Paradox State
A History of Mass Incarceration in North Carolina 1968-1995
Ina Therese Kristiansen Falkeid
A Thesis Submitted to the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages at the Faculty of Humanities
ENG 4790 (30 ECTS)
Supervisor: Dr. Hilde Løvdal Stephens UNIVERSITY OF OSLO
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the MA Degree Spring Term 2020
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Paradox State
A History of Mass Incarceration in North Carolina
1968-1995
Ina Therese Kristiansen Falkeid
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© 2020 Ina Therese Kristiansen Falkeid
Paradox State A History of Mass Incarceration in North Carolina: 1968-1995 Ina Therese Kristiansen Falkeid
http://www.duo.uio.no/
Print: Reprosentralen, University of Oslo
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Abstract
From 1971 to 1974, North Carolina’s growing prison population topped the per capita incarceration rate in the United States. Thus, North Carolina was a pioneer in mass
incarceration, a fairly recent phenomenon specific to the US: exceptionally high incarceration rates. Mass incarceration varyingly occurs in all states. Remarkably, mass incarceration affects Black people grossly disproportionately; therefore, many scholars define it as a system of structural racism. In the 1970s, Black people made up 22 percent of the North Carolina state population and 54 percent of the prison population. By 2013, North Carolina’s ranking had dropped to number 32. As such, the scholarly interest in mass incarceration follows four decades of rising prison population and, recently, the possible reversal of that trend. This thesis examines why North Carolina committed to reducing its prison population at a time when incarceration surged nationally, how state politicians made progressive criminal justice policies palatable through tough on crime rhetoric reflective of the national climate, and how those otherwise progressive reform policies worked regressively by further widening the longstanding gap between the incarceration rates of Black and white people from 1968 through 1995. The objective is to understand how North Carolina became an outlier in mass incarceration in order to better understand it broadly, which is particularly important given how robust the current anti-mass incarceration conversation is in the US. Examining the mistakes of a state that has already attempted to reduce its imprisonment could help other states avoid the same pitfalls. This study generally contributes to the conversation on the development in the criminal justice system after the 1960s, mass incarceration, and the South’s role in shaping criminal justice policies and particularly to the conversation on state- level mass incarceration in North Carolina. This research analyzes materials from archival sources collected at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and leans on newspapers, using a historiographical research method with a qualitative approach. This thesis argues that while the cultural imperative among North Carolinians was punishment, that impulse was checked by politicians’ financial concerns which is why North Carolina reduced its
incarceration rate and earned a reputation for being progressive on criminal justice. However, this data was only a statistical mirage: Structural racism exceeded economic interests. The results of the state’s penal reforms in the 1980s and 1990s are thus a hodgepodge of regressive outcomes hidden behind one progressive effect.
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Acknowledgments
I have many people to thank for supporting me as I pursued this research project. First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Hilde Løvdal Stephens, who did an
impeccable job of guiding me. Her feedback and support were rewarding and essential to the progress of this study. I appreciate her thoroughness, professionalism, empathy, and patience.
I am very grateful to Dr. Seth Kotch with whom I worked during my second student exchange to the US, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). This thesis would not have turned out the same without his advice and guidance in the social history of criminal justice. I want to thank him for accepting me into his classes and for teaching me how to work through graduate school. His expertise in the field has been of the utmost importance to the preparatory work for this thesis. I also want to thank him for letting me join in on a visit to Raleigh’s Central Prison. Further, I want to thank Dr. Michelle Robinson for accepting me as a student at the Department of American Studies at UNC Chapel Hill, for treating me like one of the department’s own students, and for connecting me with Dr. Kotch. Further, I would like to thank the staff at UNC’s Wilson Library, especially Sarah, the staff at the UNC School of Government, especially Alex, and the staff at UNC’s Kathrine R. Everett Law Library for assisting me in the research process for this project. I want to thank Maria Dykema Erb at the Graduate School at UNC for connecting me with Dr. Robinson and for including me in her initiatives F1RSTS and Global Grads, which were of great support to me during a very busy and academically challenging year of graduate school. Dr. Terry Anne Scott’s class “Blacks in American Law” inspired me to start this research project a few years back during my first student exchange to the US, at the University of Washington. I am forever grateful for everything she taught me and for her impact on my academic career. Many warm thanks to Erica for her enthusiasm and curiosity, for offering feedback, and for giving my thesis a proofread. Thank you to Maxine, as well, for sending me some scans I needed and for
offering feedback. I want to thank Jon, especially, for technical help with Word and Excel and Amin for help with Excel. Thank you to my parents for having such strong belief in me and thank you to my beloved young brother, Sander, for being such an incredible joy in my life.
Also, thank you to Ayfer and Ida for showing emotional support. Finally, I am grateful to the Norwegian welfare state for making my academic journey possible.
Ina Therese Kristiansen Falkeid, Oslo, July 2020.
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Table of Contents
1 Introduction ... 1
Primary Sources and Methodology ... 6
2 Paradoxical Commitment ... 8
Backlash Against the Civil Rights Movement ... 14
When Judges Ruled: Indeterminate Sentencing in North Carolina ... 20
Prison Problems and the Knox Commission ... 22
Governor Jim Hunt: An Evasive Strategist Who United the Political Spectrum ... 25
Reforming the Criminal Justice System: Determinate Sentencing in North Carolina ... 27
3 Paradoxical Effects ... 30
Amending Determinate Sentencing: Emergency Solutions to a Prison System in Crisis . 32 The War on Drugs (and Black People) ... 36
The North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission (NCSPAC) ... 39
Revolutionary Sentencing Reform ... 40
4 Conclusion ... 46
Bibliography ... 49
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1 Introduction
In 1974, Black people made up 54 percent of the North Carolina prison population while making up only 22 percent of the state population. Civil rights activist Angela Davis therefore described North Carolina as America’s “[n]o. 1 disaster area in terms of racial justice.”1 North Carolina also had the highest per capita incarceration rate in the United States from 1971 through 1974––and its prison population kept growing. The peak in this Southern state’s prison population occurred before the national trend of mass incarceration began, during a time in which the US prison population as a whole saw a minor decline despite growing crime rates (from 1960 to 1973). In this sense, North Carolina was a pioneer of mass incarceration.
However, because the reality of mass incarceration presented problems such as overcrowding, overspending, and lawsuits, North Carolina eventually committed itself to reducing its prison population. In consequence, the state’s prison admissions eventually flattened and the growth of the prison population was stalled. As a result, after topping the nation’s per capita
incarceration rate in the early 1970s, North Carolina ranked number 32 in 2013.2 This thesis explores the pathway to that steep drop and what the drop really meant. Remarkably, mass incarceration affects Black people grossly disproportionately. The objective for this research is to understand how North Carolina became an outlier in mass incarceration to better understand mass incarceration broadly, which is particularly important given how robust the current anti-mass incarceration conversation is in the US.3
The US practice of mass incarceration has aroused interest among scholars in disciplines such as history, criminology, sociology, political science, law, psychology, and anthropology. “Mass incarceration” is a term created by the sociologist David Garland to describe an American and fairly recent phenomenon: Exceptionally high incarceration rates.
The prison population in the US was similar to that of other Western industrialized countries until the mid-1970s. Thus, the scholarly interest in mass incarceration follows four decades of
1 See North Carolina Department of Correction, Annual Statistical Report (Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Correction Office of Research and Planning, 1974); “Thousands Join March July 4 In Protest of Racism in N.C.,” Carolina Times, July 13, 1974, frontpage.
2 Stevens H. Clarke, Felony Sentencing in North Carolina 1976-1986: Effects of the Presumptive Sentencing Legislation (Chapel Hill: Institute of Government, 1987), 2; Stevens H. Clarke, Law of Sentencing, Probation, and Parole in North Carolina (Chapel Hill: Institute of Government, 1987), 47; Michael Tonry, Sentencing Fragments: Penal Reform in America, 1975-2025 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 34, 50; The North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission, The North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission: A History of its Creation and its Development of Structured Sentencing, by Lorrin Freeman (Raleigh: The North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission, 2011 (c2000)), 2.
3Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012 (c2010)), 6.
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rising prison population and, recently, the possible reversal of that trend. While there are differences within each individual state, mass incarceration occurs in all states. Perhaps one could assume that the rise of mass incarceration in the US echoes a rise in crime rates, but there is more or less consensus in the scholarship that mass incarceration is not a reflection of drastic changes in crime. As to why the US committed itself to a punitive shift in the 1970s, the scholarship offers no consensus explanation.4
Some see mass incarceration as a race issue. Historians such as Michelle Alexander, Robert Perkinson, and Heather Anne Thompson trace the roots of modern mass incarceration back to slavery and the collapse of Reconstruction, when white supremacy re-emerged and Black people were yet again subjected to racial control through horrendous practices such as
“peonage, convict leasing, and lynching.” This backlash led to the Jim Crow system of law, custom, and practice, in which Black people were excluded from white society, controlled, disenfranchised, and discriminated against in all aspects of social and economic life. After the successes of the modern Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, a historic shift comparable to the aftermath of Reconstruction materialized as predominantly white Southern conservatives recovered power using law and order rhetoric. As such, these historians make a convincing case in arguing that the US still has what Alexander refers to as a racial caste system which is implemented through mass incarceration. Since legal segregation in free society is no longer incorporated into American law, legal segregation has established roots in the criminal justice system. Thus, under the system of mass incarceration, racism has adapted to contemporary politics and economics. As a result, Black people are still, according to Alexander, a “racial undercaste” being used as a means in the symbolic production of race.
Shut out of “society at large, Jim Crow has moved behind bars,” argues Perkinson.5 Alexander, Perkinson, and Thompson therefore point to racism as a cause of mass incarceration and consider mass imprisonment of Black people an effect of racism. Alexander contends that mass incarceration in the United States is a system of structural racism in which Black people are trapped because they get caught for committing crimes at much higher rates than people of other races––especially white people. Moreover, Alexander continues, mass incarceration is a system constructed of racially biased legislation and racial profiling.
4 Becky Pettit, Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2012), 11-12; Heather Ann Thompson, "Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History," The Journal of American History 97, no. 3 (2010):
703.
5 Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 21-22, 190-91;Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 9; Thompson, Why Mass Incarceration Matters, 706-07.
3 Defending this system of racism as not racist is uncomplicated because it is not specifically articulated as a system based on race.6
In addition to racism, Thompson considers financial interests a cause of mass
incarceration. This explanation is supported by historian David T. Courtwright. The material component in mass incarceration is that prisoners produce free labor. Businesses in the post- Civil War South and the post-Civil Rights Movement 1960s had an insatiable need for free labor performed by unfree people. In turn, mass incarceration fed into cycles of poverty: Free labor led to increased unemployment hitting poor minorities in inner cities especially hard.
Courtwright points out that “mass imprisonment meant, for practical purposes, the
institutional resegregation of surplus black laborers” and further refers to poor Black men as the “hereditary holders of the nation’s short stick.”7
Alexander points to the War on Drugs, which now spans more than four decades, as the most vital cause of mass incarceration since it systematically targets people of color and is the most decisive reason for their imprisonment. Thompson agrees that the War on Drugs is one of the most essential causes of mass incarceration. The explosive growth in the US prison population is a direct result of changes in sentencing laws and policies, with sentence length being the most fundamental contributor.8 Consequently, the US not only incarcerates a higher percentage of its citizens than any other country in the world––its penal system is the biggest to be found worldwide. On a global scale, 25 percent of all prisoners worldwide are locked up in the US, while the US accounts for only five percent of the world population. The next closest country is Rwanda, which has an incarceration rate 20 percent lower than that of the US. Norway, by comparison, has an incarceration rate lower than ten percent of that of the US.9 Most remarkably, the US locks up more of its minorities than any other nation in the world. The percentage of Black Americans behind bars in the US surpasses the percentage of Black people behind bars in South Africa at the most extreme point of apartheid.10
Mass incarceration matters because it affects democracy and public health. A total of 48 states and the District of Columbia deprive convicted felons of their franchise during incarceration and many also disenfranchise parolees––sometimes for life.11 The sociologists
6 Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 184.
7 Thompson, Why Mass Incarceration Matters, 716-17; David T. Courtwright, No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America (London: Harvard University Press, 2010), 168.
8 Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 60, 91-93; Thompson, Why Mass Incarceration Matters, 707-09.
9 Perkinson, Texas Tough, 1; Baz Dreisinger, Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World (New York: Other Press, 2016), 8; Pettit, Invisible Men, 1, 11, 83.
10Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 6.
11 Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 158; Pettit, Invisible Men, 72.
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Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza suggest that in the years between 1980 and 2000, one presidential election, at the minimum, and seven US Senate elections would have turned out differently if inmates had kept the franchise.12 Additionally, in the late 1990s, it was found that the prevalence of HIV and AIDS was five times higher in the prison population than in the general population, affecting both prisoners and the general population when prisoners were released. In 1989, it took more than one billion dollars of taxpayers’ money to treat prisoners during tuberculosis outbreaks exacerbated by overcrowding.13
Most importantly, mass incarceration matters because it affects Black Americans more than other Americans. The chance of a Black American getting incarcerated is six times higher than that of a white. Thus, the racial dimension of mass incarceration is never in question. In 2001, nationally, one out of six Black Americans had been locked up.
Imprisonment deteriorates many Black communities as it not only generates poverty and more crime, but also discomposes family ties. In addition, mass incarceration increases the chance that children of convicts become convicts themselves. Remarkably, there were fewer Black people subjected to control under slavery in 1850 than there are Black people subjected to control by criminal supervision today.14
Thompson asserts that in order to understand what led to the American poverty and racial inequality crises, historians must investigate two matters: how the US justice system developed after the 1960s and how mass incarceration has affected Black Americans.15 Meanwhile, Perkinson argues that while the South has topped the imprisonment rates in the country for a long time, scholars have overlooked its role in criminal justice and instead focused on the penitentiaries in the Northeastern states, meaning that the history of America’s penal system has deeper roots in the South than previously recognized.16 Political scientist Marie Gottschalk calls for an examination of state level differences of mass incarceration because efforts to combat crime first and foremost are tasks at the local and state levels––not the federal––and therefore states play a critical role in shaping criminal justice laws in the US as a whole.17
12 Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza, “Democratic Contraction? Political Consequences of Felon
Disenfranchisement in the United States,” American Sociological Review 67, no. 6 (2002): 794; Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 161.
13 Thompson, "Why Mass Incarceration Matters,” 715.
14 Joseph E. Kennedy and Mika W. Chance, “Collateral Damage: How Mass Incarceration Increases Poverty and Crime in North Carolina’s Poorest African American Communities,” Trial Briefs (2011): 15; Dreisinger, Incarceration Nations, 8; Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 170.
15 Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters,” 716.
16 Perkinson, Texas Tough, 7.
17 Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 13.
5 This thesis answers the call for state level examination as it explores penal reforms in North Carolina. The Tar Heel State’s incarceration practices matter because they stand out.
Recent research shows that North Carolina is the most capable state at regulating its prison population numbers.18 To understand why and how North Carolina’s per capita incarceration rate took a steep drop between 1974 and 2013, one must examine the pathway to the sudden drop, which started with a shift of the sentencing system when the state went from a system known as indeterminate sentencing to determinate sentencing. This shift was implemented by a number of laws that effected two sentencing reforms, with the two most important being the Fair Sentencing Act (FSA), implemented in 1981, and the Structured Sentencing Act (SSA), implemented in 1994. However, also crucial to North Carolina’s fall in per capita
incarceration rate was the 1987 Emergency Prison Population Stabilization Act, better known as the prison cap, which capped the size of the prison population.
North Carolina offers an unusual story of mass incarceration: one of falling admission numbers and stalled prison population growth at a time of law and order rhetoric, truth in sentencing policies such as mandatory minimums, and other factors such as the War on Drugs. At the same time, the story of mass incarceration in North Carolina reveals several paradoxes. The state implemented both longer sentences and a commitment to decarceration, which slowed the overall growth of the prison population and led to the proceeding drop in per capita incarceration rate that had been the highest in the nation. Remarkably, though, North Carolina simultaneously drastically increased its Black prison population.
With this in mind it is important to realize that while North Carolina was recognized for its efforts, the policies ultimately were not comprehensive enough to stop racism in the system. When the state capped the prison population in 1987, racial disparities in the prison population drastically increased as white and Black people were released at uneven rates, more Black people were admitted to prison, and Black people were kept in prison for longer time periods. Then when the state implemented truth in sentencing through mandatory
minimums in 1994, the prison admission numbers fell, but the racial disparities in admissions remained the same. At the same time, the prison population numbers increased drastically, and the racial disparities in the prison population continued to increase. Paradoxically, then, while North Carolina stalled the growth of its overall prison population, it drastically increased the growth of its Black prison population, despite the language of the 1994 SSA, which mandated that racial disparities in sentencing should not occur. This paradox meant
18Tonry, Sentencing Fragments, 156.
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that North Carolina adapted for racial equality in its criminal justice system in theory but did not achieve it in practice.
This thesis investigates why North Carolina committed to reducing its prison population at a time when incarceration surged nationally, how state politicians made progressive criminal justice policies palatable through tough on crime rhetoric reflective of the national climate, and how those otherwise progressive reform policies worked
regressively by increasing the prison population and further widening the longstanding gap between the incarceration rates of Black and white people from 1968 through 1995. This thesis argues that while the cultural imperative among North Carolinians was punishment, that impulse was checked by politicians’ financial concerns which is why North Carolina reduced its per capita incarceration rate. However, this data was only a statistical mirage:
Structural racism was ingrained in the state’s criminal justice system and surpassed economic concerns. Therefore, mass incarceration, explicitly defined as the mass imprisonment of Black people, was in full effect in North Carolina from 1968 through 1995. In general, this thesis is a contribution to the conversation on mass incarceration, the development in the criminal justice system after the 1960s, and the South’s role in shaping penal policies in the US. In particular, this thesis contributes to the conversation on state-level mass incarceration in North Carolina. This research is particularly important given how robust the current anti-mass incarceration conversation is in the US, because examining the mistakes of a state that has already attempted to address the problem can help current states avoid the same pitfalls.
Primary Sources and Methodology
This thesis leans on newspapers found on newspapers.com and digitalnc.org and analyzes materials from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Special North Carolina Collection and its Southern Historical Collection at the Wilson Library, its law library, and its School of Government using a historiographical research method with a qualitative approach.
The North Carolina Department of Correction’s prison records are this thesis’s main source.
Despite the biases guaranteed in any primary source, the use of primary sources in this thesis was vital in examining the rhetoric and attitudes of policymakers.
In the North Carolina Department of Correction’s prison records, the admission numbers and population numbers are organized into race and gender categories. In this thesis, I have merged the genders of the same race into the same category in all figures. Also, the three categories this thesis operates with are “Black,” “White,” and “Total.” The category
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“Total” includes “Black,” “White,” and all other race categories found in the prison records.
Combined, Black and white people made up 96 to 99 percent of all prison admissions and 96 to 98 percent of the prison population in the years from 1968 through 1995. Because all other race categories consistently made up such a small percentage of the total, examining them at a micro level would blur the picture. Also, a micro level analysis of these other race categories is out of the scope of this thesis because this thesis examines incarceration of Black and white people in North Carolina. Do take note, though, that all other races are included in the “Total”
category, which means that when talking about a certain number or percentage of total number, those other races are included in that total. I discuss real and relative numbers which refer to actual numbers and percentages respectively. The numbers in each respective
category originate from raw data from the prison records as of December 31 of each year in the years from 1968 through 1995.
This thesis begins in 1968, as the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement was ending and the War on Crime beginning. With the election of Richard Nixon for president, American politics took a right turn. This thesis stops in 1995, the year in which the
Emergency Prison Population Stabilization Act was revoked, because it investigates the process and effects of sentencing laws in North Carolina during the years from 1968 through 1995.
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2 Paradoxical Commitment
The Ford Foundation awarded the North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory
Commission with the Innovations in American Government Award in 1997. The Tar Heel State’s criminal justice reform received much commendation for its new sentencing
legislation, the Structured Sentencing Act, that limited prison population. The SSA declared that sentencing should be fair and truthful but also established that punishment did not necessarily have to mean imprisonment. Therefore, the Ford Foundation held up North Carolina as a model for other states. With that achievement, the Tar Heel State gained a reputation for being progressive on criminal justice issues. David Gergen, one of the awarding judges, emphasized that, “Every state should learn from North Carolina’s program how to resolve prison overcrowding.”1
Even though North Carolina did deserve recognition for its new sentencing legislation, the drop in per capita incarceration rate was only a statistical mirage. On paper, the per capita incarceration rate went down, but, in reality, the prison population grew. Incarceration in North Carolina was complex, and problems in the state’s criminal justice system stretched far beyond sentencing. Racism was inherent in the practices of police officers, ruling judges, and parole boards, so changing sentencing was not enough to stop racist effects in the system. In other words, there was a huge difference between North Carolina’s reputation and its reality.
Simply put, the progressive policies worked regressively. For this reason, it is worth questioning whether North Carolina should serve as a model for other states. The awarders overlooked two crucial problems in North Carolina’s criminal justice system: the racial disparities in the state’s prison admissions and in the prison population.
The paradox of North Carolina’s commitment to penal reform was that rather than reducing its prison population and making the system fair as promised, it caused a surge in prison population and led to a more racially biased system. The commitment was built on contradicting policies that resulted in disproportionately increased incarceration for one group, Black people, in order to achieve the goal of reducing incarceration overall. The reforms tried to get rid of racism in the system by taking discretion out of the equation through standardized sentences. Remarkably, though, while Black people were a minority in the North Carolina state population at only 22 percent in the 1990s, they were the majority in the state’s prisons. White people, on the other hand, were the majority in the state’s
1 “Well-deserved praise: N.C.’s structured sentencing is a model for the nation,” The Charlotte Observer, October 20, 1997, 10A.
9 population at 73 percent but a minority in its prisons.2 This data demonstrates that North Carolina’s penal system had strong racist effects.
Alexander sheds light on the processes involved in racism. Traditionally, people have tended to understand racism as a matter of attitudes and individual prejudice. However, academics understand racism as a matter of individual prejudice and power structures, which they refer to as “structural racism.” There is a common perception in US society, Alexander explains, that poor Black people are locked up in massive numbers as a result of their individual choices rather than as a result of social circumstances rigged against them. That perception is simply wrong, Alexander claims, stating that, “racism manifests itself not only in individual attitudes and stereotypes, but also in the basic structure of society.” Alexander’s argument means that, even though Americans traditionally have considered racism as inherent in the individual and being racist as something one either is or is not, racism is systemic.
Therefore, all Americans are suffused within the processes of racism. Alexander and scholars such as Iris Marion Young and Marilyn Frye claim that one key racist structure is the system of mass incarceration. The structural racism of mass incarceration is realized by “a wide variety of laws, institutions, and practices––ranging from racial profiling to biased sentencing policies,” that “trap [Black people] in a virtual (and literal) cage,” Alexander explains. She further explains structural racism as “a set of structural arrangements that locks a racially distinct group into a subordinate political, social, and economic position, effectively creating a second-class citizenship.” Further, the question of how to define racism is central to the debate over race in the US, specifically whether someone has to be an overt racist in order to act racist or if racism is such a powerful storyline in the American narrative that people do not recognize a racist structure that creates racist effects when they see it. However, mass
incarceration, “the new racial caste system,” is not “explicitly based on race,” which is why people can defend the system and simultaneously claim to be non-racist.3
North Carolina serves as a useful case study in structural racism because its penal policies had racist impacts even when policies and policymakers did not express racist intentions. In North Carolina’s penal system, racism persisted and increased in three ways:
Compared to the general state population, admissions stayed higher for Black people because Black people were arrested and admitted in comparatively higher numbers in the first place.
2 The relative numbers of the general North Carolina demographics were calculated based on numbers from the US Census Bureau from 2000. U.S. Census Bureau, Profile of General Population and Housing Characteristics:
2000, available at: https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2000/phc-1-35.pdf, pages 2 and 171.
3Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 183-85.
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After the first reform Act was implemented, the admission numbers for Black people became higher also in real numbers, which utterly reinforced the already huge misrepresentation of the state’s demography. Prison population stayed higher for Black people because there were already more in prison and because judges and parole boards found loopholes to continue giving Black people longer sentences and fewer releases on parole. This picture reveals a stark contrast and suggests that Black people were targeted and subjected to racial profiling.
Below are four figures illustrating the racial disparities in both the prison admissions and the prison population. The four figures compare two different data sets over the time period from 1968 through 1995. Figures 1 and 2 show new convicts, and figures 3 and 4 show prison population. Real numbers are presented in figures 1 and 3, while relative numbers are presented in figures 2 and 4. This data from the prison records shows several factors and trends.
Combined, figures 1 and 2 show that slightly more white than Black people were admitted to North Carolina prisons in real numbers between 1968 and 1979. While the racial distribution in the admission numbers strongly contrasted the racial distribution in the state population with disproportionately high admission rates of Black people, the racial
distribution in the admission numbers remained somewhat stable during those years, ranging between a ratio of 43 percent Black and 55 percent white at the widest in 1973 and 48 percent Black and 49 percent white at the narrowest in 1979. In 1980, the distribution changed
slightly as Black people were admitted at 49 percent and white people at 48 percent. In 1981, the distribution was 49 percent Black and 49 percent white. From 1982, just a year after the FSA was implemented, North Carolina admitted more Black people to its prisons than it did white people. Nevertheless, in 1987, the state implemented another new prison policy, and the trend of increased racial disparities not only continued, it exploded: In the six years from 1987 to 1993, the relative number of Black people admitted jumped from 52 percent to 63 percent, while it fell significantly from 45 percent to 34 percent for white people. At the same time, the real total number of people admitted to North Carolina prisons skyrocketed. Thus, new penal acts adopted in the 1980s led to a drastic upsurge in arrests of Black people.
Finally, figures 1 and 2 show one effect of North Carolina’s 1994 criminal justice reform Act: The state’s prison admissions plummeted that year and even more so in 1995.
Nevertheless, despite facing a rapid reduction in prison admissions, the reduction did not reduce racial disparities in admissions: The admission numbers continued to amount to roughly two thirds Black and one third white. Those vast racial disparities become even more alarming when considering the demography of the North Carolina state population which was
11 about one fifth Black and three quarters white. These statistics indicate that an immediate effect of the legislation passed in the 1980s and 1990s was increased disproportionate policing of Black people.
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4 Graph based on raw data from the North Carolina DOC, Annual Statistical Report, 1968-1995.
0 5 000 10 000 15 000 20 000 25 000 30 000 35 000
1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995
Year
Figure 1: North Carolina Prison Admissions in Real Numbers Based on Total Admissions
Black White Total
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While the racist effects of the criminal justice reform Acts were clear in the admission numbers, they were even starker in the population numbers. Remarkably, Black people made up the majority of North Carolina’s prison population at any given time in the years from 1968 through 1995 even though white people had been admitted in slightly larger numbers from 1968 through 1979. This discrepancy demonstrates that the racial distribution in the prison population did not necessarily reflect the racial distribution in the admission numbers, which indicates that the decisions made by judges and parole boards had an even stronger racist bias than the practices of police officers. Figures 3 and 4 show thatwhile the racial disparities in the prison population were significant, they were relatively stable in the period from 1968 to 1987. During that time, the ratio ranged between 55 percent Black and 42 percent white at the widest in 1976 and 1987 and 53 percent Black and 45 percent white at the narrowest in 1968, 1969, 1973, and 1981.6
From 1987 onward, however, that distribution changed drastically and became even more grossly disproportionate. In eight years, the relative number of Black inmates in North
5Ibid.
6North Carolina Department of Correction, Annual Statistical Report, 1968-1995.
30%
35%
40%
45%
50%
55%
60%
65%
70%
1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 Year
Figure 2: North Carolina Prison Admission Numbers in Relative Numbers Based on Total Admissions
Black White
13 Carolina prisons jumped from 55 percent in 1987 to 65 percent in 1995, whereas the relative number of white inmates fell from 42 percent to 31 percent.7 Moreover, although the total prison admission numbers decreased in 1994 and 1995, the total prison population numbers soared those years. This change signals that people were serving longer sentences after entering the system. Especially striking was the explosion of Black inmates. Ultimately, Black people, who only made up about one fifth of the state population, made up
approximately two thirds of the prison population, while white people, who accounted for about three quarters of the state population, only made up approximately one third of the prison population in 1995. This data demonstrates strong racist effects in North Carolina’s criminal justice system.
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7North Carolina Department of Correction, Annual Statistical Report, 1987, 1995.
8 Graph based on raw data from the North Carolina Department of Correction, Annual Statistical Report, 1968- 1995.
0 5 000 10 000 15 000 20 000 25 000 30 000 35 000
1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 Year
Figure 3: North Carolina Prison Population in Real Numbers Based on Total Population
Black White Total
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The story of mass incarceration in the Paradox State reveals a complex mixture of backlash against the Civil Rights Movement and economic concerns. What happened in North Carolina’s criminal justice system from 1968 to 1995 is intricate, as major political changes took place in the state in that period. These changes were part of a broader trend of political and social changes in the US as a whole.
Backlash Against the Civil Rights Movement
Before the 1960s, national politics had not dealt with criminal justice issues because crime had been managed by the individual states. However, political and social conditions in the 1960s destabilized the country and changed the federal government’s take on criminal justice.
That change set a trend for what would come in the following decades. Even though liberal Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson won the presidential election in 1964, a politics of law and order, causing public fear, broke through when Republican candidate Barry Goldwater ran
9 Ibid.
30%
35%
40%
45%
50%
55%
60%
65%
70%
1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 Year
Figure 4: North Carolina Prison Population in Relative Numbers Based on Total Population
Black White
15 against him. Johnson had previously signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act that outlawed racial discrimination and the 1965 Voting Rights Act shortly after, helping Black citizens exercise the right to vote in places where local policies had been preventing them from voting. From 1966 onward, however, a downward spiral hit Johnson and the Democratic Party as violent crime and homicides skyrocketed. In poor inner-city areas with large Black communities, violent crime increased especially, and racial riots were on the rise. This tension created fear in the public. Politicians such as George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush would later increase those public fears.10
To understand why politicians were able to increase public fears, which would ultimately lead to stronger racist effects in the prison systems both nationally and in North Carolina, one must first understand public attitudes toward Black people and crime in the US.
Mass media has shaped the myth of the Black criminal. A myth can be explained as a false narrative with no basis in scientific evidence. Some claim that a myth is a narrative consisting of a fundamental aim to do more than merely tell stories. Therefore, people can have hidden intentions with sharing such narratives. Alexander traces the myth of the Black criminal back to old movies that presented distorted illusions of race relations in the South instead of showing what race relations really constituted: a cruel system of racism and control. Such movies promoted the Confederate Lost Cause narrative, which emerged in the South after Reconstruction. An example of such a movie is The Birth of a Nation (1915), which was adapted from Thomas Dixon Jr.’s novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), both created in the period of Jim Crow rule. The film romanticized the Old South and portrayed Black men as oversexed, criminal, lazy, and dangerous people. Such films, combined with more contemporary media, Alexander and Pettit argue, have
perpetuated the myth of the Black criminal. In this same context, the myth of the Black criminal has gone hand in hand with the idea that the criminal justice system should punish Black people to protect the public. The myth has promulgated ideas that the criminal justice system should be reformed to be even harsher. However, the stories of crime and the rhetoric around law enforcement did not reflect reality. Instead, they engendered fear and strengthened the myth of the Black criminal.11
10Gottschalk, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 146; Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows, 33-34; Donald T. Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 42.
11 Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 59; Pettit, Invisible Men, 2; The Birth of a Nation (Youtube, 2018), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGQaAddwjxg; Richard G.A. Buxton, Jonathan Z. Smith, and others,
16
The Republican Party played on these fears and used strong conservative rhetoric to emphasize a need for the restoration of law and order. In his 1968 campaign, Richard Nixon spread fear through advertisements by focusing on rising crime rates and, just like his ideological forebears, portrayed white communities as especially exposed to danger. He did so by repeating more explicitly pronounced rhetoric from the past, in which Black men were portrayed as posing sexual threats to white women. To deter this alleged danger, Nixon called for a tough on crime approach to protect white communities.12 To make matters worse, Nixon created an intense fear of illegal drug use and rhetorically launched a War on Drugs, insisting that drugs were “public enemy number one.” Alexander contends that, “A backlash against blacks was clearly in force.” Nixon successfully created the War on Drugs to gain politically from law and order rhetoric, a measure his successor, Reagan, would later expand and continue.13
Nixon’s victory was a crucially important event because it would transform the future of the US, both on the national and state levels, especially with regard to mass incarceration.
Through what would become known as the Southern Strategy, the Republican Party not only made the issue of crime nationalized and politicized––it also implicitly linked crime to race in order to win the votes of the white working class and white Southerners and to implement its own ideology. The Republican Party argued that there was a correlation between crime, counterculture, and civil rights advocacy. Therefore, by creating and later playing on white people’s conceptions of Black crime and resistance toward integration, the party made sure public fears in the country took firm hold. The federal government adopted a new penal policy that paved the way for an expanded conception of crime, increased and harsher punishment, and the realization that prison could be a new way to expand racism and
segregation. Consequently, the opinions of the general public changed as national politicians hammered home the law and order message and linked social problems to immorality instead of social circumstances. On that note, Gottschalk concludes that “crime policy is a product of the actions of political elites and not merely a reflection of the fears and anxieties of its citizens.” Ultimately, then, politicians continuously generated public fear and continuously responded to it. Republicans’ persistent association of Black people with crime contributed to
“Myth,” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., January 3, 2017, https://www.britannica.com/topic/myth.
12 Seth Kotch, Lethal State: A History of the Death Penalty in North Carolina (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 158.
13 Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 48-49.
17 the public’s understanding of law and order and thus led to a prioritization of prison
expansion in the United States.14
This political shift paralleled the changing nature of the Democratic and Republican parties, especially in the South, at the time. The rise of the Republican Party in the South, including North Carolina, was driven by white backlash against the Civil Rights Movement and its supporters, among them Democratic leaders. Prior to the 1960s, the Democratic Party had been the party of Jim Crow as powerful conservative Southern Democrats in the US Senate obstructed civil rights concessions, from both Democrats and Republicans, in order to uphold white supremacy in the South. However, in response to the cultural and political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, both liberalism and conservatism took on new meanings.
Both the Democratic and the Republican parties drifted further from the center in opposite directions, which polarized the political debate. The new Democratic Party in the South became more progressive as robust Social Democrats and liberals pushed the party to the left by working to strengthen government regulations, international cooperation, and multicultural liaisons. Moreover, victories of the Civil Rights Movement resulted in programs such as busing and affirmative action. The leftward push from Southern Democrats and support for civil rights measures caused dilemmas and friction within the party. Notably, the leftward turn resulted in Black people turning to the former party of Jim Crow. However, the turn also made the Democratic Party lose many of its Southern white voters and Northern blue-collar voters, largely because of racial resentment. At the same time, the Republican Party was pushed to the right due to heavy influence from two especially conservative branches: A New Right and a New Religious Right. These conservative branches reinforced subjects the
Republican Party had taken advantage of since 1968 and thus made sure the party capitalized on fighting crime, complaining about moral decadency and high tax levels, playing on nationalism and patriotism, and emphasizing conservative family values. The two
conservative branches were particularly strong in the “Sunbelt,” a region spanning from North Carolina in the Southeast through the Deep South and the Southwest to Southern California in the West. Kevin Phillips coined the term Sunbelt in his famous book The Emerging
Republican Majority, from 1969, which describes the exact processes of this political shift that took place after the South had been Democratic for decades. Phillips studied voting patterns and was the Republican strategist who created the Southern Strategy that helped get
14 Gottschalk, Caught, 145-48; Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows, 33-34; Critchlow The Conservative Ascendancy, 94; Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 11.
18
Nixon elected. As such, Phillips’s incentive for writing about the Sunbelt was to ensure the Republican Party extracted everything it could from the political shift. Consequently, by the end of the 1960s, the Republican Party had stepped forward as the majority party nationally and particularly in the South. Conservative politics from the Sunbelt would strongly influence national politics.15
Even though North Carolina was part of the Sunbelt and followed some of the national trends, it went against other trends. There was a progressive strain present in North Carolina, which was what separated its politics from those of other Southern states. Voters in the state were inclined to elect a liberal candidate if convinced they would take care of the average person. In the 1960s when Alabama’s then-governor, segregationist George Wallace,
followed the traditions of the Old South and refused to give up segregation, North Carolina’s then-governor, Democrat Terry Sanford, mobilized for racial integration. Such mobilization was unusual for a Southern state in the 1960s. Moreover, the sit-ins of the modern Civil Rights Movement started in North Carolina, for example at Durham’s Royal Ice Cream Company in 1957 and at Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro in 1961. These revolutionary acts were to a certain degree possible due to the multiple historically Black colleges (HBCs) that North Carolina was home to.16
But the racial progressivism in the state had significant limitations because the progressive strain was perpetually in conflict with North Carolina’s culture of white supremacy. Following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the Ku Klux Klan expanded and ultimately built its biggest chapter in North Carolina in the 1960s. That chapter, the North Carolina Realm of the United Klans of America, boasted over 50 percent of the total Southern Klan membership and exceeded the Deep South state of Louisiana by more
15 Paul Luebke, Tar Heel Politics 2000 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 189;
Mebane R. Whitman, “The Evolution of Party Politics: The March of the GOP Continues in North Carolina,” in North Carolina Focus: An Anthology on State Government, Politics, and Policy, eds. Mebane R. Whitman and Ran Coble (Raleigh: North Carolina Center for Public Policy Research, 1996), 174; William C. Berman, America’s Right Turn: From Nixon to Clinton (London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 3, 14, 23- 24; Michelle Nickerson and Darren Dochuk, eds., “Introduction” in Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 3-6; Joseph Crespino, “Strom Thurmond’s Sunbelt: Rethinking Regional Politics and the Rise of the Right” in Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 80; Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, “Sunbelt Boosterism: Industrial Recruitment, Economic Development, and Growth Politics in the Developing Sunbelt” in Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 31-32; Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001), 215-17; Courtwright, No Right Turn, 171.
16 Rob Christensen, The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics: The Personalities, Elections, and Events that Shaped Modern North Carolina (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 3, 179; Jack, D. Fleer, North Carolina Government and Politics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 26; Kotch, Lethal State, 156; Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 46.
19 than tenfold. North Carolina had an advanced system of upholding racial control in the
1960s.17
At the time, the state was home to the fourth highest number of Black people in the country. Sheer numbers did not give Black people political advantages, though, as state institutions were run by white elected officials. This system of almost-all-white representation was upheld by widespread Black voter suppression. Only Mississippi had a wider gap
between Black eligible voters and white registered voters in its population. In the landmark year of 1968, not a single state in the country had fewer elected Black officials than North Carolina.18 Thus, while there were progressive elements in North Carolina, white supremacy was the dominant social system in the South. White supremacy infiltrated politics.
Perhaps the new politics of the Republican Party and its law and order rhetoric appealed to many North Carolinians because of the social system in the state. The new Democratic Party distanced itself from white supremacy and aimed to improve the everyday lives of the state’s Black people through welfare measures. The party also mobilized for school integration through busing. Therefore, the political shift in the Tar Heel State may have been inevitable.19 The politics of the new Democratic Party was not compatible with the ongoing white resentment toward the Civil Rights Movement. In North Carolina, busing often involved sending Black students to white schools and shutting down Black schools. Activists criticized this practice as punishing the Black community for pursuing a system of equal rights. Meanwhile, when white students faced the risk of being bused, people strongly opposed it, calling it “forced busing.” It was rejected as “the most insanely, stupid, idiotic, and illogical crackpot program ever promogulated in a civilized country in the history of human civilization.” Busing became the focal point in the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement. Therefore, politicians running for office on all levels flagged their conservatism by opposing the measure, combined with hammering home the law and order message.20
In addition to its pledge to get tough on crime, the Republican Party promoted politics compatible with mainly white conservative Protestant North Carolinians. In the late 1960s, bans against school prayer combined with racial integration in schools made many white conservative Christians in the South claim that public schools were unavailable to them. The Republican Party’s cries to ban abortions and to permit group prayer in the state’s public
17Kotch, Lethal State, 157.
18Kotch, Lethal State, 157.
19Christensen, The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics, 227.
20Kotch, Lethal State, 159.
20
schools resonated with white conservative Christians in North Carolina. Additionally, many Republican Midwesterners and Northeasterners had relocated to North Carolina. Combined, shifting politics and shifting demographics led to the growth of Republicanism in the state.21
White supremacists in the state, among them politicians and their allies, did, however, have to put in great effort to maintain power. White supremacy had been challenged by an increasing number of activists who had the support of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Moreover, North Carolina had voted for Johnson in 1964. Nevertheless, as a result of racial resentment and the white backlash against the modern Civil Rights Movement, Nixon, who had run on restoring “law and order,” won 70 percent of the state’s vote in 1968 and thus reshaped the political landscape in North Carolina.22
When Judges Ruled: Indeterminate Sentencing in North Carolina
American states have different criminal justice systems.23 Until 1981, North Carolina was one of many states practicing a system of sentencing policies known as indeterminate
sentencing.24 This system gave the individual judge the power to decide whether to send a defendant to prison and to set the minimum and maximum sentences. This level of
independence also applied to the parole boards, which were responsible for deciding who was eligible for release, setting the date of the potential release, and assessing who would return to prison if they broke the parole premises.25
Indeterminate sentencing in North Carolina was rather chaotic due to vague definitions of what constituted a crime and each crime having a broad range of sentences.
This system of indeterminate sentencing had roots in the ‘“medical model’ of corrections,” a model based on the belief that, in the same way medical doctors diagnose patients, the parole boards and courts could diagnose offenders. Therefore, courts could determine which
problems the offenders were dealing with and the degree to which they were dangerous.
21 Christensen, The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics, 228; Kevin M. Kruse, “Beyond the Southern Cross: The National Origins of the Religious Right,” in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, eds. Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 296.
22 Kotch, Lethal State, 157-58.
23 Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows, 107.
24 North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission, North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission, 1; Louis B. Meyer, “North Carolina’s Fair Sentencing Act: An Ineffective Scarecrow,” Wake Forrest Law Review 28, no. 3 (1993): 528.
25 Tonry, Sentencing Fragments, 50.
21 Courts were able to impose treatments accordingly, and parole boards were in charge of assessing when the inmates were ready for parole.26
Not only did judges and correctional authorities have unlimited room for discretion, they also were exempt from giving grounds for their decisions. Ultimately, this model made it difficult to prove whether racist attitudes shaped the judges’ rulings, but the data from the prison records shows that the effects were racist. The North Carolina judiciary’s practice of indeterminate sentencing had detrimental effects on Black communities because this system allowed racial disparities in the prison population. According to Justice Louis B. Meyer, who served as Senior Associate Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, indeterminate sentencing often led to different sentence lengths for people who had committed the same crimes, and it allowed for sentence lengths that were out of proportion to the crimes committed. Combined, these factors led to a feeling of injustice among the state’s inmates, who were caught in the system. Judges and parole boards had extensive room for discretion because indeterminate sentencing in North Carolina did not provide guidance in terms of standards or rules. Subsequently, Meyer states that “disparity in sentencing became rampant, either perceptually or apparently based on race.”27
The randomness of the sentencing system led to a rising number of people, especially liberals, voicing their concerns about the effect of the system. The combination of
indeterminate sentencing, police brutality, and poor prison conditions led to a number of prison riots across the country: five in 1967, fifteen in 1968, twenty-seven in 1970, thirty- seven in 1971 including the Attica Prison riot with more than forty casualties, and forty-eight more in 1972.28 At times the consequences were vicious. By mid-April 1968, a deadly prison riot broke out in North Carolina’s state capital Raleigh’s maximum security prison, Central Prison. It was the bloodiest prison riot to ever have taken place in North Carolina, with six inmates dead and seventy-seven more injured. The inmates of Central Prison rioted in response to Commissioner of Correction V. Lee Bounds’s sanctions on “homosexuality, extortion, and racketeering.” Bounds, who was serving his third year as Commissioner, responded that he “avoided the consequences of giving in to [the inmates’] demands,” where one was that he talk to them. Furthermore, he expressed pride in having put an end to the riot
26 Stevens H. Clarke, Law of Sentencing, Probation, and Parole in North Carolina, (Chapel Hill: Institute of Government, 1997), 47; Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares, 43-44.
27 Meyer, “North Carolina’s Fair Sentencing Act,” 528-30; Clarke, Law of Sentencing, Probation, and Parole (1997), 47.
28 Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares, 42; Janssen, “Sunbelt Lock-Up,” 226.
22
by force and not by negotiation: “I have thus far always said I would do precisely the same thing again.”29
Prison Problems and the Knox Commission
The North Carolina prison records suggest that Nixon’s law and order rhetoric had a huge impact in the Tar Heel State. The number of convicts rose, and the state housed one of the biggest prison populations in the United States by the early 1970s. By then, the North Carolina Bar Association had criticized the system for generating different sentences for the same crimes––which was a direct result of indeterminate sentencing. Not only did the prison population grow—prison expenses grew immensely as well.30 Ultimately, concerns over spending and leftwing criticism of prison conditions on the one hand and rightwing tough on crime rhetoric from politicians, combined with calls for stricter punishment from conservative voters, on the other caused strong tension. Moreover, the North Carolina Bar Association
“criticized the disparity of prison sentences imposed in like cases” and requested a study “not only of disparity in sentences, but of the entire problem of sentencing, the philosophy
underlying it, and the procedures used in effecting it.”31
Therefore, in 1974, when North Carolina’s per capita imprisonment rate was the highest in the nation, the North Carolina General Assembly appointed a commission to
address the problems the state was facing. The Democratic then-state senator Eddie Knox was appointed chair of the commission which would become known as the Knox Commission.32 The legislature mandated Knox and his colleagues to assess how much physical space would be needed for prisons and to investigate what life behind bars was like for the prisoners in terms of treatment and activities.33 Moreover, the General Assembly directed the Commission to reduce the state’s expenses by reducing the size of the prison population while
simultaneously attending to the safety of the general population.34
The Commission started out by examining what the reasons for North Carolina’s high prison population numbers could be. In its interim report from 1975, the Commission noticed
29 Linda Lowe, “Bounds reflects on Central Prison riots,” The Daily Tar Heel, October 30, 1975, 4.
30 Meyer, “North Carolina’s Fair Sentencing Act,” 528, 530; Clarke, Law of Sentencing, Probation, and Parole in North Carolina (1997), 47.
31 See North Carolina Bar Association, Penal System Committee, Second Interim Report, (Raleigh: North Carolina Bar Association, 1972), 14. Also found in Clarke, Law of Sentencing, Probation, and Parole in North Carolina (1997), 40.
32 Clarke, Law of Sentencing, Probation, and Parole in North Carolina (1997), 40.
33 Stevens H. Clarke, Law of Sentencing, Probation, and Parole in North Carolina (Chapel Hill: The Institute of Government, 1991), 40-41.
34 Meyer, “North Carolina’s Fair Sentencing Act,” 537-8.
23 that there were two main reasons for the large prison population: the state’s parole practices and the type of crimes people went to prison for. A significant number of the inmates were incarcerated for felonies. Therefore, they were serving longer average sentences than inmates in other states. The average sentence in North Carolina was longer than the average sentence in other states because the proportion of people charged with misdemeanors versus felonies was different than in other states. On top of that, North Carolina ranked high in sentence length.35 A study by the North Carolina Department of Correction (DOC) found that inmates in the Tar Heel State in general spent 68 percent more time behind bars than the national average.36
In its continued efforts to meet the mandate, the Knox Commission addressed a hot- button issue: Whether they should build more prisons. For two months, the members of the Commission studied North Carolina’s prison system and the DOC’s plans for future building programs. Fiscal researchers from the legislature also partook in the study. In their search for extensive information on crime and an expected rise in population numbers, the Commission consulted academic experts and career professionals. Arguments supporting the DOC’s plans focused on the continuous increase in crime, predicted increase in crime, and the increased accumulation of felons in the system. Counterarguments included analyses of historical trends and a predicted decrease in crime. Those who opposed prison construction also wanted to influence judges’ and the general public’s stances on imprisonment for a number of victimless crimes. Therefore, in its second report, also from 1975, the Commission concluded that overcrowding alone did not provide sufficient grounds to go through with prison expansion and therefore advised against it. Knox and his team criticized the Parole Commission for being passive and claimed that some of the overcrowding was “self-imposed” due to the reduced number of parolees over the last 18 months.37
The Knox Commission did, however, find “that to continue the overcrowded conditions without the implementation of short-range alternatives is inexcusable and could result in serious management problems, including but not limited to the abuse of inmates, the deterioration of rehabilitative programs and riots.” Moreover, the Commission expressed great concern about the effects of the current situation: “[T]he brutalizing, de-humanization that is a fact of life in many of North Carolina’s prisons today is in large part attributal to the
35 Commission on Sentencing, Criminal Punishment, and Rehabilitation, Interim Report 1975, 1-2.
36 Meyer, “North Carolina’s Fair Sentencing Act,” 530.
37Commission on Sentencing, Criminal Punishment, and Rehabilitation, Second Report: Including Capital Construction Recommendation, 1975, 1-4, 6.