Media missed Scott sisters’ big story: Prison sentencing bias

There’s still time for journalists to go back and report the real tragedy that affected the sisters and others like them

Initial media coverage of the Scott sisters centered on their personal plight and civil rights activists’ long-fought battle to get them released. Most recently, news outlets focused on Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s unusual deal that freed them from serving life sentences in prison on the condition that Gladys donate a kidney to her ailing sister, Jamie.

Yet the structural issues that created the conditions for this kind of injustice to occur—two black women locked up for more than 16 years for an $11 armed robbery that they say they had nothing to do with—and remain unresolved for nearly two decades have received little or no attention.

Instead of pursuing a thorough examination of the structural forces that precipitate criminal injustices—such as wrongful convictions and unusually harsh sentencing—the news media’s general tendency is to skim the surface of these critical issues.

“Race is still very much a factor in criminal justice outcomes today,” said Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a group that advocates for policy reforms that would reduce disparities in prison sentences.

Blacks and Latinos make up more than 60 percent of the U.S. prison population, according to The Sentencing Project.  Because of racial profiling, blacks and Latinos are also more likely to be stopped by police, even as juveniles. This in turn leads to higher rates of arrest and detainment—a phenomenon known in criminal justice policy circles as disproportionate minority contact—and higher incarceration rates.

To further exacerbate the problem, consider the institutional proclivity to impose harsh sentences on blacks and Latinos. The result: Widespread criminalization of people who live in poor, urban communities.

“It’s community profiling,” said Andrew Grant-Thomas, deputy director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. “Where you direct your [law] enforcement resources will tell you who ends up in prison.”

To get at the heart of these issues, the media must consistently live up to its watchdog role. News outlets have to resist pressure to rely solely on human interest angles in cases such as the Scott sisters, and report on context and policy so that citizens can fully understand what’s going on and how it impacts our world.

“A vast majority of Americans assume if you’re in prison, it’s because you did something,” Grant-Thomas explains. “If there are more black and Latino people in prison, it’s because black and Latino people do bad things more.”

Take the war on drugs. According to one study of drug arrests in California, blacks are arrested for marijuana possession at a rate four times higher than the rate for whites in every county, even though government studies have consistently found that young blacks use marijuana at lower rates than young whites.

Grant-Thomas recalled his days as a student at Yale University and the preponderance of drug use and selling among white students. “So many people in this country do illegal drugs. It’s not a big secret,” he said. “But the police weren’t knocking down the doors at Yale. It’s not about how many communities have more offenders. The problem is where are you going to send your police to pick up offenders? It is black and brown communities that are being profiled. The offenders in those communities are being put behind bars.”

Drug arrests—both users and sellers—are the primary reasons behind dramatic growth of the prison population. In 1972, fewer than 350,000 people were being held in prisons and jails nationwide, compared with 2.3 million today, according to The Sentencing Project. Racial disparities also worsened over this period. 

“No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities,” author and law professor Michelle Alexander wrote in her book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” “The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.”

The Scott sisters’ case provides plenty of opportunities for media to tackle the structural issues that have led to the racial and sentencing disparities in the U.S. prison system and how we deal with them. Here are four topics the news media can pursue:

Wrongful incarceration: Police arrested the Scott sisters despite evidence that they may not have been involved materially in the armed robbery at all. Wrongful incarceration is costly to prisoners, who lose years or decades of earnings, and taxpayers, who pick up the tab for prison operations. In Mississippi, the average annual cost per inmate in 2008 was $15,188, according to the National Institute of Corrections.

A compelling twist would be to tell the sisters’ stories of how being incarcerated for a petty crime has affected their lives. Reporters could trace the trajectory of the sisters’ potential earnings at the factory where they worked prior to arrest and conviction.

“Hopefully, they can go beyond the human interest aspect, which is part of the appeal of the story,” says Grant-Thomas. There are other problematic elements of the Scott sisters’ story, he adds. “These were two very young women convicted on the testimony of three teens who had incentive to lie. So much of our criminal justice system is based on the testimonies of people who have incentive to lie.”

Prosecutorial strategy:  That the Scott sisters were painted as the ring leaders seems questionable and worthy of further investigation. Who was the prosecutor in this case and what was behind the decision to let the gunmen off lightly? Prosecutors are public employees. The media has a responsibility to hold them accountable.

“There are a lot of people in prison who shouldn’t be in prison,” adds Grant-Thomas, referring to those who are innocent, who are hooked on drugs or who have committed nonviolent offenses such as identity theft. 

Harsh sentencing: The Scott sisters did not have a criminal record and this was a first offense. The amount of money stolen was paltry. Neither Gladys nor Jamie wielded a weapon. No one was injured. All of these factors presumably would lead a judge to hand down a lighter sentence. What went wrong here?

One area ripe for investigating is the criminal justice system’s use of life imprisonment. A 2004 report by The Sentencing Project raised questions about the practice. “One in every 11 people in prison is currently serving a life sentence,” Mauer says.  “Some have committed mass murder and some are like the Scott sisters. It’s just remarkable. No other nation comes close to these kinds of numbers. ”

Conditional release: This aspect of the case has already received a lot of attention, but there are unexplored aspects that are still worth covering. Barbour raised the issue of the cost of keeping prisoners, noting the $200,000 annual expense for Gladys Scott’s dialysis treatments. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is now eyeing prison reform as a cost cutting measure. How much does it cost to keep prisoners locked up for non-violent drug and other minor offenses? If a prisoner’s medical care is too costly, should they be released no matter what crime they’ve committed?

And for the Scott sisters, there is the issue—and the cost—of Barbour’s refusal to pardon them. Many states compensate prisoners who are exonerated of their crimes, notes Grant-Thomas. “But that’s not what’s going to happen for these women,” he says. “They’ve lost all this time and now they have to somehow re-enter society, twice as old with this incredible prison gap and not well educated.”

Reality check

Stories about the Scott sisters’ release centered on their personal plight, rather than systemic injustices in law enforcement and criminal courts. News media relied on outdated assumptions about what readers care about:

• Casting aside angles related to race and injustice because those are “old stories”
• Playing up quirky details—stipulating a kidney donation as a condition for prison release—and leaving out the bigger picture: Sentencing bias

Next step tips

Read The Sentencing Project’s 2004 report on life sentencing policy, which details how the practice has evolved since the 1970s. It sheds light not only on the Scott sisters’ experience, but also on prisoners in other states where the use of life sentences has mushroomed, especially those who have no chance for parole.

Collect data on arrests and sentencing by race for drug and other non-violent offenses in the prison system in your state.

Interview prosecutors about how and when deals are cut. Keep tabs on criminal convictions that are overturned and report on every prisoner who has been found innocent. Note the prisoner’s race and ethnicity and explore how their race and economic status affected their experience with police and the courts.

Try these resources

Marc Mauer, executive director, The Sentencing Project
202-628-0871 | mauer@sentencingproject.org

Andrew Grant-Thomas, deputy director, The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity
614-292-7525 | grant-thomas.1@osu.edu

Paul Cates, communications director, The Innocence Project
212-364-5346 | pcates@innocenceproject.org

“The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” (The New Press, 2010) by Michelle Alexander, law professor at Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University