Refusing to address the role that class plays in the criminal justice system, and politics in general, makes it all but impossible to address the root causes of 2 million people behind bars in the U.S. Race and racism do play a factor, but only indirectly. To the extent that blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately poor compared to overall society, they are disproportionately represented in the prison population. Few studies have examined the correlation between race and class. One of the few that did, (cited in Elliott Currie's Crime and Punishment in America), looked at the crime, arrest and incarceration rates in a poor black neighborhood and a poor white neighborhood in Ohio. The not so surprising conclusion was that it is the poor, regardless of race, who bear the brunt of the war on crime, which sounds better than a "war on the poor." This explains why whites are in prisons and the relative absence of wealthy minorities from prisons and jails.
The unspoken reality is that in America today there exists two systems of criminal justice. One for the wealthy, which includes kid-glove investigations, lackluster prosecutions, drug treatment, light sentences and easy, if any, prison time. The other, for the poor, is one of paramilitary policing, aggressive prosecution, harsh mandatory sentences and hard time. Wealth, and the political connections inherent to wealth, not race, is the determining factor in deciding which system one gets. This is most obvious when wealthy hip-hop artists and athletes, many of them black, are charged with serious crimes. Class trumps race every time, even if the wealth is new found.
