Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System

Watch the Video

Please join the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice for our next Robina In Conversation, “Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System,” onTuesday, June 7, 2016  from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. in the Cowles Auditorium at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. We will continue the conversation at a reception after the discussion in the Humphrey Atrium from 5:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m.

Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System

Numerous studies have found that African Americans, Native Americans, and other racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately represented in prison and jail populations relative to their numbers in the general population.  Similar disparities are found at earlier stages of criminal justice processing, beginning with investigatory stops and arrests by the police, and all of these disparities are worse in Minnesota than for the nation as a whole.  What accounts for these persistent disparities, and what can be done about them?  Some observers see such disparities as the product of overt and implicit bias by criminal justice officials and policy makers; others claim that such disparities primarily reflect racial and ethnic differences in criminal offending.

This Robina In Conversation panel will examine three causes of racial disparities in criminal justice. The panel discussion will be moderated by Robina Fellow Dr. Rhys Hester. We will hear from University of Minnesota Law Professors Richard Frase, Perry Moriearty, and Myron Orfield, and from Kedar Hickman, Program Manager at Ujamaa Place in St. Paul. The professors have done extensive research on problems of racial disparity in criminal justice, and the combined disadvantages of race and poverty. Mr. Hickman works with African American offenders reentering the community, and in the fields of Education, Youth, and Human, Community, and Economic Development.

Join us on June 7, 2016 at 3:00 p.m. in Cowles Auditorium, Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

Continue the conversation after the panel discussion at a post-event reception in the Humphrey Atrium. 

Continuing Legal Education

An application for 1 standard Continuing Legal Education (CLE) credit will be submitted.
An application for 1 Elimination of Bias credit will be submitted.
Registration required for in-person, livestream online, and on demand viewing if you would like CLE.

Watch the In Conversation Live

Can’t make the event in person? Watch the livestream, here, beginning at 3 p.m.on June 7, 2016.

Featuring

Richard S. Frase is the Benjamin N. Berger Professor of Criminal Law at the University of Minnesota Law School. He teaches criminal law, criminal procedure, and the federal defense clinic.  He has also taught the Misdemeanor and the Federal Prosecution clinics.  His seminars include comparative criminal procedure, sentencing guidelines, and sentencing policy. He was the Julius E. Davis Professor of Law for 1988-89 and became the Benjamin N. Berger Professor of Criminal Law in 1991.  His scholarship examines Minnesota and other state sentencing guidelines, punishment and proportionality theories, criminal procedure in the U.S. and abroad, and comparison of sentencing law and practice in the United States and in other nations.  He is the author or co-author of eight books and over seventy articles and essays on these topics.

Professor Frase graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Haverford College. He received his J.D. degree from the University of Chicago, where he was Comment Editor of theUniversity of Chicago Law Review. He clerked for the Honorable Luther M. Swygert, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and was an associate attorney for the law firm of Sidley & Austin in Chicago from 1972 to 1974. Professor Frase then became a research associate and Arnold Shure Fellow of the Center for Studies of Criminal Justice at the University of Chicago Law School.

In 1977 he joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota Law School. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Christian Albrechts Universität in Kiel, Germany, and at the Université Jean Moulin in Lyon, France, and a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg (Breisgau), Germany. Professor Frase is a member of the American Law Institute, the American Society of Criminology, and the American, Minnesota, and Hennepin County Bar Associations. He is a frequent contributor to radio, television, and newspaper reports on criminal justice issues.

Professor Richard Frase Biography

Perry Moriearty is Associate Professor of Law and the Vaughan G. Papke Clinical Professor in Law. She joined the clinical faculty in 2008 with expertise in clinical legal education, civil litigation, and juvenile justice. She teaches criminal law, race and the law, and co-directs the Child Advocacy and Juvenile Justice Clinic. She writes in the areas of constitutional law, juvenile justice, criminal law and race and the law.

Before joining the Law School faculty, she taught in the Civil Litigation Clinic at the University of Denver, which specializes in landlord-tenant, wage and hour, workers’ compensation, and domestic violence civil protection order matters. She also taught in the Juvenile Justice Clinic at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, which represents children charged with delinquency and criminal offenses.

Professor Perry Moriearty Biography

Professor Myron Orfield is the Director of the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity. He has written three books and dozens of articles and book chapters on local government law, spatial inequality, fair housing, school desegregation, charter schools, state and local taxation and finance, and land use law. The syndicated columnist Neal Peirce called him “the most influential demographer in America’s burgeoning regional movement.” Orfield’s research has led to legislative and judicial reforms at the federal level and state level reform in Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, California, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Washington, Oregon, and Maryland.

Professor Orfield has been a litigator in a large law firm, a civil rights lawyer, and an assistant attorney general of Minnesota, representing Minnesota in appellate courts, including the United States Supreme Court. He has been a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and led both a national non-profit organization and a private research firm with clients all over the United States. Orfield was elected to both the Minnesota House of Representatives and Senate, where he was the architect of a series of important legislative changes in land use, fair housing, and school and local government aid programs. Recently, Orfield served on the National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, as an academic advisor to the Congressional Black Caucus, an advisor to President Obama’s transition team for urban policy, to the White House Office of Urban Affairs, and as special consultant to the HUD’s Office for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. At FHEO, Professor Orfield assisted in the development of the Fair Housing Act’s Discriminatory Effects Standard (the “disparate impact rule”) (78 Fed. Reg. 11460) and the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule (80 Fed.Reg. 42272).

Professor Myron Orfield Biography

Kedar Hickman is the Program Manager, Ujamaa Place. For 22 years Kedar has worked within the fields of Education, Youth, Human, Community and Economic Development. During that time, He’s developed an expertise in working with people to realize their growth potential through education, self-empowerment, leadership, citizenship, and skills building. Kedar has taught and instructed on education levels ranging from primary to adult. He also in that time has worked with community businesses and organizations to build strategies that enmesh them into and better serve the communities in which they are located. Kedar’s work experience has been in both the public and private/ nonprofit sectors.

Rhys Hester is a Research Fellow in Sentencing Law and Policy at the Robina Institute. He is currently involved in the Institute’s Criminal History Project and the Sentencing Guidelines Resource Center. Hester’s primary research interests are in criminal sentencing and criminal procedure. His recent scholarship includes both quantitative and qualitative investigations of sentencing practices in a variety of jurisdictions. His dissertation is one of the only contemporary state-wide examinations of sentencing in a non-guidelines jurisdiction. Hester’s most recent research has been published in The Journal of Crime and Justice, Criminal Justice Policy Review, and The Prison Journal. Hester was formerly a professor in North Carolina where he coached moot court and taught criminal procedure, criminal law, the judicial process, and the Constitution. He holds a JD and a PhD in Criminology and Criminal Justice.

Robina Fellow Rhys Hester Biography