1 00:00:00,030 --> 00:00:04,799 We're very pleased today to have Nikki Lacey back with us to talk to us. 2 00:00:04,800 --> 00:00:10,650 And Nikki is a school professor of law, gender and social policy at the LSC. 3 00:00:11,820 --> 00:00:18,420 And before she went back to the LSC, she was here for a number of years here in this college. 4 00:00:18,420 --> 00:00:24,840 It also was, and she was part of the Centre for Criminology, so we're very pleased to see her today. 5 00:00:24,840 --> 00:00:28,800 But I have this long list that the administrator always sends me and it's incredibly long finished. 6 00:00:28,830 --> 00:00:31,920 It tells us all about the various things she's done. 7 00:00:32,820 --> 00:00:39,150 Senior Research Fellow previously, also a professor of criminal law and legal theory here at the University of Oxford. 8 00:00:39,540 --> 00:00:43,650 She's held a number of visiting appointments, most recently at Harvard Law School. 9 00:00:43,800 --> 00:00:49,560 She's an honorary fellow of New College Oxford and of University College Oxford Fellow of the British Academy, 10 00:00:51,360 --> 00:00:58,290 and in 2017 was awarded the CBE for services to law, justice and gender politics. 11 00:00:58,680 --> 00:01:08,459 So very impressive. And today Nikki will be talking to us about her ongoing work about democracy and the title of her paper, 12 00:01:08,460 --> 00:01:13,350 It's Historic Sizing American Exceptionalism in Crime, Punishment and Inequality. 13 00:01:14,490 --> 00:01:17,940 Thank you. Thank you, Mary. Thank you so much for the invitation. 14 00:01:17,940 --> 00:01:27,040 It's lovely to be here. She's back here among family, friends and former colleagues and all of you students, all my former LSC students as well. 15 00:01:27,060 --> 00:01:35,280 It is lovely to see this seminar has been a source of pleasure and stimulation to me for most of my career, 16 00:01:35,280 --> 00:01:42,060 so it's always a very special thing to be asked to contribute to it. And I shall try not to lower the standard, the average standard too badly. 17 00:01:44,220 --> 00:01:50,670 I've actually not. A line between us decided that we were going to keep things low stress and not struggle with the PowerPoint. 18 00:01:50,670 --> 00:01:58,740 But I've got a very short handout, which is really just a few sort of data and table slides to give a little bit of background to, as it were. 19 00:01:59,280 --> 00:02:05,189 What we're trying to explain in this paper, and I should say this paper is part of a joint project with David Solstice, 20 00:02:05,190 --> 00:02:08,460 who's a political scientist for The Economist. 21 00:02:09,260 --> 00:02:19,590 A comparative this and the particular sort of background to this paper is that it was written for a conference that we organised with two colleagues, 22 00:02:20,070 --> 00:02:28,440 Leo, to assist insofar as the locus at the conference in general is looking at the relationship or the question of what, 23 00:02:28,740 --> 00:02:33,240 if any, relationship there is between crime, punishment and inequality. 24 00:02:33,990 --> 00:02:37,860 And we are focusing on America, which we've worked on in the past. 25 00:02:37,860 --> 00:02:43,320 And I will sort of summarise some of our past work very briefly as part of this paper, 26 00:02:43,650 --> 00:02:48,719 and the paper is probably a bit long, so please excuse me if I'm correct. 27 00:02:48,720 --> 00:02:52,140 There's a bit of crashing gears while I do some impromptu cuts. 28 00:02:54,180 --> 00:02:56,309 So by any standards, 29 00:02:56,310 --> 00:03:04,350 the US presents itself as a really fascinating case study in any effort to understand the complex and contested links between crime, 30 00:03:04,590 --> 00:03:13,150 punishment and inequality. We know that societies with high levels of inequality tend also to exit exhibit 31 00:03:13,170 --> 00:03:17,580 both high levels of crime and particularly violent crime and punishment. 32 00:03:18,450 --> 00:03:26,099 But actually, most of the exemplary cases feature either an insecure or pretty recent democratic political 33 00:03:26,100 --> 00:03:32,580 system and the late or incomplete imposition of an advanced capitalist economic system. 34 00:03:34,050 --> 00:03:41,250 Amid long standing democracies with advanced capitalist economies, the US really does stand out in terms of a number of key features. 35 00:03:42,090 --> 00:03:49,680 Inequality is as measured by a number of economic standards, notably the Gini coefficient levels of serious violent crime, 36 00:03:50,130 --> 00:03:55,590 imprisonment rates, rates of penal surveillance and post-conviction disqualifications. 37 00:03:57,480 --> 00:03:59,670 These are very well known to everybody in the room. 38 00:04:00,870 --> 00:04:07,649 So even among the more unequal, more criminal genic, more punitive liberal market economies of the advanced democracies, 39 00:04:07,650 --> 00:04:13,380 the US occupies the unenviable position of being an outlier in all the wrong ways. 40 00:04:14,640 --> 00:04:19,800 Why should that be so? Now, in all previous work, 41 00:04:19,830 --> 00:04:25,590 David and I've argued that the exceptional rise in violent crime and punishment in the US the mid seventies to 42 00:04:25,590 --> 00:04:34,770 the early 1990s could be explained by the interaction of four political economic variables based on change. 43 00:04:34,770 --> 00:04:41,820 In other words, the collapse of food ism, varieties of capitalism and varieties of welfare state. 44 00:04:43,830 --> 00:04:52,350 The US obviously is a liberal market economy and a liberal welfare state and asking understand this typology type of political system. 45 00:04:52,650 --> 00:04:59,220 The US has a competitive majoritarian rather than negotiated proportional representation system. 46 00:05:00,480 --> 00:05:07,740 But critically and specifically, we focussed in our work on another unusual feature of the US political system, 47 00:05:07,740 --> 00:05:12,630 and that is that the US is a radical outlier in the degree of local democracy, 48 00:05:13,260 --> 00:05:24,480 with policies on residential zoning, public education, policing, prosecution, justice, transport, you name it, all decided at local level. 49 00:05:25,380 --> 00:05:33,450 So what's on the handout? You know, you don't need to really look at it, but essentially just an updated version of the abstracts. 50 00:05:33,450 --> 00:05:38,490 And then there is a couple of charts that really look at what we're trying to explain here, 51 00:05:38,980 --> 00:05:44,700 that the imprisonment and homicide rates and you can see unfortunately because I didn't have a colour print, 52 00:05:44,700 --> 00:05:50,460 so you can't really see the differences between the other countries, but you can see that the US has been on a sort of journey of its own. 53 00:05:51,570 --> 00:05:56,580 And then over leaf we've got residential segregation, imprisonment rates, homicide rates, 54 00:05:56,610 --> 00:06:04,110 literacy score at the bottom and child poverty in the US is sort of an outlier in all of these ways. 55 00:06:04,650 --> 00:06:13,830 And then across time I just basically compare the US and England and Wales in terms of the locus of policy making and decision making in 56 00:06:13,830 --> 00:06:22,890 fields that are either part of criminal justice or cognate to things that might affect dispositions to punish or to offend and so on. 57 00:06:24,930 --> 00:06:31,499 So a very broad argument has been that violent crime, for example, came from the poverty, 58 00:06:31,500 --> 00:06:35,100 lack of welfare, limited education and lack of effective policing, 59 00:06:35,370 --> 00:06:40,199 particularly in the traps to which zoning policies segregate segregated the 60 00:06:40,200 --> 00:06:45,929 disadvantaged losers from the collapse of 47 policies which favoured median voters, 61 00:06:45,930 --> 00:06:50,940 local voters, by bolstering house prices and reducing property taxation. 62 00:06:52,290 --> 00:06:57,059 These same dynamics shaped we all views as in a paper published and published in 63 00:06:57,060 --> 00:07:03,209 Punishment and Society four years ago shaped a distinctive toxic politics of punishment, 64 00:07:03,210 --> 00:07:10,980 particularly from the 1970s on, and in particular electorally driven patterns of residential segregation. 65 00:07:10,980 --> 00:07:19,530 We argued, reinforced and aggravated the radical racial inequality, which is, of course, a further and striking feature of American history. 66 00:07:21,810 --> 00:07:22,799 Since we did that work, 67 00:07:22,800 --> 00:07:31,440 there's been quite a lot further research across a number of disciplines that I think has bolstered the evidential case for that broad thesis. 68 00:07:32,490 --> 00:07:41,729 So the tendency of American political fragmentation to unleash what we might call or the historian calls sort of centrifugal forces, 69 00:07:41,730 --> 00:07:47,400 polarising forces, has been very central to recent US history, 70 00:07:47,520 --> 00:07:55,290 his his historical scholarship and the impact of local democracy and locally based criminal justice institutions 71 00:07:55,560 --> 00:08:01,710 on the development of criminal justice policy has been confirmed in a very broad range of criminological work. 72 00:08:03,420 --> 00:08:10,800 Recent studies have also confirmed the decisive impact of electoral cycles on both judicial and prosecutorial decision making, 73 00:08:11,310 --> 00:08:19,690 finding that under conditions prevailing from the 1970s on local electoral dynamics have set an upward trajectory of punitive. 74 00:08:19,710 --> 00:08:27,210 This indeed in recent work, John Pfaff, who's done some pretty meticulous empirical research on this, 75 00:08:27,210 --> 00:08:33,540 has gone so far as to claim that the single most important reform needed to make further progress 76 00:08:33,540 --> 00:08:39,600 in dismantling American mass imprisonment would be a move away from the election of prosecutors. 77 00:08:42,360 --> 00:08:47,489 So as a result, we're gradually sort of accumulating a bit of a better understanding of the mechanisms through 78 00:08:47,490 --> 00:08:54,660 which these extraordinary outcomes captured very crudely in these tables and figures in crime, 79 00:08:54,660 --> 00:08:57,540 punishment and inequality have been produced and maintained. 80 00:08:58,110 --> 00:09:04,860 And some pieces are emerging that promise to perhaps explain how the distinctive American political, 81 00:09:05,010 --> 00:09:09,510 economic and social structure has sustained those outcomes in time. 82 00:09:10,980 --> 00:09:17,790 But of course, the institutions which shaped these outcomes today are the products of very long historical processes. 83 00:09:18,960 --> 00:09:26,850 And a historical focus is very important in developing the argument that America's outlier position among 84 00:09:26,850 --> 00:09:32,730 contemporary advanced democracies is shaped by its distinctively institutionalised political system. 85 00:09:33,360 --> 00:09:41,370 So in this paper, we're focusing on that history and we're asking three questions which are implied by our past work, but not really covered by it. 86 00:09:43,020 --> 00:09:50,940 First, we confront a very fundamental question, which is why do such distinctive patterns of local democracy arise in America? 87 00:09:52,530 --> 00:09:59,550 And in light of the overt representation of African-Americans in the criminal justice system today, we're particularly interested in how. 88 00:09:59,820 --> 00:10:05,880 It's a tool that political structure is tied up with the distinctive American history and politics of race. 89 00:10:07,860 --> 00:10:15,630 Second, we ask what, if any, this political economic history implied about the development of specifically criminal justice institutions. 90 00:10:15,660 --> 00:10:24,020 And third, we go on to ask why the burden of violent crime and punishment continue to fall so disproportionately on African Americans? 91 00:10:24,030 --> 00:10:35,310 But now we also have to think about Hispanics. So, first of all, let's look at political economy more or less. 92 00:10:36,240 --> 00:10:41,670 So most of the modern institutional structures of advanced economies which industrialised in the 19th 93 00:10:41,670 --> 00:10:48,090 century derive from the ways in which those nations were organised before and during industrialisation, 94 00:10:48,660 --> 00:10:52,800 and how governments, given those political economic preconditions, 95 00:10:52,980 --> 00:10:58,350 shaped the institutions which they found necessary for the formulation of an industrial economy. 96 00:11:00,120 --> 00:11:08,170 Economic historians distinguish between three or four industrial revolution as corresponding to what they call different technology regimes. 97 00:11:09,420 --> 00:11:13,830 The original Industrial Revolution, which was based on iron and steam, 98 00:11:14,550 --> 00:11:20,900 gave way in the middle of the 19th century to the much more sophisticated so-called scientific revolution, 99 00:11:20,910 --> 00:11:31,820 which was based on electricity and produced very large, complex corporations that then subsequently morphed into feudalism, much more familiar to us. 100 00:11:31,830 --> 00:11:37,560 And when faltered and collapsed in the 1970s and 1980s, with deindustrialisation, 101 00:11:37,950 --> 00:11:43,799 advanced economies painfully and often conflicts literally began to absorb the 102 00:11:43,800 --> 00:11:48,270 information revolution based on information and communications technologies. 103 00:11:48,570 --> 00:11:51,210 And of course, we're still in the midst of that change. 104 00:11:52,890 --> 00:12:01,110 Now, the scientific revolution, as distinct from the original industrial revolution, required a huge range of infrastructural rules and institutions. 105 00:12:02,430 --> 00:12:07,950 And in the U.K., as in all other industrialised countries, apart from the US, 106 00:12:08,670 --> 00:12:16,710 in the context of the public goods that were needed to to underpin ever more sophisticated industrialisation. 107 00:12:17,280 --> 00:12:22,080 The second half of the 19th century saw consolidation of power by national governments. 108 00:12:23,580 --> 00:12:29,790 This consolidation tended to be based on disciplined national parties and the creation of effective ministries 109 00:12:29,790 --> 00:12:37,380 so as to foster control and counter what in every country were quite conservative forces of reaction against, 110 00:12:37,740 --> 00:12:43,950 as it were, public spending and redistribution to produce the public goods that were needed for industrialisation. 111 00:12:46,080 --> 00:12:51,090 A particularly important focus for that kind of opposition was compulsory education, 112 00:12:51,990 --> 00:12:59,040 which existing elites would have to pay for and which would enable agricultural workers whose labour was of course, 113 00:12:59,040 --> 00:13:06,840 crucial to the power of those elites to leave for industrial jobs with significant implications for the balance not only of the economy, 114 00:13:07,020 --> 00:13:09,000 but of political and social power. 115 00:13:10,800 --> 00:13:19,020 So the newly centralising political systems of most countries crafted a raft of legislation covering things like finance, 116 00:13:19,020 --> 00:13:27,120 accounting, transport, labour, a wide range of standards security, sanitation and crucially, education. 117 00:13:29,010 --> 00:13:32,580 So the key thing from the point of view of all comparison with the US, 118 00:13:33,210 --> 00:13:38,490 this included in the UK the establishment of a national top down control from 119 00:13:38,490 --> 00:13:43,200 Westminster over municipalities to a degree that had not been the case before. 120 00:13:45,930 --> 00:13:56,550 By contrast, the US mainly through presidential choices during the long Republican ascendancy from the 1870s on by cities after the Civil War, 121 00:13:57,330 --> 00:14:01,410 in cooperation with presidential appointments, the Supreme Court, 122 00:14:02,130 --> 00:14:10,080 a topical matter and one that has been we've been here before, went in completely opposite direction from this country. 123 00:14:11,940 --> 00:14:18,930 And it did so in spite of the fact that the Republican ascendancy was just as concerned to industrialise and therefore faced 124 00:14:19,200 --> 00:14:27,390 and needed to solve very similar problems about how to create public goods and to foster incentives to sustain them over time. 125 00:14:28,500 --> 00:14:33,300 But they confronted this task under very different institutional preconditions. 126 00:14:34,530 --> 00:14:41,490 So what are the key features of the US political economic history for that point, from that point of view? 127 00:14:41,760 --> 00:14:45,810 And I'm just really, you know, painting with very broad brushstrokes here. 128 00:14:46,390 --> 00:14:52,530 And the first thing to note is that the US essentially opted for a two region solution. 129 00:14:55,170 --> 00:14:59,460 The core conservative opposition to industrialisation within the southern. 130 00:14:59,590 --> 00:15:05,499 Guys and presidents think we're just coming out of the trauma of the Civil War precedent. 131 00:15:05,500 --> 00:15:12,459 So it is far too costly to remove this opposition to counter it because it was very PC resistance. 132 00:15:12,460 --> 00:15:21,610 So, of course, highly tied up with the race system, a system of racial oppression and access to cheap labour that that applied to Southern elites. 133 00:15:23,260 --> 00:15:28,540 But moreover, the Republican presidents began to realise, I suppose, 134 00:15:28,540 --> 00:15:35,889 that Southern states weren't actually needed for industrialisation so long as the South accepted common 135 00:15:35,890 --> 00:15:42,160 U.S. manufacturing tariffs to protect developing northern industries against European competition, 136 00:15:42,430 --> 00:15:48,400 they would be forced to buy northern goods. So essentially very neat. 137 00:15:48,490 --> 00:15:52,420 You just keep the south outside of the industrialisation project. 138 00:15:53,140 --> 00:15:59,140 And the North really had no economic reason to impose proper education on the South. 139 00:15:59,140 --> 00:16:06,520 And that of course had in a way, ways the punch line of our paper had terrible long term effects for the black Americans. 140 00:16:07,630 --> 00:16:11,320 So this settlement, in contrast to the UK, 141 00:16:11,320 --> 00:16:19,780 where we managed to neuter the Lords Opposition with reform legislation such that the start of 1867 and 1884, 142 00:16:20,290 --> 00:16:25,600 the US simply didn't eliminate conservative opposition in the 19th century. 143 00:16:25,780 --> 00:16:29,499 Rather it contained it, roughly speaking, within a region. 144 00:16:29,500 --> 00:16:32,920 That's obviously a gross oversimplification, but that's the basic argument. 145 00:16:35,780 --> 00:16:41,320 So the second point is that education was left to local autonomy. 146 00:16:41,830 --> 00:16:46,540 So education, as we saw, was key to industrialisation. Why was it left to localities? 147 00:16:47,740 --> 00:16:57,280 Well, here we come to the US Constitution because of course, the presidency didn't have any constitutional power to impose universal education. 148 00:16:58,540 --> 00:17:00,460 What it saw, however, 149 00:17:01,150 --> 00:17:09,850 was that northern cities and counties had their own strong incentives to develop universal elementary and later high school education. 150 00:17:10,690 --> 00:17:19,360 And that was because given flexible labour markets, education was pretty key to income levels as far as local meeting voters were concerned. 151 00:17:19,990 --> 00:17:20,860 And secondly, 152 00:17:20,860 --> 00:17:30,190 municipalities needed at least semi educated workforces to attract the large corporations that were really the engine of industrialisation in America. 153 00:17:31,990 --> 00:17:40,840 So actually the US education system really developed out of local autonomous systems based on democratic choices. 154 00:17:41,200 --> 00:17:43,240 And this produced, interestingly, 155 00:17:43,630 --> 00:17:51,670 only outside the South a pretty effective education system that's entirely different from the way compulsory education developed in this country. 156 00:17:54,250 --> 00:18:00,610 Now that also meant a broader degree of autonomy for municipalities and counties. 157 00:18:02,200 --> 00:18:11,649 The absence of effective federal bureaucracies covering the US implied more generally the role for minor municipalities in economic development, 158 00:18:11,650 --> 00:18:17,590 particularly for large places in most of the northern states in the 19th century, 159 00:18:17,610 --> 00:18:21,970 mean this municipalities were significantly more important administratively. 160 00:18:22,000 --> 00:18:29,080 Even the states now, police powers were, of course, given by the Constitution to the states, 161 00:18:30,580 --> 00:18:35,820 but de facto they were passed on in large part to municipalities and counties. 162 00:18:35,830 --> 00:18:42,610 And in the historian William Novak's words, in contrast to the modern idea of the state as a centralised bureaucracy, 163 00:18:42,970 --> 00:18:49,120 the prevailing U.S. conception of the regular, well-regulated society emphasised local control and autonomy. 164 00:18:50,080 --> 00:18:55,810 This reflected the historical origins in much of the northern US of government being based in cities. 165 00:18:56,890 --> 00:19:05,230 And as Richard Benson has argued, key to the dynamics favouring a de facto grants of major autonomy to big cities in the interests 166 00:19:05,230 --> 00:19:12,010 of industrial development was that the Supreme Court could impose the Interstate Commerce Clause, 167 00:19:12,340 --> 00:19:17,770 suitably interpreted by the carefully chosen justices, 168 00:19:18,220 --> 00:19:24,520 so that local areas and indeed big cities didn't put up local tariffs and controls on competition. 169 00:19:25,630 --> 00:19:32,890 So you're sort of creating a national economy, industrialised economy, that through all these decentralised mechanisms, 170 00:19:34,960 --> 00:19:38,770 therefore, and this was really critical for American industrialisation, 171 00:19:39,160 --> 00:19:44,140 big cities really had to attract large corporations who could bring in wealth and employment 172 00:19:44,500 --> 00:19:49,930 by providing labour forces who were educated and preferably for the good corporations. 173 00:19:49,930 --> 00:19:55,330 Non-unionized has very low levels of unionisation in the US over time. 174 00:19:56,800 --> 00:20:04,700 Cities further took on the role of educating the next. Serene migrants enclosed in the 19th century and guaranteeing the corporations that 175 00:20:04,700 --> 00:20:09,890 unionisation and strikes would be controlled by the city in exchange for migrant votes. 176 00:20:10,130 --> 00:20:15,800 So it is quite a complex system and I'm obviously massively oversimplifying it, but that's that's the key things. 177 00:20:17,870 --> 00:20:21,620 Now, given what I've said so far, and this is the next sort of headline point, 178 00:20:21,620 --> 00:20:27,320 it's not all that surprising that an enormous amount of autonomy was given to big corporations 179 00:20:27,470 --> 00:20:33,790 because they were really largely the drivers of what was happening along with the cities in Europe, 180 00:20:33,800 --> 00:20:39,230 nation states played a key role in developing the infrastructure necessary for industrialisation. 181 00:20:40,070 --> 00:20:45,200 In the US, the federal government simply lacked the institutional and legal capacity to do that. 182 00:20:46,520 --> 00:20:51,590 And at least until at least until the mid-19th century, mid 20th century, really. 183 00:20:52,640 --> 00:21:01,130 As Ghoshal argues, the constitutional constitution implied that national power had to be exercised by subterfuge, 184 00:21:01,610 --> 00:21:08,030 via strategies like exemptions and constitutional restraint, surrogate navigation of responsibility, 185 00:21:08,270 --> 00:21:13,759 or contracting out of what in other systems would have been public responsibilities, 186 00:21:13,760 --> 00:21:20,960 core governmental functions, creating in a state a kind of hybrid public private governance structure. 187 00:21:22,700 --> 00:21:31,310 So no wonder that the US had difficulty in crafting that alone, in forcing centralised policies, redistribution or capacity building, 188 00:21:31,610 --> 00:21:38,780 able to tackle radical levels of inequality which tend to come alongside this kind of rapid capitalist development. 189 00:21:41,030 --> 00:21:49,159 Bancel in particular, has argued that the Supreme Court, loaded with judicial appointments from the by the Republicans, 190 00:21:49,160 --> 00:21:54,920 from the highly successful railroad operations, who are, of course, a big driver of industrialisation. 191 00:21:55,760 --> 00:22:00,290 Supreme Court understood the possibility of great the great economies of scale and 192 00:22:00,290 --> 00:22:05,900 scope from giant corporation corporations if they had the freedom to dominate markets. 193 00:22:07,370 --> 00:22:16,579 This led to very sophisticated court interpretations of the Clayton and Sherman Anti-Monopoly legislation with a precedent using Break-Up Powers. 194 00:22:16,580 --> 00:22:21,110 Only one companies failed to develop the desired economies of scale and scope. 195 00:22:22,290 --> 00:22:32,270 In effect, what Bancel argues is that the Republican ascendancy presidency used the Supreme Court to deploy the Interstate Commerce Clause 196 00:22:32,630 --> 00:22:41,270 to prevent protectionist behaviour by states or cities and take away powers from all levels to regulate industrial relations. 197 00:22:42,320 --> 00:22:52,610 This meant the cities had to compete to get the giant corporations in order to develop and grow and build labour markets to their requirements. 198 00:22:54,470 --> 00:22:58,340 And that brings me to the final headline, melody of this part, the paper, 199 00:22:58,340 --> 00:23:09,739 which is this the so-called book political scientists call the sort of deal that was done in cities at this time of American history, 200 00:23:09,740 --> 00:23:14,270 as it's well known city centre to be run by sort of party bosses. 201 00:23:15,650 --> 00:23:27,620 And the incentive, incentive structure for those party bosses in big cities was very much too up till the 1920s to encourage and absorb immigration. 202 00:23:28,730 --> 00:23:37,970 In order to provide labour, the city bosses wanted large companies to bring prosperity, raising the price of property and creating employment. 203 00:23:38,690 --> 00:23:45,620 As they as immigrants moved in, they either had political leadership or organisation from coming with them, 204 00:23:46,130 --> 00:23:49,970 or they joined an already partially established migrant groups. 205 00:23:49,970 --> 00:23:58,400 This is basically documented, by the way, anybody's interested in. Desmond Cain's book Making Americans and Implicit Bargains was struck between their 206 00:23:58,400 --> 00:24:05,600 leaders and city bosses within the so-called Tammany Hall system significantly. 207 00:24:05,600 --> 00:24:08,960 So they were basically trading jobs for folks. 208 00:24:09,050 --> 00:24:13,100 That's really what was going on significantly. However, and this again, 209 00:24:13,100 --> 00:24:16,790 this sort of punch line of our paper really is that this deal was not available 210 00:24:16,790 --> 00:24:22,940 in the same way for African-Americans who might migrated north from 19 states, 211 00:24:23,330 --> 00:24:31,820 particularly from 1963 to 1970, to fill the manufacturing demand for labour when European migration slowed. 212 00:24:32,470 --> 00:24:41,870 And I'll come back to that now, of course, given that those corporations are making big investments and literally central to the whole project, 213 00:24:42,410 --> 00:24:46,850 they had a lot of power and they wanted to feel protected by the political system. 214 00:24:47,690 --> 00:24:52,820 So the ability to invest in politicians was pretty important to them. 215 00:24:54,620 --> 00:24:59,120 From this perspective. We think that sort of reasonable hypothesis would be that British companies. 216 00:24:59,650 --> 00:25:05,320 Who couldn't invest in politicians because actually individual politicians here have never had very much power. 217 00:25:06,940 --> 00:25:17,380 Some were less prepared to make massive long term investments for these huge US corporations because they had quite a lot of political clout. 218 00:25:17,830 --> 00:25:23,170 Did. And of course, cities, given their major role in policymaking, 219 00:25:23,170 --> 00:25:28,899 wanted protection from the broader federal, fiscal, federal and state political systems. 220 00:25:28,900 --> 00:25:32,290 So everything was stacking up in favour of local power. 221 00:25:33,970 --> 00:25:39,310 And that also applies I won't go into this to the party system, which remained very undisciplined. 222 00:25:39,310 --> 00:25:44,740 And although it was within a national framework, essentially parties were run at the local level. 223 00:25:46,090 --> 00:25:53,860 So to sum up that part of the paper, the US political economic system was from way back fundamentally different 224 00:25:53,860 --> 00:25:58,180 from the political systems of the UK and of other northern European countries, 225 00:25:58,840 --> 00:26:02,979 negatively in terms of the absence of highly disciplined political parties, 226 00:26:02,980 --> 00:26:11,680 driving national policy positively in terms of the power vested in localities and corporations as drivers of economic development. 227 00:26:12,550 --> 00:26:17,260 So while those differences are decisively shaped by the history and politics of race, 228 00:26:17,620 --> 00:26:21,429 notably, of course, by the legacy of the Civil War and of slavery, 229 00:26:21,430 --> 00:26:28,900 which shaped the political and cultural world of the South and fostered this reasonably bifurcated equilibrium. 230 00:26:29,800 --> 00:26:34,710 Local autonomy in the US wasn't driven by race in a simple way. 231 00:26:34,720 --> 00:26:41,650 It's very deeply driven by race, but it's kind of indirectly driven, I think, if you're looking at it historically, 232 00:26:42,490 --> 00:26:48,910 because race was sort of mediated by political economy and vice versa in that it was 233 00:26:48,910 --> 00:26:54,730 the racial policies of the politics of the South which pushed industrialisation north, 234 00:26:55,510 --> 00:27:03,100 and it was the ability to industrialise without the South which kept the southern system of racial oppression in place. 235 00:27:03,300 --> 00:27:11,170 So it is an intimate link with race, but it's a slightly more complex one than it's perhaps sometimes appears. 236 00:27:13,240 --> 00:27:22,930 Now let's pass the paper, which deals with the question of how this maps on to the development, if at all, of criminal justice institutions. 237 00:27:24,370 --> 00:27:32,379 And I'm pretty sensitive about this paper because I'm not really in America, I'm not really a historian. 238 00:27:32,380 --> 00:27:37,060 So there are doubtless lots of people in the room who know more about bits of this paper than David might do. 239 00:27:37,060 --> 00:27:43,990 But I'm going to have a go at sketching out the ways in which I think the development of the American criminal 240 00:27:43,990 --> 00:27:49,960 justice system is similar in very cognate ways to that picture I just give me of the political economy. 241 00:27:51,730 --> 00:27:54,969 So in the 19th century in Europe, many countries, 242 00:27:54,970 --> 00:27:59,950 most countries saw a sort of gradual process of state building, which in a lot of literature, you know, 243 00:28:00,400 --> 00:28:07,090 evokes vapour kind of standardly, is all about modernisation through centralisation and professionalisation, 244 00:28:07,690 --> 00:28:11,820 standardisation through the construction of governmental bureaucracies. 245 00:28:11,830 --> 00:28:13,840 That's the sort of picture of modernisation. 246 00:28:15,580 --> 00:28:22,750 And by that sort of template in the US, that process is state building in a sense just remains incomplete. 247 00:28:23,170 --> 00:28:29,440 I mean that that's as it were, to judge the US by the European standard, but it's very, 248 00:28:29,440 --> 00:28:36,520 very different and it, as we've seen in that is an exceptional amount of power at local level. 249 00:28:37,600 --> 00:28:40,090 So how did that affect criminal justice? 250 00:28:42,310 --> 00:28:50,410 Now at first sight, actually, I think the development of criminal justice institutions in the US from the colonial era right up to the 20th century, 251 00:28:50,680 --> 00:28:56,110 looks quite similar to England. What happened in England and Wales in both countries. 252 00:28:56,110 --> 00:29:03,099 If you go back to, you know, the 18th or very early 19th century, you have a lot of local action. 253 00:29:03,100 --> 00:29:12,250 You know, there's a significant local and lay elements to the delivery of criminal justice, even as a sort of key decision making in this area. 254 00:29:13,270 --> 00:29:18,879 You have local officials, you have enforcement in the context of a very dense, 255 00:29:18,880 --> 00:29:24,670 normative system of social control, listed variously churches, families, 256 00:29:24,940 --> 00:29:34,839 landowning structures and the disciplinary power over particularly agricultural and domestic workers, which these structures entailed in America. 257 00:29:34,840 --> 00:29:42,160 Following the revolution, the establishment of the Republic in 1789, the constitutional settlement was interpreted, 258 00:29:42,310 --> 00:29:47,740 interpreted as mandating only very limited federal criminalising paths. 259 00:29:47,740 --> 00:29:58,710 We know scholars actually differ a bit on how determinate the original constitution itself was on this point with Novak in particular, and. 260 00:29:58,890 --> 00:30:05,940 So I think that the early Republican conception of government as existing to assure the public welfare embodied a certain 261 00:30:05,940 --> 00:30:12,810 kind of welfare system which actually could have led in quite a different trajectory and quite a different direction. 262 00:30:13,680 --> 00:30:21,719 One But his argument is that that was basically undermined ultimately by the move towards a more rights based, 263 00:30:21,720 --> 00:30:25,440 legalistic conception of government after the Civil War. 264 00:30:27,120 --> 00:30:35,100 But the fact is that neither in the early decades of the public nor republic, nor in the period of reconstruction after the Civil War, 265 00:30:35,580 --> 00:30:43,260 was there a coalition with either the interest or the capacity to shape that original allocation of police powers to states 266 00:30:43,560 --> 00:30:50,760 in such a way as to facilitate the development of central government institutions of the kind that were emerging in Europe. 267 00:30:53,070 --> 00:30:58,980 Nonetheless, both countries saw developments which sort of in a way, conform to a standard picture of modernisation, 268 00:30:59,880 --> 00:31:05,970 the emergence of police and a prison conceived as a humane and rationally organised institution. 269 00:31:07,020 --> 00:31:13,860 A more organised system and hierarchy of courts assisted in part by a more organised and numerous legal profession. 270 00:31:15,450 --> 00:31:21,210 Beneath this appearance similarity, I think there were some quite important differences. 271 00:31:22,080 --> 00:31:25,200 And in this section, I'm going to leave aside capital punishment, 272 00:31:25,200 --> 00:31:32,849 which is usually the sort of go to difference historically with between America and Europe on criminal justice, 273 00:31:32,850 --> 00:31:38,729 to concentrate on three other areas in which I think the differences are quite 274 00:31:38,730 --> 00:31:43,890 clearly related to the differences in political economy that I've already described. 275 00:31:44,430 --> 00:31:52,080 These are the development of the police, the arrangements for decisions on and conduct of prosecutions and the role of popular justice. 276 00:31:53,790 --> 00:32:02,849 First, the police. So in both countries, the institution of a public police force was a pretty controversial matter, evoking, 277 00:32:02,850 --> 00:32:09,840 as it did some worries about centralised state power, which were associated, albeit in somewhat different ways with tyrannical government. 278 00:32:11,970 --> 00:32:20,100 In England, the creation of the Metropolitan Police was premised famously on the idea of a of a citizen, but a citizen in uniform. 279 00:32:20,540 --> 00:32:23,970 It was meant to be as a disciplined, professional force. 280 00:32:24,840 --> 00:32:32,549 Now, whether or not the early force entirely conforms this model of the gradual expansion and development tools and nationwide police 281 00:32:32,550 --> 00:32:39,120 force sort of conformed to the idea of an independent force seen as a professional rather than a political organisation. 282 00:32:40,860 --> 00:32:46,680 Now, the structure of the American policy, obviously it implied that the emergence of policing would be decentralised. 283 00:32:48,570 --> 00:32:53,700 And although the development of police forces in the middle of the 19th century at both state and city levels, 284 00:32:53,700 --> 00:32:57,900 was often inspired by and actually evoked invokes the Peale model. 285 00:32:58,440 --> 00:33:07,050 What emerged was something different forces which were staff, not by men joining an emerging profession, as it were, 286 00:33:07,740 --> 00:33:13,590 but rather men who were recruited by local officials who didn't enjoy any job security because 287 00:33:13,590 --> 00:33:19,920 their positions might be swept away by the next electoral contest at city councils or state level, 288 00:33:20,760 --> 00:33:24,840 who mostly didn't wear uniforms, which identifies them as public servants. 289 00:33:25,950 --> 00:33:32,190 The American police were being tendentious here, but I think they were, in effect, an arm of local government, 290 00:33:32,640 --> 00:33:40,080 a tool of local political interests, vulnerable to the sway of political power and to the temptation of various forms of corruption. 291 00:33:41,520 --> 00:33:48,180 Probably the most spectacular well known example of this is the New York Police Department during the era of local machine politics, 292 00:33:48,720 --> 00:33:55,830 with policing in significant part funded by informal systems of charging for licenses, exemptions and services. 293 00:33:56,340 --> 00:34:02,610 And the police in the service, the local politicians, and in fact, part of the Tammany Hall patronage system. 294 00:34:04,290 --> 00:34:09,120 Despite efforts to further professionalise the police throughout the latter part of the 19th century, 295 00:34:09,360 --> 00:34:13,260 these important institutional differences persisted well into the 20th. 296 00:34:13,740 --> 00:34:18,540 Will be it subject to the local variations, which are a key feature of the US case, 297 00:34:19,800 --> 00:34:26,250 even in the form reforms that the progressive area of the early 20th century local political control, 298 00:34:26,250 --> 00:34:30,180 rather than professional autonomy, was the dominant characteristic of policing. 299 00:34:32,460 --> 00:34:41,010 What about prosecution? At the start of the 19th century, prosecution in both both countries was in lay hands, 300 00:34:41,430 --> 00:34:46,829 initiated by private citizens with the assistance of local lay officials such as justices, 301 00:34:46,830 --> 00:34:48,180 constables and sheriffs, 302 00:34:48,900 --> 00:34:57,750 mediated by deliberations of grand juries and sometimes facilitated by the existence of private arrangements such as prosecution associations. 303 00:34:59,660 --> 00:35:02,450 In England and Wales, the grand jury declined, 304 00:35:02,450 --> 00:35:09,860 and the gradual development of a nationwide police force transferred much of the responsibility for prosecutions to the police. 305 00:35:10,670 --> 00:35:17,090 With more serious cases handled by ordinary lawyers, engaged by the police, or in the case of private prosecutions, the victim. 306 00:35:18,830 --> 00:35:19,879 In the US, however, 307 00:35:19,880 --> 00:35:27,890 there was a key institutional innovation which was to be hugely consequential for the development of criminal justice over the next 150 years. 308 00:35:29,150 --> 00:35:33,380 This was the invention in the early decades of the 19th century of the public prosecutor, 309 00:35:34,400 --> 00:35:42,020 a public official like prosecutors in North European Systems, but locally based as in England and Wales. 310 00:35:43,970 --> 00:35:51,320 In the years after the revolution, most states provided for the appointment of prosecutors by judges, governors or legislators. 311 00:35:52,520 --> 00:35:58,820 But concerns gradually emerged about the vulnerability of appointed prosecutors to the sway of political patronage. 312 00:35:59,480 --> 00:36:08,990 And between 1832 and 1861, almost three quarters of states moved to a system of elected rather than appointed prosecutors. 313 00:36:10,730 --> 00:36:18,830 The aim, ironically, given what we know about behaviour of prosecutors today, was to guarantee their political independence. 314 00:36:20,240 --> 00:36:24,979 But as a result of the extraordinarily dense system of electoral democracy, 315 00:36:24,980 --> 00:36:30,620 which the US political economy has spawned, they were of course elected at local level. 316 00:36:31,670 --> 00:36:38,900 So even more directly than the police, they in a sense became part of the state and local political systems, 317 00:36:39,350 --> 00:36:45,800 subject to the sway of electoral pressures at the local level and contrary to the intentions of the reformers. 318 00:36:46,130 --> 00:36:49,450 Very much subject to political influence, broadly conceived. 319 00:36:49,460 --> 00:36:55,640 Not party political influence, of course. But the influence of politics at the local level. 320 00:36:57,500 --> 00:37:06,440 With what's arguably the single most important filter for criminalisation exposed to the power of popular opinion in such a disaggregated way, 321 00:37:07,340 --> 00:37:16,490 the potential for any potential capacity to shape a national criminal justice policy is really quite seriously undermined. 322 00:37:17,600 --> 00:37:21,530 Even indeed at state level was somewhat compromised. 323 00:37:23,750 --> 00:37:27,380 And that really brings me to the question of life or popular justice. 324 00:37:28,790 --> 00:37:36,739 So another difference, I think, between 19th century developments in England and the of states lies in the degree 325 00:37:36,740 --> 00:37:41,510 to which social control continued to be exerted by private or popular justice. 326 00:37:43,010 --> 00:37:45,710 Now, of course, it's important not to exaggerate this. 327 00:37:47,210 --> 00:37:53,330 Legal historians, criminal justice historians have shown that even in the relatively centralised British system, 328 00:37:54,050 --> 00:37:56,210 as it was by the end of the 19th century, 329 00:37:56,510 --> 00:38:04,730 practices of local shaming, such as so-called rock music persisted, particularly in rural areas right up to the 20th century. 330 00:38:06,170 --> 00:38:12,350 And of course, internalised norms and a range of private institutions remain in all countries, 331 00:38:12,350 --> 00:38:17,360 probably much more important to social ordering than the criminal justice system, 332 00:38:18,290 --> 00:38:26,510 which is inevitably partial and patchy in its effects and quite often counterproductive to petty juries. 333 00:38:27,010 --> 00:38:32,300 What we call here now, just the jury, of course, also remains central features of those systems. 334 00:38:33,230 --> 00:38:39,709 Nonetheless, I think there's strong evidence that a continued reliance on and indeed attachment to the idea of 335 00:38:39,710 --> 00:38:46,070 popular sovereignty in the delivery of criminal justice remained distinctively high in the US, 336 00:38:46,400 --> 00:38:53,120 with significant implications for a sort of incomplete process of modernising the criminal justice system. 337 00:38:55,590 --> 00:39:02,899 So arguably the sway of public private hybrid roles such as elected local justices, 338 00:39:02,900 --> 00:39:09,050 sheriffs and constables, along with the slow and still at the end of the 19th century, 339 00:39:09,260 --> 00:39:18,950 incomplete professionalisation of the police in America itself implied a large element of lay justice at the heart of even state criminal justice, 340 00:39:19,940 --> 00:39:25,310 as indeed did the continued role of late decision makers, although of course that was true here as well. 341 00:39:26,960 --> 00:39:35,660 But a range of other accepted practices in the US doesn't, don't really find a clear parallel in this country with weak policing. 342 00:39:35,660 --> 00:39:45,200 In many parts of the country, private militias remained an important residual tool of de facto public control throughout the 19th century, 343 00:39:45,710 --> 00:39:52,640 employing state and local government authorities reliance on popular sentiment and support among those groups. 344 00:39:54,380 --> 00:39:58,580 The link, of course, with today's continuing attachment to gun rights is signified. 345 00:39:58,650 --> 00:40:06,480 Come here. MOBBING and rotting continues in many parts of the country as a form of law and order intervention to a degree. 346 00:40:06,690 --> 00:40:10,170 More analogies with 18th and 19th century England. 347 00:40:10,950 --> 00:40:19,080 While the horrifying practices of lynching employed vivid limits to state and legal standards, the criminalisation well into the 20th century. 348 00:40:20,430 --> 00:40:23,339 Equally important, the creation of vigilance committees, 349 00:40:23,340 --> 00:40:29,340 which asserted to themselves the right of law enforcement in many areas of the country right into the 20th century. 350 00:40:30,450 --> 00:40:43,529 And an entirely, of course, random newspaper sampling is still going on today on the the border with Mexico, Michoacan, 351 00:40:43,530 --> 00:40:46,499 a sort of lack of of not merely of centralisation, 352 00:40:46,500 --> 00:40:53,580 but of standardisation of the rule of law in a way which finds, I think, not a parallel in northern Europe. 353 00:40:55,800 --> 00:41:00,150 The criminal justice systems of late 19th century America amounted to sort of public, 354 00:41:00,150 --> 00:41:05,400 private, hybrid hotchpotch of public yet politicised, professional, 355 00:41:05,400 --> 00:41:15,210 yet not centralised, private and uncoordinated or hybrid organisations employing radical local variation in both institutional structure and outcome. 356 00:41:16,830 --> 00:41:21,990 Private bodies were being used to deliver governmental functions in a sort of echoing 357 00:41:22,080 --> 00:41:26,190 what happened in the political economy and I think a sort of summarise here. 358 00:41:26,190 --> 00:41:33,419 But I think that the comparison actually between juries in the US and UK is really interesting here because although you could say, 359 00:41:33,420 --> 00:41:37,080 well, the jury is, is a counterexample that because we've still got juries. 360 00:41:38,370 --> 00:41:43,649 What happened here was that quite certainly as part of the system of modernisation, 361 00:41:43,650 --> 00:41:50,100 it became very much more robustly understood that juries only decide questions of fact, 362 00:41:50,790 --> 00:41:57,029 whereas in the US has been a much more vigorous and long lasting argument about the issues, 363 00:41:57,030 --> 00:42:04,470 so-called jury nullification, whether it is part of the public role of the jury to invalidate unjust laws. 364 00:42:04,800 --> 00:42:11,400 And I think that the tokens of very, very different conception of what the role of the lay voice in the criminal trial is. 365 00:42:15,000 --> 00:42:18,360 I think it's difficult to see how this sort of fragmented, fragmented, 366 00:42:18,360 --> 00:42:27,330 fragmented and significantly privatised trajectory of the US political economy in the case of industrialisation would contribute to this. 367 00:42:27,480 --> 00:42:32,550 Similarly, the decentralised and public private structure of criminal justice. 368 00:42:33,690 --> 00:42:36,179 But a further interesting question arises, I think, 369 00:42:36,180 --> 00:42:43,590 about the political mentalities which these associated institutional structures face reflected and reinforced. 370 00:42:45,300 --> 00:42:53,700 As many historians have noted, American Republic has less and less who is shaped by strong attachment to freedom and a suspicion of centralised power, 371 00:42:54,150 --> 00:43:02,970 which has, as its correlate, a strong attachment to popular sovereignty and to the development of highly responsive institutions. 372 00:43:04,920 --> 00:43:12,980 In this context, Randall Randolph Ross Really magisterial study of patterns of homicide is quite instructive. 373 00:43:12,990 --> 00:43:17,250 I think over the whole sweep of American history, 374 00:43:17,610 --> 00:43:23,549 Ross finds that the level of homicide is positively related to periods of high social 375 00:43:23,550 --> 00:43:29,040 conflict and to low levels of trust in government and faith in strong national identity. 376 00:43:30,600 --> 00:43:37,319 These striking correlations raise important questions about the extent to which American policy in society has been able to 377 00:43:37,320 --> 00:43:45,750 achieve sort of internalisation of norms and mechanisms of social control on the same sort of level as other countries, 378 00:43:46,350 --> 00:43:54,300 particularly countries with coordinated systems. And this sort of echoes a point that David Gordon makes in his book on capital punishment. 379 00:43:56,040 --> 00:44:04,020 This, in turn, invites the thought that there's a correlation not just between not just two, but three features of the US social landscape, 380 00:44:04,800 --> 00:44:08,490 the institutional structure of the political economy and the criminal justice, 381 00:44:09,030 --> 00:44:17,670 informal institutions of social control and social mentalities in relation to state and in particular, federal, state power. 382 00:44:21,760 --> 00:44:31,629 I think the time goes on a 15 minute. Okay. So there's one more quick point I make we make in that section, 383 00:44:31,630 --> 00:44:37,660 which is that there's a lot of scholarship that argues not to of people like Heather Schoenfeld or Mary Gottschalk. 384 00:44:37,660 --> 00:44:40,360 That really the key thing, 385 00:44:40,400 --> 00:44:48,880 the structure of the American criminal justice system the way it is today was the accretion of federal power during the Roosevelt era, 386 00:44:49,630 --> 00:44:56,380 which produced a certain kind of increased capacity, which was then used to produce to effect mass imprisonment. 387 00:44:56,380 --> 00:45:02,710 And we don't disagree with that, but we don't think it addresses the question of why that happens. 388 00:45:03,130 --> 00:45:07,750 And so we think there's still a reason to go go back into history. 389 00:45:08,470 --> 00:45:08,950 Okay. 390 00:45:09,490 --> 00:45:21,370 Let me come to the last section of the paper, which has to do with the upshot of this history for racial disproportion in criminal justice today. 391 00:45:23,050 --> 00:45:33,580 So how the how have these associated historical trajectories affected the gross racial disproportionality and patterns of crime, 392 00:45:33,910 --> 00:45:36,910 criminal victimisation and punishment today? 393 00:45:38,770 --> 00:45:39,640 Now, obviously, 394 00:45:39,850 --> 00:45:48,760 race and racism have long occupied a central place in the explanations of distinctive American patterns of crime and especially punishment, 395 00:45:49,210 --> 00:45:52,270 as indeed a social organisation more generally. 396 00:45:53,080 --> 00:45:57,850 And recently, as a result of Michelle Alexander's very striking argument, 397 00:45:58,330 --> 00:46:02,770 race has really been absolutely the heart of debates about American criminal justice, 398 00:46:02,770 --> 00:46:07,329 and the explanation of the prison build up with her race is striking. 399 00:46:07,330 --> 00:46:16,870 Nice, clear argument that the Jim Crow, that in effect mass imprisonment is that, as she puts it in the title book, The New Jim Crow. 400 00:46:18,670 --> 00:46:25,990 So it's a system geared to perpetuating structural exclusion and has a Schoenfeld makes an analogous argument in her recent book. 401 00:46:28,840 --> 00:46:33,640 But as James Forman argues in his book and I think very persuasively, 402 00:46:34,750 --> 00:46:40,810 an explanation founded wholly in racial exclusion encounters some quite significant difficulties, 403 00:46:41,590 --> 00:46:49,060 not least in explaining the class aspects of racial patterns of crime, of punishment with mass imprisonment. 404 00:46:49,210 --> 00:46:58,870 Unlike Jim Crow leaving a substantial black middle class pretty much untouched and while having a significant impact on poor whites, 405 00:46:59,200 --> 00:47:11,319 whites and Hispanics, it also, I think the full Jim Crow argument has some difficulty in explaining black political support for tough crime policies, 406 00:47:11,320 --> 00:47:17,560 as witnessed by policy choices in black majority jurisdictions such as Washington, D.C., 407 00:47:19,270 --> 00:47:25,509 as well as in explaining the role of violent crime in which black Americans are disproportionately 408 00:47:25,510 --> 00:47:31,360 both victims and offenders in moving crime up the political agenda from the 1960s, 409 00:47:31,360 --> 00:47:34,750 as argued, I think, very effectively in Lisa miller's work. 410 00:47:36,820 --> 00:47:42,160 So we argue that we need a more of a pluralistic interpretation here, 411 00:47:42,160 --> 00:47:50,080 albeit one at which the history and politics of race is central and acknowledged to have large and continuing effects. 412 00:47:51,280 --> 00:47:57,460 And the stark facts of racial inequality in the US, as graphically charted by many, many scholars, 413 00:47:58,750 --> 00:48:07,480 are clearly direct and indirect consequences of Southern racism in and before the 19th century and the continuing echoes of slavery, 414 00:48:07,780 --> 00:48:16,060 the Jim Crow regime which replaced it, and a host of institutional arrangements, particularly in relation to residential segregation. 415 00:48:17,830 --> 00:48:22,959 And of course, the continuing existence of racism, which persists not of course, 416 00:48:22,960 --> 00:48:30,960 just in the U.S. but also in other countries, including this country, but also has very consequential implications. 417 00:48:30,970 --> 00:48:38,140 The criminal justice outcomes have been thrown in the US into ever greater relief by Black Lives Matters, 418 00:48:38,290 --> 00:48:43,090 Black Lives Matter by, you know, other features of the Trump era. 419 00:48:46,060 --> 00:48:51,020 But of course, these things long predate the era of mass incarceration. 420 00:48:51,070 --> 00:48:57,160 I think the interesting question for this paper is what we know. What precisely how is that history resonating? 421 00:48:59,260 --> 00:49:09,850 And I think our arguments about the impacts of this local autonomy really in its impact on race disproportionality today, 422 00:49:09,850 --> 00:49:18,950 really of race primarily via the arguments about how local democracy has produced segregation, particularly in the beginning. 423 00:49:19,090 --> 00:49:28,860 Austria's cities of the Northeast and Midwest, along with a very, very entrenched educational disadvantage, 424 00:49:28,860 --> 00:49:33,930 which is extremely difficult to escape because, of course, education is highly local. 425 00:49:35,160 --> 00:49:45,600 So we argue that the centrifugal dynamics set up by local autonomy have driven demographic divisions within as well as between racial groups. 426 00:49:46,500 --> 00:49:51,930 And they've given local black political leaders disincentives to combat segregation because 427 00:49:51,930 --> 00:49:59,310 their power base tends to be based in highly segregated areas because the logic of elections. 428 00:50:00,840 --> 00:50:06,630 So our sort of underlying argument is that once those sorts of divisions get mapped on to space, 429 00:50:07,140 --> 00:50:12,209 the possibilities of reversal, notably through education, steadily diminish. 430 00:50:12,210 --> 00:50:21,780 And these local institutional arrangements have often through zoning, which is a really very distinctive feature of American local power, 431 00:50:22,260 --> 00:50:33,150 fostered this toxic spatial concentration of disadvantage and very, very brilliantly analysed, I think, in a very recent book by Jessica Greenstein. 432 00:50:35,220 --> 00:50:44,370 But of course, that spatial concentration of disadvantage predated the great migration of the early 20th century, the northward migration. 433 00:50:47,910 --> 00:50:53,970 And you'll notice, by the way, just to follow that you said that that the on these this this is work. 434 00:50:54,900 --> 00:51:00,240 This is the second page, I believe, the first line of that table. 435 00:51:00,420 --> 00:51:08,340 This is work by geographers showing. You can see that that residential segregation was really, really, really very high in the US. 436 00:51:11,040 --> 00:51:17,639 And so our argument is that this long term structural difference helps to explain the fact 437 00:51:17,640 --> 00:51:23,850 that although you have forms of quite toxic racism in the whole number of countries, 438 00:51:25,110 --> 00:51:34,650 they have not seen quite the same scale of either build up of penalising or 439 00:51:35,070 --> 00:51:41,100 explosion of violent crime in in the latest period of technological disruption, 440 00:51:41,140 --> 00:51:50,100 technology, regime change. And really, the core argument is that in America's radically decentralised system, 441 00:51:50,100 --> 00:51:57,690 it hasn't proved possible to frame and find consistent support for political strategist combat segregation. 442 00:51:58,230 --> 00:52:05,520 And at various points, notably in the 1930s, racially motivated, racist federal policies, we have to say, 443 00:52:05,520 --> 00:52:12,120 such as discriminatory rules about mortgage eligibility, make things significantly worse. 444 00:52:13,650 --> 00:52:20,370 Hence, racial disadvantage has continued to accumulate and to radiate out from the criminal justice system, 445 00:52:20,640 --> 00:52:23,520 producing highly in egalitarian social affairs, 446 00:52:25,530 --> 00:52:33,510 the segregation, promoting dynamic of local politics that consolidated the problem of black and now also Hispanic disadvantage. 447 00:52:34,770 --> 00:52:41,400 So while American localism can't be argued to have been motivated directly by racism, 448 00:52:42,150 --> 00:52:51,240 it was shaped in a sense by racism because of its relationship to industrialisation and the two region solution. 449 00:52:52,260 --> 00:52:59,130 So the long history of racism in the US was a key indirect driver of localism itself, 450 00:52:59,520 --> 00:53:06,810 which today consolidates racial disadvantage because the persistence of segregation and racial 451 00:53:06,930 --> 00:53:12,270 disadvantage in the North is indeed a consequence of the American path to industrialisation, 452 00:53:12,630 --> 00:53:16,500 which simply left black Americans to their fate in the South. 453 00:53:18,950 --> 00:53:25,530 And I've got more detail in that section, but I think I'm just going to race to the conclusion because I suspect, 454 00:53:26,700 --> 00:53:34,020 yeah, 5 minutes and so is the when you just to sum up, 455 00:53:37,110 --> 00:53:44,669 the upshot of all this is that the racial justice to which the civil rights movement aspired and still aspires remains, 456 00:53:44,670 --> 00:53:49,020 alas, distant as social outcomes in education, crime, 457 00:53:49,020 --> 00:54:00,059 punishment and housing all too clearly attest or argument in this paper has been that the decentralisation and fragmentation of power in the 458 00:54:00,060 --> 00:54:09,450 American political system and the political sway which this gives to parochial self-interest is one important reason why that's the case, 459 00:54:10,740 --> 00:54:18,900 and that this decentralisation has long historical and institutional roots, which depend as much on political economy as on. 460 00:54:19,140 --> 00:54:29,910 The distinctive features of the US Constitution and conclusion it's perhaps worth pondering a counterfactual imagine, 461 00:54:29,910 --> 00:54:36,149 if you will, a mid-19th century equivalent to President Trump who, 462 00:54:36,150 --> 00:54:47,220 instead of prosecuting a civil war, decided that the solution was to build a wall between North and South so as to foreclose northward migration. 463 00:54:49,080 --> 00:54:53,940 Well, of course, negotiating a trade deal featuring extensive tariffs. 464 00:54:56,160 --> 00:55:01,380 Now, one way of thinking about the upshot. The argument is that if it's roughly right, 465 00:55:02,340 --> 00:55:06,419 then the institutional structure of the northern political economy and criminal 466 00:55:06,420 --> 00:55:11,360 justice system would have developed in quite similar ways to those they followed. 467 00:55:11,370 --> 00:55:16,050 In America's natural history and inequalities in crime, 468 00:55:16,260 --> 00:55:27,420 punishment and broader social indices like housing and education would nonetheless have eventuated even without that north and namely black migration. 469 00:55:28,830 --> 00:55:36,450 And I think here the fate recently of Hispanics, Hispanic-Americans and migrants, 470 00:55:36,720 --> 00:55:42,629 migrants with unequal access to forms of education and organisation needed to assimilate. 471 00:55:42,630 --> 00:55:53,790 And as King's work has really shown, I think that integration in America, probably elsewhere, has always, in effect, meant assimilation. 472 00:55:55,470 --> 00:56:01,290 So I think that the recent fate of Hispanics is is actually quite suggestive here. 473 00:56:02,880 --> 00:56:09,270 So broadly political, economic reasons, the American project of nation state building, even of pacification, 474 00:56:09,270 --> 00:56:14,729 has remained, and I think now will remain by the standards of other advanced economies, 475 00:56:14,730 --> 00:56:23,130 with democratic political systems incomplete, as Ross puts it, as compared with its closest competitors, 476 00:56:23,400 --> 00:56:29,250 the ironically named United States has suffered a failure to coalesce as a nation. 477 00:56:30,360 --> 00:56:35,370 America's distinctive patterns of inequality and of racial inequality in particular, 478 00:56:35,700 --> 00:56:41,280 are a tragic effect of America's distinctive and decentralised paths to modernity.