Soc. 3251W Race, Class, and Gender

In the readings for March 1, the articles focus on the affects of race, class, and gender when applied to Law and the Criminal Justice System in a variety of ways.

In the first article, Convictability and Discordant Locales: Reproducing Race, Class, and Gender Ideologies in Prosecutorial Decisionmaking, Lisa Frohmann tells of her experiences following sexual assault cases in Center Heights. This community is commonly associated drugs and prostitution. Frohmann discusses how district deputy attorneys (DDAs) construct things called “discordant locales� through stereotyping people of different socioeconomic status, race, and gender when organizing the convictability of a case. This article points out that Center Heights is a “ghetto� community surrounded by neighborhoods that house middle class to upper middle class whites. Often times, the jurors are ethnocentric people from predominantly white neighborhoods that have a difficult time understanding the “norm� for the lower class people who reside in Center Heights. As many of the county workers stated throughout the article, it is usually difficult to expect the jurors to understand the lifestyles of [mostly] women in Center Heights because they do not conform to many of the middle class ideologies of a “proper lady�, therefore, making it difficult to attain guilty verdicts for their assailants. One of the interviewees of Frohmann gives an example of this by discussing how the sense of time differs in the lifestyles of women in Center Heights compared to that of the jurors who hear their rape cases. He mentions that many of the women are on unemployed and on public assistance, so they do not wake up until the afternoon hours. This makes “their one o’clock in the afternoon our eight o’clock in the morning,� thus justifying being out and about until two o’clock in the morning or later. Next he makes justification for being out on the streets at that hour by addressing lack of means to engage in other forms of entertainment (like shows, dining, and theater). Unfortunately, these things translate to the middle class jurors as lazy (waking up in the afternoon/ being on public assistance) and drug or sex related (walking the streets at two o’clock in the morning). This lack of understanding by the middle class white jurors to identify with the lower class people of color, along with the application of middle class expectations for “lady like behavior� to victims in court, lead to a lot of injustice in the court system. These women are being punished for the neighborhood they live in as if they “should expect it�. I believe that this shows white privilege because the ideologies applied to life by middle class whites becomes the determinant in what qualifies as punishable criminal behavior. Not guilty: it was the woman’s fault for being raped because she does not act the way (we) our women act.

The next article, Ballot Manipulation and “The Menace of Negro Domination�: Racial Threat and Felon Disenfranchisements in the United States, talks about how race has been involved in laws passed to revoke felon voting rights. The authors noted that disenfranchisement laws were tightened in times of liberalization or when the number of nonwhites in prisons was at a high. The obvious conclusion to be drawn from this was when the blatant racism of not allowing black to vote was revoked, policies changed to achieve the same outcome under a covert operation. This was easier to do in the 40’s and 50’s under Jim Crow laws because there wasn’t much evidence required to convict a person of color; however, after the Civil Rights movement disenfranchisement is still considered a way to drown out the black vote.

Questions
1. Do you think that is cases similar to the sexual assault cases in Center Heights that victims are being denied a “jury of one’s peers�? Should searches be narrowed so that victims and jurors can identify on race/class?
2. What perpetuates disenfranchisement laws today without segregation laws or blatant racism?