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A Case Study in Race and Class Privilege

Cara

Renee at Womanist Musings has a post up right now that pretty much makes me want to drink myself into oblivion.  But it’s really worth your time reading all the same.  It’s one of those things we don’t want to read, because of how it illuminates the extreme injustice of the world, but for the same reason kind of have to.

It examines the case of Roy Brown — a homeless black man who committed an unarmed against a bank, where he left piles of money behind and stole exactly $100 because he was hungry.  Brown turned himself in to the police because he felt guilty about what he had done, and was subsequently sentenced to 15 years in jail.

Renee uses this utterly despicable and depressing story to make one very interesting and prudent comparison with Bernard Madoff:

Here we have two vastly different interactions with the justice system; a black man who turned himself in after stealing one hundred dollars because he hungry and Madoff who stole billions to feed his greed and ego. How does the man who stole 100 dollars out of a sense of desperation merit 15 years in jail, while the billionaire sits in his luxurious home surrounded by his ill gotten gains?  Someone want to tell me again about how blind the justice system is?

Indeed.

Go read the whole post.

13 thoughts on A Case Study in Race and Class Privilege

  1. I see it where I live as well. We have towns like Gary and Hammond near affluent neighborhoods like Valparaiso and Munster. White kids getting picked up for Heroin possession are in and out of jail with hardly andy consequences while someone that gets picked up once in Gary and who is african American will get 10 years. Their is a belief that we need to help the poor white kids who were taken in by the evil drug users in the ghetto while the black users are thugs and never going to quit.

  2. Don’t know much of anything about this case, but it looks like Brown committed first-degree robbery, which carries a minimum sentence of three years without parole. Armed robbery has a much higher minimum sentence (10 years) but requires the actual use of a firearm, so it wasn’t that. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find any other sources on what happened, but my guess is that Brown had prior convictions and Brown was hit by a law that increased the mandatory minimums for people with prior convictions. I agree that the result is ludicrous though.

    The comparison to Madoff seems unfair. Madoff hasn’t been indicted yet, he’s not a danger to the public (anymore), and he’s under house arrest. The more appropriate comparison is with Madoff’s treatment after he’s convicted.

  3. To a lawyer: you’re thinking like a lawyer. Heh.

    How about thinking like a human being. Think about what might be good for your own community. Think about how you might want to be treated if you did something truly fucked up and without endangering any other human being.

  4. A lawyer, I am not sure this is fair:

    “The comparison to Madoff seems unfair. Madoff hasn’t been indicted yet, he’s not a danger to the public (anymore), and he’s under house arrest. The more appropriate comparison is with Madoff’s treatment after he’s convicted”

    While it is true that Madoff may spend many many years in prison, (hopefully not a separate white collar one) it is because of race and class that he spends his time waiting for trial in luxury, while most pre-trial detention centers are filled with people who have committed petty crimes and can’t afford bail. Once they have their trial, they are often released with time served, having spent more time in jail waiting for trial than they would have been sentenced to.

    The other big secret is that jail has become an economy in itself, with people in ghettos being born (sometimes in jail) with two options, to go to jail, or work for the jail.

    Madoff didn’t steal because he was hungry, he stole because he was pathologically greedy.

  5. The comparison to Madoff seems unfair. Madoff hasn’t been indicted yet, he’s not a danger to the public (anymore), and he’s under house arrest.

    It’s certainly legitimate to compare with Madoff how Brown was treated between turning himself in and conviction; he certainly didn’t get to sleep in a comfy bed.

    And it’s legitimate to compare the damage they’ve done. I feel for the bank teller that Brown spoke to, as I can’t imagine it was anything but traumatic – but Madoff, it appears, has left a trail of destroyed lives behind him, including at least one suicide – which of these men represents the greater danger to society?

  6. a lawyer,

    I suspect you aren’t a financial services lawyer…if you look at the details of the case including Madoff’s client list you’d note that what Madoff did was far more harmful than armed robbery.

    He stole from dozens of charities including medical research and education charities. Some of those charities no longer exist because of his fraud. They won’t be able to help save lives going forward.

    Not to mention the potentially hundreds of individual retirees he bankrupted. People who may now be that greeter at Walmart that a police officer will assault when he’s irritated or that customers will trample.

    Maybe if Madoff had just ripped off a few rich people (if it had been a hedge fund, rather than separate accounts) I’d agree with you…but that’s not this case.

  9. Kristen (The J one), I actually am a financial services lawyer, which is why I agree with you about the seriousness and culpability of Madoff’s crimes. He ought to be imprisoned for a long, long time and forced to pay an enormous penalty in addition to giving up his ill-gotten gains. I’m not putting any money on that happening though, thanks to the enormous advantages rich and white defendants have.

    My point was just that it’s not fair to compare Brown’s sentence with Madoff’s current treatment. The appropriate comparison would be between Madoff’s eventual sentence and Brown’s sentence or between Brown and Madoff’s pre-indictment treatment I agree with SunlessNick and Ellen about the race and class issues raised by the latter though.

  10. maybe fair wasn’t the right word. How about not completely accurate. However, if we had any info on Brown’s pre-indictment treatment, it would probably be a similar argument. But I am also a bit unsure about the accuracy of how you could backtrack to get info about the crime from his sentencing. Don’t those laws differ by state?

  11. But I am also a bit unsure about the accuracy of how you could backtrack to get info about the crime from his sentencing. Don’t those laws differ by state?

    I was trying to figure out if there was some harsh mandatory minimum, so I went and looked at the Louisiana criminal statutes and figured out what he was guilty of based on the facts committed in the article. Conclusion: the crime he committed (and therefore the one he was probably convicted of) has a minimum sentence of only three years.

    Because the crime was obviously relatively innocuous and the defendant seems to need help rather than incarceration, I don’t think overt race and class bias (i.e., the judge or jury doing the sentencing is just doesn’t like poor black people, and so treats them more harshly) is a very plausible explanation for the high sentence. (It’s Louisiana, though, so that’s not completely implausible.) There’s a lot of subconscious bias, and the research pretty convincingly indicates that it produces systematically higher sentences for black defendants for the same crimes. There’s probably a similar effect for poor defendants. But is that really enough, on its own, to explain a fifteen-year sentence for what looks to have been a fourth-rate bank robbery? I don’t think so.

    So the question is why the sentence is so much higher than what appears to be the three-year mandatory minimum. The most likely explanation is that there are (what the law considers to be) aggravating factors not revealed in the article. I don’t know about Louisiana’s sentencing laws, but it’s hardly uncommon for homeless people (especially homeless black men) to have prior convictions, and lots of states have mandatory sentencing increases for defendants with prior convictions. So I think that’s the most likely explanation for the sentence.

    Of course, it could be argued (and I would probably agree) that the system of mandatory minimums and mandatory sentencing step-ups for prior convictions is a form of systematic race and class bias.

  12. The facts you actually have in hand tend to indicate oversentencing. But you know the system doesn’t oversentence, so you assume into existence some other vague, unknown facts.

    I think that’s backwards.

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