A history of heavy policing and sentencing practices has left California’s Black population overly represented in the prison system. 

Black people are a minority in California, comprising just six percent of the state’s population, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. This is compared to 40% of Latinos and 34% of Whites in the state. But even given their minimal population, as of 2023 Black people represent 28% of all people imprisoned in the state.

Research from Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow details how these disproportionate numbers are rooted in the political and social climate to 40 years ago. 

Ronald Reagan served as President of the United States from 1981-1988. During his presidency, his administration implemented its “War on Drugs” campaign, in direct response to the crack epidemic gripping much of the country at the time. The “crack era,” as the period came to be known, was plagued with rampant drug use and violence.

As detailed in film director Ava Duvernay’s documentary 13th, these solutions and their implementation gave birth to issues that reverberated throughout the criminal justice system.

Local law enforcement agencies across the country received increased federal funding to help combat the crack problem. The Reagan administration also enacted policies like the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act of 1981. The act allowed military troops to participate in policing efforts. These measures primarily focused on Black communities, because media coverage had painted the crack epidemic as a problem plaguing predominately Black people. 

Publications from 1986, including a June issue of Newsweek and an August issue of Time magazine used racially charged terminology when referring to both users and distributors of crack cocaine, including “welfare queen,” “crack babies,” “predators,” and “gangbangers.” 

“So many people have negative views of Black people, going all the way back to slavery. This makes it easier to create a system that targets who you think are the worst of the worst,” said Gregory Starling, a San Quentin resident.

Crack cocaine related crimes were routinely charged and sentenced more severely than crimes involving powder cocaine. This disparity was a product of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and resulted in more Black people being sent to prison for longer periods. In 1995, the United States Sentencing Commission revealed that the Anti-Drug Abuse Act was disproportionately implemented, resulting in 80% of convicted crack offenders being Black. 

Between 1989 and 1993, more than 300,000 Black men had been sent to prison in the country, compared to 50,000 white men.

As recent as 2022, research conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found that 24.3% of drug users in California were Black, compared to 22.5% of whites, yet Blacks represented 40% of all defendants sentenced to prison for drug and property crimes.

Mandatory minimum sentences came from policies that removed judicial discretion, forcing judges to sentence defendants to a set amount of time for various crimes. It also increased the power prosecutors had when deciding how to charge a defendant, affecting the potential time a person could serve behind bars.

Fallout from Reagan’s war on drugs included California’s Three Strikes Law, which was passed under Proposition 184 in 1994, and mandated life sentences for repeat offenders. 

The passage of California’s Proposition 8 in 1982, created the “Nickel Prior” enhancement, which added an additional five years to a defendant’s sentence if they had a prior felony conviction. 

The STEP Act of 1988 created the gang enhancement, which added as much as a life sentence for defendants who were convicted as members of a gang. In 2023, CBSNews reported that 99% of defendants who received gang enhancements in Los Angeles County were Black or Latino.

In 1998, the enactment of the gun enhancement added as little as 10 years, and as much as life in prison for gun related crimes. Possession alone, without discharge, was enough to add 10 years to a sentence.

The policies were not only disproportionately directed toward Black people specifically, and people of color in general, but helped California’s prison population explode. Data from the Public Policy Institute of California revealed that between 1980-2015 California’s prison population went from 23,264 to 127,815.

In 2020, California lawmakers passed Assembly Bill 2542, known as the Racial Justice Act, to address the decades of race-based issues haunting the state’s criminal justice system. The author of this bill – now a law – is Assemblymember Ash Kalra wrote that its purpose is to, “prohibit the state from seeking a criminal conviction or sentence on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin …”

“The Racial Justice Act is an attempt to bring equality to the law, because the way the laws are handled is unbalanced,” said SQ resident De’Andre Brumfield.

It will take time to see how the bill’s implementation will affect the thousands of Black and Brown people currently incarcerated in California.