Black Supporters of the No-Discrimination Thesis in Criminal Justice

• Author: Kareem L. Jordan,Shaun L. Gabbidon,George E. Higgins,Everette B. Penn
• DOI: 10.1177/0887403413489705
• Published date: 01 September 2014
• Date: 01 September 2014
• Subject Matter: Articles

Criminal Justice Policy Review

2014, Vol. 25(5) 637 –652

© 2013 SAGE Publications

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DOI: 10.1177/0887403413489705

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Article

Black Supporters of the No-

Discrimination Thesis in

Criminal Justice: A Portrait

of an Understudied Segment

of the Black Community

Shaun L. Gabbidon1, Kareem L. Jordan2,

Everette B. Penn3, and George E. Higgins4

Abstract

This study examined a national sample of more than 600 Black Americans and their

views on bias in the American criminal justice system. The research found that 26% of

the Black respondents did not believe there was bias in the American criminal justice

system. To explore the segment of respondents holding these views, we separated

the sample into Blacks who believe there is bias in the system (referred to as the

discrimination thesis or DT supporters) and those who opposed this belief (referred

to as the no-discrimination thesis or NDT supporters). The NDT supporters were

more likely to be younger, male, less educated, and have lower income than those

respondents who supported the DT. NDT supporters were also more likely to

believe that Blacks and Whites had equal job opportunities, have more confidence in

the police, and believe that racism was not widespread.

Keywords

public opinion, racial bias in criminal justice, no discrimination thesis, discrimination

thesis, Blacks/African Americans

1Penn State Harrisburg, Middletown, PA, USA

2University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

3University of Houston, Clear Lake, Houston, TX, USA

4University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA

Corresponding Author:

Shaun L. Gabbidon, Penn State Harrisburg, School of Public Affairs, 777 W. Harrisburg Pike, Middletown,

PA 17057, USA.

Email: slg13@psu.edu

489705CJP25510.1177/0887403413489705Criminal Justice Policy ReviewGabbidon et al.

research-article2013

638 Criminal Justice Policy Review 25(5)

During the last quarter of the 20th century there was a legendary series of debates

between William Wilbanks and Coramae Richey Mann. Wilbanks’ thought-provoking

1987 book, The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System, provided those who believed

that racial disparities were an artifact of excessive offending, and not of racial bias,

with a treatise to support what became known as the No-Discrimination Thesis (NDT),

or the belief that race was not the central reason for the observed disparities across the

criminal justice system (see also DeLisi & Regoli, 1999; Mac Donald, 2008).

Coramae Richey Mann’s response to Wilbanks was her acclaimed 1993 book,

Unequal Justice: A Question of Color, which provided supporters of the Discrimination

Thesis (DT) with strong scholarly evidence challenging Wilbanks’ perspective. While

books on race and crime had been published before, and have been published since,

these seminal books set the stage for the NDT versus the DT debate. Ironically, three

short years after the publication of Mann’s book, Walker, Spohn, and De Lone (2012)

created a Discrimination-Disparity continuum that provided a more expansive

approach to contextualizing the level of discrimination in the criminal justice system.

Their text provided a useful typology for researchers studying racial bias in the system

because it pointed to specific levels of discrimination beyond the NDT and DT poles.

Yet observers still often reduce the debate to the NDT and DT approaches.

The largest share of the NDT and DT debate and scholarship focuses on whether

the police discriminate against minorities during the execution of their duties (see

MacDonald, 2003; Rice & White, 2010). But there is also a considerable body of

research examining racial bias in the court process and sentencing (for recent sum-

maries, see Gabbidon & Taylor Greene, 2013; Walker et al., 2012). Another body of

research has focused on public opinion of bias in the system and is also referred to as

criminal injustice scholarship (Hurwitz & Peffley, 2010). This research focuses on

public opinion of bias in the criminal justice system. Relying on an all-Black sample

from a 2008 Gallup Poll, our emphasis was on the study of Black respondents who can

be considered an invisible minority in public opinion research on race and crime issues

(see Gabbidon, Higgins, & Wilder-Bonner, 2012). This term refers to those Blacks

who do not adhere to standard opinions that are typically ascribed to Blacks. They

have been referred to elsewhere as invisible because rarely are their views the focus of

any substantive research in the field. Only recently have they garnered any serious

scholarly interest (Gabbidon et al. 2012).

In the current study, this invisible minority represents those Blacks who do not

believe that the American justice system is racially biased against Blacks. Why focus

on this small minority of the Black population? Because past and current researchers

have a tendency to write as though Blacks are monolithic in their experiences and

thinking (cf. Georges-Abeyie, 1989). This has resulted in a limited scholarly emphasis

on minorities who hold what are likely viewed as nontraditional views within the

Black community. This study is an attempt to understand the characteristics of Black

supporters of the NDT. In particular, the focus of the study was to investigate two

questions: What are the demographic characteristics of Black supporters of the NDT;

and what factors separate NDT supporters from DT supporters?