Race, Class, and Criminal Law

While criminal law in the colonies and, later, in the United States has always been raced and classed, the specific relationships between race, class, and criminal law have fluctuated across time and place. Criminal codes were explicitly raced from the colonial period until shortly after emancipation. In these codes, whether a behavior was a crime and what the prescribed punishment for that crime was depended on the race of the alleged offender. Since the fall of Black Codes in the 1860s, states have adopted implicitly raced criminal ...