass incarceration problem is due the FBI’s system of collecting data, and not the “New Jim Crow”, I must first explain how the method in which the FBI represents crime from a national perspective. Since its creation, the FBI began pushing for state and local criminal justice systems to provide arrest reports to create a national database to present crime statistics publicly for social scientists and politicians alike. In 1970, just three states submitted their arrest reports, but by the end of the decade, this number rose to 48 states (Maltz 12). To handle the gargantuan amount of data, the FBI created the UCR program to streamline the process of data collection. While the computers used on the UCR were able to accurately collect millions of crime reports across the nation, Maltz states that “more and more of the crime statistics reported by the police have not been based on crime counts but on imputed crime counts” (Maltz 12). Essentially while violent crime arrest counts laid in the six figures from the 70s to the 90s, crimes recorded by the police without an arrest along with victimizations reported by the police were also included under violent crime creating a total violent crime statistic closer to 3.5 million. By overinflating the crime statistics in this way, the FBI could have presented this data to America’s Legislation requesting higher funding to account for the supposed increase in violent crimes. Maltz states that UCR data is also directly used to allocate federal executive funds, so when the FBI can show an increase in crime rates, their budget increases (Maltz 35). It is for this reason that I believe the increase in mass incarceration amongst minority groups is due to an overly funded executive running off a system that rewards arrest rather than seeks to prevent it.  

At this point, many are undoubtably wondering how the FBI overinflating their crime statistics to increase their budget is linked specifically to mass incarceration of African Americans and not simply US citizens. Elizabeth Hinton adds on to Maltz’s work from the Bureau of Justice Statistics to assert that the transition in American policy from the War on Poverty in the 1960s, to the War on Crime in the 1970s was what led to the increased in mass incarceration of minorities. She writes “Politicians and officials have explained mass incarceration as a seemingly natural policy response to a surge in criminality and violence among specific sects of the citizenry, but scholars have pointed to the ways in which mass incarceration and the justice disparities within it expressed changes in law, budgetary allocations for crime control, and punitive practices at all levels of government” (Hinton 8). Hinton argues that America’s shift from simply helping impoverished citizens find their feet, to increasing law enforcement in lower income urban areas with the higher levels of crime and minorities has more to do with the flawed system of FBI budgeting rather than America’s legislature indirectly attempting to limit the rights of minority groups. Hinton also indirectly builds off Alexanders’s work in this way. While Alexander asserts the War on drugs in the 1980s was used to carry out the “New Jim Crow”, Hinton argues that the 1970s war on crime, on which the war on drugs was built off, was a result to the corrupt executive of the time which was rewarded for arrest rather than criminal correction.

A scholar who can add to this conversation is James Forman who agrees that Alexander’s “New Jim Crow” analogy holds power in bringing light to the issues of mass incarceration but takes away portions of context that make up the whole problem. He writes “Proponents of the analogy focus on those aspects of mass incarceration that most resemble Jim Crow and minimize or ignore many important dissimilarities. As a result, the analogy generates an incomplete account of mass incarceration-one in which most prisoners are drug offenders, violent crime and its victims merit only passing mention, and white prisoners are largely invisible” (Forman 34). If Forman assertion is valid, the way I believe it is, the discussion of mass incarceration in America needs to be looked upon as a policy issue rather than a social justice one. While I fully endorse the fact that minority groups are disproportionally imprisoned in America, I contend flaws in America’s bureaucracy are to blame rather than racist politicians plotting a “New Jim Crow.” Forman adds another layer to the discourse acknowledging the African American justices and politicians in Washington DC who vote for the policies which determine FBI budget justice system reforms. He states “Washington, D.C., is the nation’s only majority-black jurisdiction that controls sentencing policy. The district is 51% African American.” (Forman 38) and followed with “There is little evidence that D.C. officials have sought more lenient criminal policies, only to be overruled by Congress. To the contrary, local elected officials have recently pushed for tougher criminal penalties” (Forman 41). Unless minority leaders in DC are a part of the “New Jim Crow”, I believe that this can be used as an example as to why mass incarceration is a result more so of a corrupted system rather than corrupt members of the system itself. While I acknowledge that DC cannot necessarily represent the entirety of the US, I still contend that DC being black majority still doubling down on law enforcement shows the reasons behind mass incarceration go deeper than the direct influence of a few politicians in our legislation who still wish to push a racially segregated agenda.

               To tie this whole conversation together, all the scholars and data analysts above agree that the FBI controlling the collection of all crime statistics is leading to the inflation of crime data in increase funder criminal justice budget. They also agree that this leads to over the policing of low-income areas with high percentages of minorities thus increasing levels of incarceration in those areas. The debate comes down to whether this broken system is due to the rise of the “New Jim Crow” as Alexander would argue, or if the FBI’s manipulation of violent crime data to increase executive budgeting has indirectly led to the increase in mass incarceration as Maltz, Hinton and Foreman would support. The purpose of this essay is not to find a perfect fix to this problem, but I do contend that the best way forward is to find alternative ways to collect violent crime data separate from the FBI to base their budget off. The bottom line is that mass incarceration is more of a political and systemic issue rather than a social justice issue.

PLEDGE: Robby Votta

“On my honor I have neither given nor received unauthorized information regarding this work, I have followed and will continue to observe all regulations regarding it, and I am unaware of any violation of the Honor Code by others.”

Citations:

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. 10th ed., New Press, 2020.

Forman, James Jr. “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow.” Hein Online, Harvard Law School Library , 29 Nov. 2011,

Hinton, Elizabeth. “Introduction: Origins of Mass Incarceration” From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, Edited by the Harvard University Press, 2016, pages 1-28

Maltz, Michael D. “Bridging Gaps in Police Crime Data – Bureau of Justice Statistics.” Bridging Gaps in Police Crime Data, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sept. 1999, bjs.ojp.gov