Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Preface
- 1 Racial Tracking
- 2 Policy Process Theory of Racial Tracking
- 3 A Color-Blind Problem
- 4 Opportunities for Change
- 5 Congress as Power Player
- 6 The Politics Principle and the Party Playbook
- 7 Public Origins
- 8 Streams of Thought
- Appendix Methodology for Hearings Analysis
- Notes
- Index
2 - Policy Process Theory of Racial Tracking
An Overview
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Preface
- 1 Racial Tracking
- 2 Policy Process Theory of Racial Tracking
- 3 A Color-Blind Problem
- 4 Opportunities for Change
- 5 Congress as Power Player
- 6 The Politics Principle and the Party Playbook
- 7 Public Origins
- 8 Streams of Thought
- Appendix Methodology for Hearings Analysis
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Presently, the dominant theories put forth to explain the persistence of racial disproportionalness in American justice are offered in the fields of law, criminology, sociology, psychology, and economics. The available politics-centered accounts tend to emphasize racial bias or indifference – conscious and unconscious, institutional and noninstitutional. At the risk of oversimplifying, the politics-centered accounts may be summed up as attributing key racial justice outcomes mostly to actors within the criminal justice system, to racial conservatism, to rulings of the Burger-Rehnquist Courts, and/or to the Republican Party. In connection with the latter, Richard M. Nixon’s “law and order” agenda and Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs each receive considerable attention.
Empirical analyses of systemic political forces and their role in enabling racial tracking are in short supply. In fact, within the political science discipline generally, research studies explicitly purposed to provide an in-depth, systematic account of the perpetual interplay between race, crime, and criminal justice politics are rare. Yet, precisely because racial tracking is a major public policy concern, the policy process literature would seem an excellent starting place for any effort to explicate its causal roots more fully. In turn, racial tracking is an excellent case study for gauging the overall utility of existing theories of the public policy process and, particularly, their capacity to explain the lack of racial justice reform.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015