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AbstractProminent U.S. police officials have advocated greater acknowledgement of the role of law enforcement in historical racial injustice, including violence, in hopes of transforming police community relations. While an encouraging development, these calls for transformative justice understate the scope of this historical and contemporary problem, neglecting the often extralegal nature of police involved violence and injustice, its array of spectacular and more subtle forms, and the layered roles of state and non-state actors in perpetrating and sanctioning White supremacist violence. Drawing on historical records of racist violence implicating police, this paper analyzes overlapping aspects of White supremacy in policing, including racist ideologies and political acts of law enforcement officers and officials, and more routine underpolicing of White supremacism by legal authorities. This backdrop of normative racist violence - physical, cultural, and structural – must inform a contemporary transformative justice agenda, including demands for explicit and robust protection from White supremacism in policing.

Part of a special journal symposium, a reply is offered to Julia Sudbury's (2004) critique of the US prison-industrial complex as a "structural linchpin in the establishment, rationalization, & maintenance of global processes of domination & exclusion." It is suggested that militarism & empire-building in the context of economic & political repression create the conditions & "offenders" to support the expansion of prisons & use of incarceration. Cautioning against reductionism, it is argued here that we must not lose sight of the more proximate or intermediate mechanisms through which "industrialized punishment" functions. Drawing on interview data, the role of workers employed in the prison-industrial complex is examined, highlighting the attraction of such jobs to marginal & low-skilled workers, primarily women & people of color. 4 References. K. Hyatt Stewart

In "a world without prisons", Julia Sudbury ties the fate of the marginalized masses to resistance against intersecting military, penal, and imperial projects of dominant neoliberal regimes. The growing workforce of social control reveals much about how these intersecting roots extend into the fabric of our society. Prison work has come to represent a "good deal" in the new economy of opportunity, perhaps gaining a modicum of glamour through the penal obsession of popular culture, but mainly because of its sheer abundance and relative security. Recall that direct and intergovernmental justice system expenditures in the U.S. totaled around $36 billion in 1982 and almost $147 billion by 1999. This massive expenditure has not gone mainly to construction, but rather to institutional operations, including labor. Exhorts anti-globalization activists to explore a contradiction at home that ideologically and materially supports the growth of the prison-industrial complex. (Original abstract - amended)

During the Progressive Era, a rehabilitative agenda took hold of American juvenile justice, materializing as a citizen-and-state-building project and mirroring the unequal racial politics of American democracy itself. Alongside this liberal ""manufactory of citizens," a parallel structure was enacted: a Jim Crow juvenile justice system that endured across the nation for most of the twentieth century. In The Black Child Savers, the first study of the rise and fall of Jim Crow juvenile justice, Geoff Ward examines the origins and organization of this sep.

In 1930, W. E. B. Du Bois warned of an approaching backlash of racialized crime control and the two-pronged threat this posed to Black civil society. These were not altogether new threats—American criminal law and crime control practices had always been mechanisms of racialized societal exclusion—but Du Bois anticipated unprecedented levels of Black criminalization and incarceration in the second half of the twentieth century, and some of the collateral damage that would ensue. Du Bois's (1930) warning focused on juvenile crime and justice, "a problem which one can easily see among the better colored people of New York and Philadelphia, of Indianapolis and Chicago, of Pittsburgh and Baltimore, and all of our major cities" (p. 352). Du Bois (1916) had long been concerned with issues of child development and youth justice, since the fate of the "immortal child" inevitably defined the prospects and conditions of the race (Diggs 1976).

This article examines racially derogatory police jokes, what we call "racist blue humor," as discourse that negatively targets and ridicules racial and ethnic minorities as inferior, dangerous, or as objects of symbolic and cultural violence. We argue that racist blue humor fosters the social acceptability of prejudice and discrimination among officers, normalizing a culture of dehumanization that legitimizes structural and direct violence. We analyze illustrative cases of racist blue humor in the light of critical race theory, humor studies, and other work in behavioral science to elaborate this violence and its potential for harm across multiple contexts. Racist blue humor engenders legal estrangement, diminishes protection and representation in law, and heightens exposure to police and other state violence. We conclude with considerations for research and policy, including order-maintenance policing of racist blue humor.

Research finds that historic racial violence helps predict spatial distributions of contemporary outcomes, including homicide. These findings underscore the continued need to historicize modern race relations, yet intervening processes linking past violence with present events remain unclear. This study examines these intermediary mechanisms by reducing the century-long time-lapse common to legacy of racial violence research. We use mid-century measures of violent opposition to the Civil Rights Movement to bridge the historical gap between lynchings and later homicide, thus clarifying the dynamic and contingent nature of the legacy of racial violence. Structural equation models indicate that incidents of anti-civil rights enforcement and contemporary homicides are more likely to occur in areas with pronounced histories of lynching. Civil rights era assaults mediate the relationship between lynchings and contemporary homicide generally, but not White-on-Black homicide, signaling a need for further research documenting events of mid-century racial violence and clarifying these and other sources of historical transmission. Implications for future research and public policy are considered.