PROJECT LAUNCH: Racism in Criminal Courts and the Criminal Legal System
Justice Collective is launching a new research project to understand racism in courts and in the criminal legal system, starting in April with court-watching in Berlin. We will be looking at “mass offenses”—cases such as assault and low-level theft —to understand the daily experiences of punishment of racialized people. We aim to show how structural racism is enacted every day in the courts—through the ways in which court actors (judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and others) interact with each other; how the law is interpreted; and how courts relate to other institutions, including the police and the migration regime. Through this work, we will shed light on the structural role of courts in upholding inequities. Our case summaries will be available in a public database, as a starting place for more action against racism in courts and in the criminal legal system.
We are starting this research because we know that the widespread use of racial profiling by the police, including practices such as the so-called “kriminalitätbelastete Orte” (alleged crime hotspots), means that people from racialized communities are more often controlled by the police. This also means that people from racialized and migrantized groups are more often criminalized and sentenced to punishment: Though the data is imperfect, we know that when it comes to low-level cases, about one third of these are against people without German citizenship. Research also shows that non-German citizens receive harsher sentences than people with German citizenship.
While we have these clues and some understanding of the structural role punishment and policing play in maintaining borders and other inequities, there’s much more to understand about punishment and racism in the German context. At the same time, activism over the last years—including in the context of court proceedings in cases of racist police violence or as part of efforts to challenge the German migration regime—has shown how courts do not do justice for victims of racist violence. This work points to the courts as an important institution for understanding how structural racism and punishment connect.
It is against this background that Justice Collective will be observing criminal court proceedings: trying to fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge and critical understanding, as a step towards thinking about how we may undo these inequalities.
The empirical research is conducted in partnership with the University of Cologne, Institute for Criminology, under our joint project JuRa (Justiz und Institutioneller Rassismus), supported by BMBF.
