Criminal Law and the Pursuit of Equality

Despite the Constitution's guarantee to equal protection, it is fair to say that today most black Americans feel neither equal under nor protected by our criminal laws. The effects of underenforcement are devastating: Many people living in our nation's inner cities no longer feel safe walking through

Repeated attempts to remedy this situation through the courts have, to put it mildly, failed. Expansive readings of the rights of criminal suspects, defendants, convicts, and prisoners have not only failed to stem the massive institutionalization of those in disadvantaged communities, they have made those who litigate to enforce those rights appear to be pro-criminal.3 Worse still, as some commentators have noted, these tactics may well interfere with communities' self-policing capabilities.4 The result has been a confused movement towards longer sentences out of an indeterminate blend of political calculations and warring conceptions of what balance of liberties and sanctions will genuinely serve those in disadvantaged communities.

Equal protection litigation, too, has failed fairly convincingly. This is partly a result of the Supreme Court's invidious intent standard, which forces litigators to go beyond claims that state policies inadvertently contribute to the subordination of disadvantaged populations and assert that the state acted with discriminatory intent.5 Litigants attempting to meet this requirement by arguing that our laws are motivated by racist intent have alienated not only legislators and members of the executive branch, but also, increasingly, the general population who view much of our criminal law as motivated by neutral principles.6

But if the intent-based standard has many failings, the most commonly considered alternative-court-mandated remedies derived from an effects-based standard-has problems that may be equally serious. Even if courts were willing to undertake broad enforcement in principle, they would remain poorly equipped to administer broad effects-based remedies in practice.7

Perhaps even more importantly, courts are poorly positioned politically to manage such broad normative undertakings. Indeed, where activists have pitted the courts against the legislature and the executive branch on sensitive social issues-particularly in the criminal law-they have often provoked resistance and backlash with harms outweighing the benefit of the initial judicial intervention.8

These strategies, upon reflection, appear poorly fit to the egalitarian agenda for more fundamental reasons, though. The tragedy of contemporary criminal justice is not that individual rights are too narrowly construed, but that those living in disadvantaged communities are injured both by crime and mass incarceration. The remedies that egalitarians have looked to-remedies articulated within the framework of individual rights-pit these two harms against one another and are thus not well suited to address the systematic reproduction of inequality that results. In this Article I argue that, to make their vision of justice a reality, egalitarians will need to change both their focus and their tactics with respect to criminal law.9

First, as a matter of effective symbolic politics, egalitarians will need to shift their focus from the racially motivated harms directed at individual criminal offenders and defendants to the collateral and often unintentional harms borne by non-criminals in their communities.10 To give just two examples of these harms: (1) the fact that the vast majority of those convicted of drug offenses are not required to complete drug treatment programs as part of their sentence has devastating effects on the vulnerable families and communities to which they return;11 and (2) the fact that fathers who are incarcerated are not required to support (indeed are prevented from supporting) their children not only harms a broad class of non-criminals, but has far-reaching normative effects on family formation and father absence, which create serious inter-generational harms.12

Second, as a matter of pragmatic reform, egalitarians should shift their focus from the doctrine of individual liberties to more modest policy reforms aimed at increasing the influence that citizens in disadvantaged communities exercise over the form of justice itself.13 For too long, these communities have been asked to choose between expansive readings of criminal rights or oppressively harsh criminal sanctions-either choice making them a party to their own subordination. This is despite the fact that most citizens prefer more constructive third alternative: holding offenders accountable by imposing pro-social obligations on them (e.g., requiring offenders to provide restitution and victim compensation, to participate in mandatory drug treatment, mandatory job training, and mandatory literacy classes, to support their children, and wherever possible, to work). Egalitarians should leverage this popular sentiment, I argue, through a simple but powerful reform: jury polling. Properly implemented, jury polling aligns egalitarian objectives with a respect for, rather than in opposition to, popular sentiment.

There are, of course, complaints that can be leveled against this strategy. It certainly does not offer the sweeping and certain justice that some imagine the Constitution guarantees and courts should deliver. Perhaps some will see it as diminishing the principle of equality under the law to the level of mere politics. But effective reform-reform that is likely to last-requires an attention to popular sentiment and social consequence that has eluded doctrinal remedies and libertarian principles to date. It requires both a partnership with and the empowerment of those our courts seek to protect.

I develop my argument in three parts. In Part I, I review the co-evolution of criminal law and equality concerns through the lens of twentieth century constitutional doctrine. Much of the terrain is familiar, but placing criminal law and equal protection doctrine side by side produces insights into the mismatched objectives and methods of egalitarian reformers of criminal law, the results of which are a source of trenchant iniquity today. In particular, I describe how, in the context of rising crime rates and cultural conflict, the Warren Court and an increasingly conservative state created dysfunctional competition for control over the power of the criminal law to harm and protect disadvantaged communities-particularly black communities suffering from the legacies of American racial inequality.

In Part II, I describe the current predicament of the criminal law. By way of example, I show how disparities in crack cocaine sentencing moved egalitarians to undertake two unsuccessful and, in retrospect, counterproductive strategies. In the first, egalitarians attempted to use constitutional constraints on criminal procedure to increase the costs of criminal law enforcement in disadvantaged communities, thereby reducing the harms of overincarceration. In the second, egalitarians made claims of hidden or unconscious racism to meet the increasingly obscure doctrinal standard of invidious intent. Both strategies have earned egalitarian litigators the scorn of not only conservatives, but also many in the disadvantaged communities the litigators are attempting to assist. Moreover, it has left egalitarians with little in the way of a political agenda for addressing the subordinating harms of crime and mass incarceration.

Part III lays out an alternative approach. There I argue for reforms that seek to make both criminals and the criminal justice system more responsive to the practical concerns of the citizenry. I review empirical data indicating that the public is eager for reforms that do both, and I outline one modest but potent reform that leverages this popular preference, jury polling.

I. The Second Reconstruction and the Criminal Rights Revolution

I base my argument on an uncontroversial premise: The same concerns about racial inequality that underwrote the Second Reconstruction14 also underwrote the criminal rights revolution.15 The crucial difference, however, is that unlike the mainstream aspects of the Second Reconstruction-the marches, legislation, executive orders, and litigation, which embodied what many now describe as "popular" or coordinated constitutionalism-the criminal rights revolution was largely court-focused, uncoordinated, and unpopular. In this Part, drawing on existing analyses of the Second Reconstruction and the revolution in criminal rights,16 I lay out this claim and establish the point of departure for the more controversial claims of Part II and the novel proposals of Part III.

A. The Second Reconstruction and the Hope of Equality

The origins of contemporary battles over criminal law can be found in broader and more long-standing battles over equality. Understanding and remedying the failure of current efforts at reform will require understanding and disentangling these two battles.

For egalitarians, the rise and fall of the Second Reconstruction is both familiar and tragic.17 The rise-embodied in the freedom marches in Birmingham, Selma, Washington, and across the South;18 in escalating executive orders for desegregation;19 in the passage of the Civil Rights Acts and the Voting Rights Act; in the enforcement of those laws by the Civil Rights Division of the Attorney General's Office; and in court decisions leading up to and following in the spirit of Brown v. Board of Education20-spoke to the American promise of equality and the "withering injustice"21 of racial subordination despite that promise. It was a broad movement with a deep conception of equality-a justice that extended beyond individual concerns to the problems of group conflict and social subordination.22

The language of Brown certainly spoke to this conception of justice. Where the Plessy Court had dismissed the harms of segregation as the fictive "construction"23 of overly sensitive blacks, the Brown Court found that same harm to be real, deep, and unacceptable. Even where educational facilities were equal in every "tangible" respect,24 the Court reasoned, the harm done by school segregation was still unacceptable where it created "a feeling of inferiority" that frustrated the education of black children.25

Brown is often described as an embrace of Harlan's dissent in Plessy.26 In some respects, this may misapprehend the way those engaged in the First Reconstruction understood their struggle for equality under the law.27 But in at least one respect it does seem right. The Brown Court was doing more than objecting to segregation for segregation's sake; it was attempting to make good on Harlan's claim that "there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens," that, as he put it, "[t]here is no caste here."28 In Brown, the American racial caste system had reached what many hoped would be the beginning of its end.

But the Brown Court was not alone in its fight against racial stratification in civil and private life; in fact the Court was both responding to and encouraging the activism of the public, the Legislature, and, perhaps most directly, the Executive Branch.29

President Truman had spoken forcefully on the issue of racial discrimination,30 and it was under Truman that Attorney General McGranery asked the Court to discard segregation once and for all "as a negation of rights secured by the Constitution."31 Responding to public demand and the unanimous Brown decision, when the Governor of Arkansas used the National Guard to bar black students from attending Little Rock Central High School in 1957, the NAACP obtained an order barring the use of the Guard for that purpose, and President Eisenhower immediately sent the 101st Airborne to protect the black students as they attended their new school.32 In 1960, when segregationists threatened the six-year-old Ruby Bridges for planning to attend a formerly all-white school in New Orleans, President Eisenhower responded, this time sending federal marshals as escorts.33

Congress also played an active role in the Second Reconstruction. Under intense pressure from an increasingly active public and a determined President Johnson, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964,34 which prohibited discrimination in employment, established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and banned discrimination in public accommodations connected with interstate commerce.35 That act, the Voting Rights Act of 1965,36 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968(37) described practical efforts that could be made in furtherance of a society in which the law no longer contributed to racial injustice.

Ordinary citizens, too, were active reconstructors. Across the country, they took to the streets and the voting booths in increasingly large numbers and pushed for the elimination not only of segregation but of the more subtle forms of discrimination that sustained racial inequality. In bus boycotts, freedom rides, lunch counter sit-ins, and perhaps most famously, the marches on Birmingham, Washington, and Selma, Americans demanded a deep and abiding justice that included the unmet promise of true equality of opportunity. When private citizen Martin Luther King Jr. declared, "No, no, we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until 'justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,'"38 he not only voiced his opposition to segregation but also described the greater aspiration and demand of the movement-true equality in the economic, political, and social life of the nation.

Throughout the 1960s-under pressure from the public, the Executive Branch, and Congress-the Court extended its holding in Brown to other areas of segregation.39 And, in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States,40 South Carolina v. Katzenbach,41 and Oregon v. Mitchell,42 the Court upheld various aspects of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. And finally, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education43 and Griggs v. Duke Power Co.,44 the Court extinguished any ambiguity about the scope of the Second Reconstruction's aspirations, holding that the appearance of neutrality was not enough and that race-based remedies, where necessary, were required.45

B. Equality and the Criminal Rights Revolution

The Court's sweeping reform of the criminal justice system-and the Court's reforms are indeed sweeping46-were related, if not integral, to the Second Reconstruction. Robert Cover mapped the early stages of the Court's pursuit of equality through criminal procedure,47 describing the extension of Fourteenth Amendment concerns into the heartland of criminal procedure in cases like Moore v. Dempsey,48 Powell v. Alabama,49 and Brown v. Mississippi.50 It was in these cases that the federal oversight of criminal procedure became closely associated with restraining racial hierarchy.

But it was during the 1960s and '70s that the Court was most active. Operating under "the assumption that communities could not be trusted to police their own police because of the distorting influence of racism,"51 the Court "erected a dense network of rules to delimit the permissible bounds of discretionary law-enforcement authority."52 Mapp v. Ohio53 expanded the Court's understanding of criminal suspects' and criminal defendants' rights, an understanding that was soon further expanded by Gideon v. Wainwright54 and Miranda v. Arizona.55 Juvenile criminal defendants were also granted greater constitutional standing under In re Gault.56

Perhaps the most dramatic expansion of federal judicial power into the criminal justice system occurred in the Court's prison cases. Federal involvement in the quality of incarceration was most dramatically expanded in 1964 when the Supreme Court read the Civil Rights Act of 1871 as granting inmates the right to bring legal action against prison officials in Cooper v. Pate.57

Since Cooper, prisoners and their advocates have, through the courts, successfully reduced restrictions on inmates providing one another with legal assistance,58 increased prisoner's access to mail,59 required that administrators provide equal opportunity for inmates to pursue minority faiths,60 gained inmates standing to sue for unnecessary punishment,61 increased inmate access to medical care,62 subjected severe forms of isolation to heightened levels of constitutional scrutiny,63 and even found entire state prison systems unconstitutional.64 Over the course of two decades, the number of cases brought by prisoners went from a dozen to hundreds to tens of thousands.65

The motivation behind reforms in criminal procedure and prisoners' rights were unquestionably linked with equality-seeking reforms in laws governing education, the workplace, and voting rights.66 As the arrests of civil rights protestors across the South indicated, the police power of the state was a considerable tool for advancing the interests of the white men who held positions of power and openly sought the subordination of black Americans. States, as many egalitarians realized, could not be trusted with the protection of minority citizens. The tenor of court rulings, as a result, began emphasizing contemporary considerations of the "broad and idealistic concepts of dignity, civilized standards, humanity, and decency."67

But the criminal rights reforms of this period were also different from broader civil rights reforms in important ways. While the court reforms of criminal rights were reluctantly tolerated by the executive and legislative branches in some states, in most they were openly opposed. More importantly, they were neither demanded nor supported by the public at large. Indeed, many complained that civil rights activists were employing the courts to restrict state police powers not in service of innocents in the community, but in service of criminal rights and in the teeth of public opposition.68

C. The War on Crime and the Retreat from Anti-Subordination

Crime rates soaring throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Martin Luther King Jr.'s and Robert F. Kennedy's assassinations, and Johnson's withdrawal from the presidential ticket threw the left into disarray. Republicans in the 1968 election ran their campaigns largely against the expansion of rights for criminal suspects, defendants, and convicts. Americans, they argued, wanted "an end to government that acts out of a spirit of neutrality or beneficence or indulgence towards criminals."69 In particular, they argued, the courts that had "approve[d] and often underwrit[ten] the very things our individual integrity rejects"70 needed to be reigned in. Nixon's call for a "militant crusade against crime"71 was the centerpiece of his campaign and the issue that distinguished him most sharply from Humphrey and to which Humphrey tried vainly to respond. Nixon repeatedly returned to the changes in criminal procedure, complaining that the criminal justice system, undermined by the Warren Court and the Johnson administration, had "crumbled before the rising tide of crime."72

Republican candidates explicitly linked the battle against crime with their understanding of equality. The presidential candidate and Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, reframed the Supreme Court's expanded interpretation of the constitutional rights of suspects, defendants, and convicted criminals as related to a misapprehension of how best to do justice to the disadvantaged:

It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions . . . . We need a new recognition in this country-that a mugging in the ghetto is as serious a crime as a mugging on Main Street. There can be no color line between black murderer and white murderer, between black safety and white safety. We need not only equal enforcement of the law-but also equal protection of the law.73

Nixon echoed Reagan's equal protection analogies in his own campaign on law and order: "We must return to a single standard of justice for all Americans, and justice must be made blind again to race and color and creed and position along an economic or social line."74

Nixon's election and subsequent appointment of four Supreme Court Justices in the space of three years effectively removed the support of the Executive and Judicial Branches from the movement towards a more thorough investigation into the social roots of inequality and the concern for the potentially subordinating effects of facially neutral policies.75 In Washington v. Davis,76 the transformed Court began what would become a nearly unbroken three-decade retreat from the aspects of Brown that looked to effects.

Just as many early criminal procedure cases can be read as equal protection cases, Washington v. Davis, although ostensibly an equal protection case, can also be read as reaching the heart of criminal procedure. In Davis, the plaintiffs challenged a race-neutral testing program for the District of Columbia police force that failed significantly more blacks than whites.77 In rejecting their challenge, the Court stated that the fundamental principle of equal protection is "that the invidious quality of a law claimed to be racially discriminatory must ultimately be traced to a racially discriminatory purpose."78 In subsequent cases, the Court not only repeatedly reaffirmed this holding, but steadily distinguished and limited the holdings of the Brown Court.79

In the face of Supreme Court decisions that increasingly restricted and eroded Brown, Griggs, and Swann, Congress responded with a series of legislative acts protesting this retreat.80 But in the field of criminal procedure, rather than resistance, there were cheers of support from the legislature, the administration, and the public at large as the Court made short order of its previously expansive readings of criminal rights.81 As Yale Kamisar noted in a retrospective on the revolution in criminal rights:

The last years of the Warren Court constituted a period of social upheaval marked by urban riots, disorders on college campuses, ever-soaring crime statistics, ever-spreading fears of the breakdown of public order, and assassinations and near-assassinations of public figures. Moreover, the strong criticism of the Court by many members of Congress and by presidential candidate Richard Nixon and the obviously retaliatory provisions of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 contributed further to an atmosphere that was unfavorable to the continued vitality of the Warren Court's mission in criminal cases.82

Indeed, conservatives continued to use public disapproval of the revolution in criminal rights to gain further political advantage over the next two decades.83

The success of Bill Clinton's bid for the Presidency on the Democratic ticket in 1992 was similarly contingent on his distinguishing criminal offenders from the disadvantaged. Clinton, a former state prosecutor, self-consciously adopted a law-and-order stance more doggedly pro-law enforcement than his Republican opponent, moving the party away from its traditional alignment with Warren Court innovations and into what has now become a staple position of the modern Democratic Party.84 With Republicans in the majority in the House and Senate for the first time since Brown, the last leg of the Second Reconstruction's support for the criminal rights revolution had given way.

Today, with Republicans and their appointees in the majority in every branch of government, the principle of color-blind equality has all but eclipsed the Court's broader attacks on racial subordination.85 The Court openly rejects pursuit of equality considerations through criminal doctrine,86 and the meaning of race is, tragically, defined in substantial part by the vastly disproportionate number of black men in the criminal justice system and their broken families in the community.

Even some of the staunchest supporters of judicial intervention now look back in anguish, acknowledging that the "constitutionalization of the process . . . may have contributed to an increased willingness to rely on prisons and even to the increasing oppressiveness that results from the development of supermaximum institutions."87 And some of the fiercest prison litigators concede that "by promoting the comforting idea of the 'lawful prison,' the litigation movement may have smoothed the way for ever-harsher sentences and criminal policies."88

Today there is little popular support for expanding the rights of criminal suspects, defendants, or prisoners. And the vast majority of Americans-including black Americans-still feel, as they have for as long as we have records of popular opinion, that courts impose sentences that impose serious burdens on the community and do not demand enough from prisoners.89 The questions we face today are less questions of overt racial discrimination than they are of how to control the effects of our ever-expanding prison populations. In our nation's capital, for example, approximately 1 out of every 20 adult black men is in prison, and, as of the last estimate, 49.9% of the black men between the ages of 18 and 35 were under some form of correctional supervision.90 If this situation persists, more than 75% of young black men in the District and more than 90% of those in the poorest neighborhoods can expect to be incarcerated at some point in their lives.91 A few decades ago, in any city these statistics would have been astounding. Today, compared with other cities, these are commonplace.92 At a cost of over $40 billion a year, the United States now holds 1 out of every 4 of the world's prisoners93-prisoners who in our country, as everyone knows, tend to be black and brown young men in disadvantaged communities. By reinforcing the conditions that racial stereotypes presume, the criminal justice system has arguably become the principal generator of racial inequality in our society.94

II. The Egalitarian Response to Mass Incarceration

We egalitarians lack a clear agenda. We understand that the harms generated by the criminal justice system are largely borne by racial minorities, but we have also come to realize that criminals impose serious harms on the same disadvantaged communities we hope to protect. Our traditional response to injustice, constitutional litigation, has pitted these two harms against one another and provoking significant public resentment.

A. An Illustrative Example: Crack Cocaine Sentencing

To understand the complexity of the problem and the failure of traditional strategies to resolve it, consider the example of recent and highly unproductive debates over the disparities between crack and powder cocaine sentencing.

The evidence that egalitarians have marshaled in their critique of the disparities is troubling indeed. Under federal law, for example, while simple possession of any quantity of powder cocaine by first-time offenders is considered a misdemeanor, punishable by no more than 1 year in prison, simple possession of crack cocaine is a felony, carrying a 5 year mandatory sentence.95 Then there is the oft-noted 100:1 ratio for dealers: Defendants convicted of selling 500 grams of powder cocaine or 5 grams of crack cocaine both receive 5 year sentences; for 5 kilos of powder cocaine and 50 grams of crack, the penalty is 10 years.96 All of which would seem rather academic were it not for the fact that blacks accounted for 80% of offenders sentenced for possession and sale of crack cocaine but only 30% of those sentenced for possession and sale of powder cocaine.97

The principle reason for the stiff penalties, however, doesn't appear to be race, but rather the fact that crack cocaine is socially destructive-and the literature on the effects of crack cocaine prevalence is vast and consistent in this regard. Those addicted to drugs are more likely to engage in criminal activities,98 and the burdens of criminality fall disproportionately on black communities.99 Crack cocaine is highly addictive, posing a significant economic burden on those who use it and their families.100 The material costs are great, as addicts resort to criminal activities in support of their addiction.101 There are also emotional and psychological costs to the victims of these crimes, including the families of those who are addicted, robbed, threatened, or murdered. And there are special costs to the women and young men who sell sex in service of their addiction. Added to these are the broader social costs that accompany high rates of criminal activity: the dissolution of social trust, the loss of businesses from the neighborhood, and the departure of those who have the means to leave.102

The criminal penalty of extended incarceration also has significant costs for non-offenders. For example, even when controlling for other factors, incarceration remains strongly related to lower household income.103 This is due in part to the loss of the offender's income during incarceration (most offenders are employed prior to arrest),104 but it is also due to the significantly diminished earning potential of offenders after release from prison.105 There are also direct costs related to the loss of child-care and eldercare that offenders provided. Grandparents, for example, are frequently left not only assuming many child-care duties, but reducing family funds to support their children's relationship with their grandchildren through expensive collect telephone calls, visits to correctional facilities, and so on.106 In this sense, the burdens of incarceration are spread through the ties of kinship, imposing a kind of hidden tax on many inner-city families.

There is also substantial evidence that incarceration has a corrosive effect on family structure.107 While a majority of prisoners are parents, a number of studies have shown that incarceration increases the likelihood that couples, even those with children, will separate.108 High separation rates are related to other risks, including increased rates of lifetime sexual partners, which in turn have a host of negative sequelae.109 And father absence-the most obvious result of incarceration-is associated with a range of negative outcomes from increased likelihood of physical and sexual abuse for children110 to earlier onset of sexual activity among girls.111 It is also now well established that incarceration without drug treatment-the norm in most correctional systems today-prolongs addiction, further draining families of capital, straining familial bonds, and distorting community norms.112 When a substantial majority of black men in many of our nation's cities can expect to spend some time behind bars,113 these are no longer issues that an isolated and aberrant fraction of black families face; they speak to the collective impoverishment of entire communities and the large-scale disassembly of low-income black families.

In light of these harms, egalitarians are right to be concerned. But what can they do?

B. Existing Egalitarian Responses

1. Civil Liberties.-One argument is that egalitarians should continue in their pursuit of the criminal rights revolution. David Cole is one prominent advocate of this approach.114 As an illustrative example, Cole describes the plight of Terrance Bostick, caught with a pound of cocaine in a police drug sweep of a Greyhound bus.115 Cole notes that while citizens have a right to not talk to police and to not consent to searches, they often fail to exercise this right. For precisely this reason, police target common drug transport routes for "sweeps" in which they ask for consent to search for drugs in the belongings of passengers, a practice that nets a large number of convictions.116 For Cole and other supporters of the criminal rights revolution the fact that such a search was conducted, evidence was admitted, and Bostick was convicted speaks volumes about how the criminal justice system contributes to the subordination of blacks today. For them, this kind of search and seizure is wrongful, and the evidence should be excluded from trial.

One need not believe that there is any racial malice involved to follow Cole's logic. The disparities in arrest and charge rates may well be the result of social and economic conditions that cause police to concentrate their efforts on inner-city populations.117 Police simply find it easier to locate drug dealers, infiltrate drug networks, and make drug arrests in the inner cities where drugs are often publicly sold and consumed than in middle-class white neighborhoods where drugs are sold and consumed in private.118 It is not race that makes the difference; it is simply that these non-racial differences "make extensive drug-law enforcement operations in the inner city more likely and, by police standards, more successful."119 Moreover, "[b]ecause urban drug dealing is often visible, individual citizens, the media, and elected officials more often pressure police to take action against drugs in poor urban neighborhoods than in other kinds of neighborhoods."120

Predictably, then, numerous studies indicate that nationally, charges for possession of crack cocaine are brought against blacks far more often than they are against whites,121 and that this is so despite the fact that more whites have used crack cocaine than blacks.122 Put simply, blacks who use crack cocaine are more likely than whites who use the same drug to be charged with and convicted of a drug offense.

This is why Cole and others believe that egalitarians should continue to encourage courts to restrain police and prosecutors: by driving up the cost of law enforcement in the inner city, on this account, courts can reduce the harm of mass-incarceration in vulnerable black communities. In light of the harms of mass-incarceration, Cole argues, "the concerns of the 1960s that initially animated the development of constitutional criminal procedure-namely, the use of the criminal law to subordinate African Americans"-should guide egalitarians toward a reassertion of criminal rights, particularly through increased constitutional restrictions on discretionary policing.123

The problem with this response, of course, is that it is just as likely to backfire today as it was in the 1960s-and backfire in a number of ways. First, it is not at all clear that increasing constraints on criminal procedure will do more good than harm for the communities egalitarians want to protect. As Bill Stuntz has noted, wherever "courts have raised the cost of criminal investigation and prosecution, legislatures have sought out devices to reduce those costs."124 They do this not only by limiting funding for criminal defense, but also by expanding criminal liability, both of which make it far easier to induce guilty pleas and avoid the bite of procedural requirements. As a result, "underfunding, overcriminalization, and oversentencing have increased as criminal procedure has expanded."125 By inadvertently increasing the discretion of police and prosecutors in this way, egalitarian constitutional strategies have actually contributed to the very problems they attempt to ameliorate.

Second, many Americans-even those living in inner-city neighborhoods-simply reject the idea that the harms of police enforcement outweigh the benefits. As Tracey Meares and Dan Kahan have noted, the greatest advocates of greater police discretion are not white oppressors but minority citizens living in crime-ridden communities: "Instead of shunning the police, inner-city residents are demanding that police give them the protection they have historically been denied."126 Residents of a public housing project overridden by drug-related gang violence, for example, granted police permission to make a series of warrantless searches in their housing project to root out drug dealers. The ACLU sued, successfully defending limits on police conduct put in place during the 1960s and ironically, Meares and Kahan argue, blocking "efforts by inner-city residents to liberate themselves from the destructive effects of crime."127 It is this form of civil-liberties advocacy that has led dedicated egalitarians like Randall Kennedy to complain that criminal-rights advocates should pay more attention to the pleas of those "who must share space on streets and in buildings with crack traffickers."128

And third, for the reasons that these commentators raise and others, the public is adamantly opposed to the reforms Cole and others support. Whether or not most Americans support drug sweeps, the idea of excluding the pound of cocaine at trial because the person consented to a search on a bus rather than in a home or car strikes many of those living in the neighborhoods where such drugs are regularly distributed as injurious and unjust.129

But if broader readings of civil liberties do not appear helpful, neither do narrower readings. Imagine that, as Meares and Kahan have advocated, antiloitering ordinances were found to be constitutional and those living in housing projects were allowed to consent through popular vote to random searches of their apartments. Without some assurance that those arrested will face socially constructive sanctions, "order-maintenance policing" might well provoke significant social disorder-not because the police are racist or intent on harming disadvantaged families or communities, but because the police have little control over what happens after they make an arrest. It is hard to argue that broader police powers will help crime-ridden communities unless one has a more detailed conception of the consequences that follow from enforcement. Indeed, variations in each state's regime of sanctions may provide the best explanation for why order-maintenance policing has had such variable effects: A poorly constructed sentencing code and a correctional system that fails to correct will make even the most effective policing regime counterproductive.

It is not hard to see why so many living in disadvantaged neighborhoods resist the expansion of both prison populations and criminal rights. They are trapped between two serious harms, and egalitarians have yet to offer them a reasonable alternative.

2. Court-Based Equal Protection Claims.-Under these conditions, it is natural for egalitarian reformers to look to equal protection doctrine for assistance. Historically, the Equal Protection Clause has served as a resource for those committed to protecting against iniquitous legal regimes. An equal protection challenge to the sources of subordination would also be a far more direct approach than attempting to achieve egalitarian ends indirectly through increasingly libertarian readings of criminal procedure. The logic of this claim, in light of the harms outlined above, is relatively straightforward: By constructing a regime of sanctions that is arguably as injurious as the harms it addresses, the state is inflicting disproportionate material and status harms on blacks similar to those that helped motivate the Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education.130

Stigma, race, and incarceration are increasingly related in ways that elude most discussions of racial bias in the criminal justice system. There are also more subtle harms that bear on this claim. The very problems that mass incarceration exacerbates-from diminished income to undesired single parenting to steadily diminishing deterrence-are deeply embedded in stereotypes of black families in America.131 These racially constitutive aspects of our criminal sanctions-the extent to which our criminal justice system continues to create the social construct of race and reinforce our understanding of it-are linked to the stigmatization of black Americans in general. Thus, as many black families and communities confront their intimate familiarity with incarceration, they also confront a widespread set of assumptions about their loved ones and about themselves in the eyes of society at large.

These claims rely on the understanding that a far broader class is harmed by lengthy and non-productive detention than the discrete set of blacks in violation of narcotics laws. Were these burdens evenly shared in our society, one could argue that the public should be allowed to exercise its option to inflict poor policy on itself.132 But the extraordinarily disparate impact that our criminal justice policies have on black Americans raises serious equal protection concerns-at least within the framework of Brown, Griggs, and Swann.

The objection to this approach is, at this late date, all too familiar: While the Court at one time considered the harm inflicted on a protected class when assessing the law's constitutionality,133 it has since abandoned this standard.134 Today, the Court looks to intent rather than effect, allowing legislatures and government actors to knowingly employ the criminal law in a way that criminalizes, impoverishes, and subordinates black Americans, so long as they do so with some other purpose in mind. On this standard, litigants must show more than that blacks are disproportionately harmed as a class, more even than that the state knowingly inflicts greater harm on blacks as a class; they must show that the state took action with the objective of harming blacks as a class.135

As the Court bars racial classifications and demands proof of racial animus, while giving an increasingly cold response to concerns about subordination, egalitarians have dutifully followed suit. This is evident in the development of increasingly elaborate methods for discerning racial bias,136 in accusations of hidden racial malice, and in many racial conspiracy theories.137

Pursuit of these intent-based strategies in court have met with predictable results. In the most discussed case to date, federal judge Clyde S. Cahill initially refused to sentence an eighteen-year-old offender with no prior convictions to the mandatory minimum sentence of ten years imprisonment required under the federal Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988.138 Seeking to map an equal protection claim to the Court's new intent-based standard, the judge found the Federal Sentencing Guidelines to be, as a matter of fact, the product of "unconscious racism" rather than race-neutral reflection, thus satisfying the requirement of discriminatory intent.139

The judge not only drew a swift reversal from the Eighth Circuit, but a painstaking review by Randall Kennedy. Looking at the Congressional Record, Kennedy found not only no hint of racial animus, but that a majority of black members of Congress "voted in favor of the law which created the 100:1 crack-powder differential."140 Moreover, Kennedy found, black members of Congress made persuasive arguments in favor of the 100:1 disparity. Some had argued that crack was a special danger because it made "cocaine widely available and affordable for abuse among our youth."141 Others argued that the lack of severe punishments for cocaine possession was fueling a rise in addiction.142

The distorting effect that the intent-based standard has on the discourse of those seeking justice is apparent in this episode.143 Egalitarian advocates and judges have been drawn into a framework that forces them to abandon reasonable claims that state policies contribute to the subordination of low-income and minority populations in practice and to assert that the state is acting with the intent of harming blacks. These claims of government racism-not only unproven, but often unprovable-alienate not only legislators and members of the executive branch who are the object of such accusations; they also alienate a growing portion of the general population who view these strategies as improbable ploys made, of all things, to protect criminals in high crime areas.144

But if the intent-based standard has led some egalitarians astray, it is not clear that an effects-based doctrinal standard would help resolve the problems we now face. The same depth of inquiry and reform that was the strength of the early civil rights litigation was also its greatest weakness. Because it demanded the structural reform of subordination, it was thoroughly inquisitive, requiring, on the one hand, painful investigations into the social formation of caste-like hierarchies in America and, on the other, arduous and often protracted review of factual data and bureaucratic minutiae in school organization, employment practices, and local political order.

Even if egalitarians commanded the authority of the Supreme Court, the judiciary would remain ill equipped to enforce an effects-based standard. As Lawrence Sager has noted, there are a host of institutional constraints that prevent courts from adopting standards that give full expression to constitutional norms. The lack of fit between the deeper conception of justice embodied in the Constitution and the remedies that courts are capable of delivering on their own make it seem fairly natural that policies which redress racial subordination be "understood as constitutional-indeed, as clearly constitutionally desirable-yet not be treated by the judiciary as required by the Constitution."145

One important reason for resisting a pursuit of this broader and deeper conception of justice through constitutional doctrine is that it risks turning courts into political provocateurs. Courts, as Bickel infamously but accurately described, are simply incapable of achieving the necessary and always contingent fit between what is and what ought to be at the level of specificity that justice requires.146 When the courts intervene in too fine a detail, it risks provoking resentment and resistance that overwhelm the purpose of its intervention. This is arguably the chief lesson of the egalitarian interventions into criminal procedure and criminal rights through constitutional doctrine.

C. Time for a New Strategy

Surveying the legal battlefield today, egalitarians cannot be pleased. We have lost the battle over the terms on which the war for equality will be fought, and nowhere have we lost more decisively than in the criminal justice system. It is perhaps our greatest modern failure, provoking some of the deepest political and practical problems we face today. The constitutionalization of criminal procedure and punishment has not only failed to dent the iniquitous enforcement of the law, it has led to the withdrawal of desired police protection from those who live in communities battered by crime, and, along with a host of other contributing influences, it has turned the public against the broader egalitarian cause, linking the pursuit of equality with the defense of criminals rather than the defense of vulnerable minority communities. We can do better.

III. More Tactful Reform

Truth be told, egalitarians have looked to the courts in large part because we lack faith in the American people. It is, many assume, a punitive and often racist public that has driven the dramatic expansion of our criminal codes and prison populations. But is it really so?

In fact, the evidence suggests just the reverse. While the public does feel that the existing regime of sanctions demands too little from offenders, more time in prison is close to the bottom of the list of things that the public would like to sanction offenders with. Indeed the replacement of more constructive sanctions with incarceration, from the public's perspective, is part of the problem.147 Because prisoners contribute little to society but cost everyone else a great deal, conservatives disdain mass-incarceration as an expansion of the welfare system to the least deserving. And because it disassembles disadvantaged families and communities, progressives view mass-incarceration as decidedly unjust.

What then, exactly, is it that the public wants? The best data we have indicate that the public, conservatives and progressives alike, want to make more pro-social demands of offenders, requiring them to provide restitution and victim compensation, to participate in mandatory drug treatment, mandatory job training, and mandatory literacy classes, to support their children, and where possible, to work.148 Neither an expansive reading of criminal rights nor a hunt for racist intent is going to address these concerns-but giving citizens greater influence over how to respond to crime will.

A. Jury Polling

In this part I suggest a modest procedural reform that promises substantial results. The centerpiece of the proposal is a new practice, jury polling. Under this plan, at the end of a jury trial each juror would be polled on a wide array of possible remedies including prosocial sanctions like those described above. The results would be tabulated and reported back to a sentencing commission and perhaps even reviewed by the judge prior to sentencing. In every popular poll and experiment where citizens had the choice, they strongly favored socially productive, community- and family-supporting sanctions.149 Moreover, the more citizens know about the offender and the offense, the more subtle and constructive their sentences become, suggesting that jurors will be particularly conscientious. Egalitarians should harness the decency and good sense of the public by pushing judges and legislatures to pay closer attention to the concerns of the people at sentencing.

There are a host of technical issues that I will address elsewhere; here I want to provide a conceptual defense of the proposal. My point is not that the it is perfect, but that it is comparatively far better than the other court-focused alternatives I've described, particularly in light of the historical relationship between criminal law and inequality. There are three major advantages to the jury polling, each of which draws on the history outlined above.

1. Getting the Problem Right.-The values and goals of egalitarian reformers are shared by most Americans. And yet, their proposals appear to run against the grain of public sentiment. While the traditional egalitarian response to this divergence is to advocate educating the public, in this instance it does not appear that most citizens need educating (indeed it may be reformers who could do with some education on this point).

During the Civil Rights Movement, the state used police power to preserve white power. The push for restraining the racist state to protect criminal suspects, defendants, and offenders made sense then. Today, however, the relationship between race and the state's use of its police power is more complicated. Black Americans are no longer without political power, and the interests of the state are now more closely aligned with the interests of minority communities-in no small part because those communities elect many of their local and state officials.150

Rather than employing its police power to frustrate egalitarian reform, the state is now actively attempting to respond to calls for greater police protection in the inner city and addressing the harms that crime imposes on its citizens.151 The conflation of the interests of disadvantaged communities with the interests of criminal suspects, defendants, and offenders has gone a fair distance toward alienating those who suffer the ravages of criminal activity. The problem isn't law enforcement, it's the prevailing regime of socially-corrosive sanctions that burden inner-city families and communities while demanding little of use from offenders. Answering the cry of unjust punishment from these communities by defending criminal actors is worse than incoherent; it forces communities into an impossible choice between two unnecessary injustices.

Instead, egalitarians should shift their focus from the defense of criminals, suspects, and defendants to the collateral harms borne by noncriminals in their communities. The central problem the disadvantaged face today is not discriminatory policing or prosecutions but sanctions that harm rather than help the communities where the offenses are committed. These are predictable harms generated by state action, and they burden innocent parties in already burdened and disadvantaged communities. These communities are in dire need of advocates-but advocates of disadvantaged communities rather than advocates of the libertarian rights-endowed criminals who victimize those who live in them.

The shift in attention from criminals to communities gets the problem of modern inequality right: Social subordination today has less to do with over-policing or racism than it does with criminal sanctions that harm as much as they help. It is also effective symbolic politics. Americans-both those who live in the inner city and those who do not-overwhelmingly support mandatory education, drug treatment, job training, and work requirements for convicts. Indeed, support for these types of socially productive sanctions-the kinds of sanctions that would actually benefit the communities where criminals are convicted-stands at about 90% in one major public opinion poll.152 Yet none of these are the norm in sentencing or corrections, and most of these are at the periphery of the egalitarian agenda.

The criminal law gives expression to our deepest intuitions about right and wrong, and the enforcement of criminal sanctions is an act through which we imagine the limits of our social bonds with one another. Public frustration with our criminal justice system is not, as many suggest, simply punitiveness; rather it reflects a deeper anxiety about the unraveling of the social fabric itself and the inability of our criminal justice system to do anything about it.153 Instead of dismissing the concerns of the people, egalitarians should view this as an opportunity for reform.

Jury polling can thus help egalitarians develop an effective symbolic politics. Egalitarians have typically distrusted popular sentiment as potentially insensitive to the needs of vulnerable minorities. But on issues of criminal justice, the public is surprisingly sophisticated and sensitive to the needs of communities burdened by crime. Egalitarians can and should leverage public support for sanctions that help rather than hurt communities already injured by crime. The evidence we have suggests that the public is committed to broader social justice, but egalitarians will need to trust and empower the public in order to achieve that end.

B. Getting the Process Right

Juries, although increasingly marginalized in modern jurisprudence, were originally cast in precisely this role.154 At the time of our nation's founding, it was neither the judiciary nor the legislature that exercised the most sway over sentencing, but juries.155 In both civil and criminal trials, juries decided law, fact, and quite often sanctions "complicatedly."156 And while many today think of Article III and the Sixth Amendment jury requirements as a protection against state corruption, a more careful reading suggests that the Framers were also concerned about preserving the right of the people to play a role in the deeply moral decisions about the fit between conduct and sanction.157 It is for precisely this reason that public participation in juries, while an important safeguard for defendants against state abuse, was also seen as, "more fundamentally, a political institution embodying popular sovereignty and republican self-government."158 Criminal trials are both fact-finding endeavors and morality plays in which community members communicate important information with each other and with state officials.

Unsurprisingly, then, many of the observations made about juries by the Framers and contemporary commentators describe it as the community's check against an errant state or state actor. As one of the Framers put it, the people's position as jurors "enables them . . . to come forward, in turn, as the sentinels and guardians of each other."159 Juries are, after all, "trials by the people themselves,"160 and one of the central purposes of citizen juries is to prevent the state from exerting arbitrary and unjust power over citizens through the criminal law.

Jurors are also well placed to internalize both the benefits and the costs of legal judgments161-costs that are both material and social. As Akhil Amar has noted: "a crime . . . constitutes a moral rupture, a distinct breach of the peace of the place where the crime occurred. A crime is committed not merely against the victim, but against the community. . . . [J]udicial response . . . requires not merely good factfinding, but moral judgment-moral judgment by the community via the jury."162 Indeed, the jury clauses (particularly the District Clause) can be read as supporting this assessment by insisting that the individuals who determine whether and how the criminal law is applied in a trial will, by feature of their geographic proximity, bear the consequences of their decision.163

Jury nullification, for example, is normally seen as a choice between one of two great injustices: that of imposing an unjust sanction and that of failing to impose any sanction at all.164 As Paul Butler has put it, nullification is the decision to follow "conscience" rather than law.165 But it can also be seen as a form of signaling by frustrated citizens.166 Jury nullification indicates the public's dissatisfaction with the state's overuse of incarceration and underutilization of drug treatment.167 To be sure, this signaling is costly to society and to the legitimacy of the criminal justice system in ways that are readily apparent to anyone living in a high-crime neighborhood,168 providing some indication of just how serious the frustration is.

Juries are at the heart of constitutional protections of both defendants and the community against arbitrary state power because they are the mechanism by which the public inserts itself into the fundamental workings of the state. Precisely because the criminal law governs the most direct application of state control over individual autonomy, the trial is also the site where the people demanded the greatest amount of representation in the form of direct self-government. When the people partake in the moral judgment necessary to sanction a citizen, they are describing the contours of the moral world in which they wish to live-something the state is incapable of doing because it lacks immediate access to the relevant information about the social meaning and social costs involved.

Today, this reading of jury rights in conjunction with equality concerns is particularly apt in our inner cities, where residents, plagued by crime, are also burdened by counter-productive sanctions. The injustice they see in the mass incarceration of their young men and the state's failure to impose requirements of mandatory education, mandatory drug treatment, or mandatory job training as part of criminal sanctions is widely lamented.169 Those who live in neighborhoods where a substantial majority of the men will spend time behind bars are intimately aware of the inadequacies of the criminal justice system and therefore are all the more capable of making informed choices about what kind of sanctions are likely to achieve justice.

While, generally speaking, the trend in criminal procedure has been to prevent noncapital juries from influencing sentencing,170 this need not and should not be so. Precisely because juries are so well positioned to inject community concerns into the exercise of state power over offenders, they are a logical starting place for repairing the ongoing moral rupture that unjust sanctions have brought about. Today, more than ever, a renewed commitment to empowering vulnerable communities through the jury should be brought into service of egalitarian concerns.171

Communities that have suffered generations of economic and social marginalization will regularly be confronted with both the burdens and benefits of criminality and criminal sanctions. But egalitarians can draw on the law of juries to help work out better solutions to this problem. By shifting the focus from the defendant's rights at trial to the community's right to participate in a jury trial, egalitarians can better align themselves with the interests of the communities they hope to empower.

IV. Conclusion

Throughout this Article I have operated under the assumption-associated most strongly with the work of Larry Sager, but present in the work of many others-that the law has a life outside of the courtroom and that its meaning is never fully articulated in doctrine.172 With that understanding, my first goal has been to describe a positive and a normative account of equality concerns and criminal law. The positive account described the failure of a particular approach, one that was distrustful of the people and far too invested in doctrinal battles; the normative part articulated a strategy for restoring balance and pragmatic optimism to the promise of equality under the law. Strangely, while attention to the role of popular sentiment in the law is now common, there have been relatively few pragmatic proposals describing how, precisely, egalitarians can pursue their ideals in a popular register.

The second goal of this Article, then, has been to demonstrate by way of example how egalitarians can begin to build the kind of popular strategies necessary to the successful pursuit of justice.

The approach I have taken here also has two parts. The first involves a diagnosis of the split between egalitarians and the people on matters of fundamental justice. In this case, the division was generated in part by egalitarian defense of criminal rights in the teeth of opposition by the communities egalitarians intended to protect. But it was also generated by a disrespect for the people themselves implicit in a court-based pursuit of justice. To succeed, I argued, egalitarians will need to shift their focus from criminal offenders to the vulnerable communities in which they live and move beyond distrustful doctrinal remedies to strategies that embrace and empower the communities they seek to protect.

The second part of this object lesson involved developing remedies. In keeping with the substantive commitments of the antisubordination principle, I argued, the remedies needed to embrace the thoroughly inquisitive and respectful nature of our commitment to equality. The proposals for reform thus sought to vindicate the ideal of equality under the law by promoting the generation of information about the concerns and interests of those in disadvantaged communities through meaningful jury participation.

The greater inclusion of citizens in the creation, administration, and enforcement of the law also happens to be good politics. No egalitarian activist, candidate, judge, or administrator need be abashed in campaigning for these reforms. The final lesson of this study, then, is that by properly aligning the mechanisms of democracy with the needs of disadvantaged communities, we can promote both at the same time. That doesn't make achieving egalitarian goals through popular politics easy, but it does make it refreshingly possible.