citationsneededpodcast

Ep 142: The Summer of Anti-BLM Backlash and How Concepts of "Crime" Were Shaped By the Propertied Class

Added 2021-08-04 16:37:37 +0000 UTC

"Concerns rising inside White House over surge in violent crime," CNN tells us. "America's Crime Surge: Why Violence Is Rising, And Solutions To Fix It," proclaims NPR. "Officials worry the rise in violent crime portends a bloody summer," reports The Washington Post.

Over and over this summer we have heard – and will no doubt continue to hear – the scourge of rising crime is the most urgent issue on voters' minds. Setting aside the way media coverage itself shape public opinion, the rising murder rates in urban areas is indeed very real and its victims disproportionately Black and Latino.

In response, like clockwork, Democrats and Democratic Party-aligned media have allied with conservatives and right-wing media are rehashing the same tired responses: more police, longer sentences, and tougher laws. But this time, they assure us it will be different: it won’t be racist and overly punitive. Instead, in addition to the return of 1990s Tough On Crime formula. we will get enough nebulous reforms and anti-bias training that it will somehow be enlightened and consistent with the demands of Black Lives Matter.

But everything we know about the past 50 years tells us this will not be true. Indeed, if more policing and prisons solved crime, the United States would be the safest country on Earth, but, of course, it is not. According to The American Journal of Medicine, compared to 22 other high-income nations, the United States' gun-related murder rate is 25 times higher despite imprisoning people at rates 5-10 times what other rich nations do.

So why do lawmakers and the media always reach for the same so-called "solutions" when it comes to crime? What are the assumptions that inform how we respond to an increase in homicides and other violent crime? How can the wealthiest nation in the world throw billions of dollars, more police, longer sentences, and tougher prosecutors at our high murder rates only to continue to wildly outpacing the rest of the so-called developed world on this, the most urgent of metrics?

On this episode, we explore the origins of "crime," what crimes we consider noteworthy and which are ignored, how property rights and white supremacy informed the crime we center in our media, how the crimes of poverty, environmental destruction, wage theft, and discrimination are relegated to the arena of tort, with its gentle fines and drawn out lawsuits – while petty theft and drug use results in long prison sentences. We’ll study how these bifurcations inform both media accounts of crime and how we respond with more police, and longer sentences the second we are faced with so-called crime waves.

Our guests are Civil Rights Corps' Alec Karakatsanis and sociologist Tamara K. Nopper.

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Guests

Alec Karakatsanis is founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps. A civil rights lawyer and former public defender in the District of Columbia and the State of Alabama, Alec is co-founder of the organization Equal Justice Under Law and author of the book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System (New Press, 2019). You can follow him on Twitter @equalityAlec.

Dr. Tamara K. Nopper is a sociologist, writer, editor, and data artist. An affiliate at the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies, whose research focuses on the intersection of economic, racial, and gender inequality, she is also editor of Mariame Kaba’s book, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021), and wrote several data stories for Colin Kaepernick’s Abolition for the People series. You can follow her on Twitter @tamaranopper.

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