“Crime, Inequality, and Social Justice”
By Eileen Leonard, Professor of Sociology
Thank you, Dean Alamo, for that introduction, and my thanks to President Bradley for the opportunity to speak here today.
Good afternoon to all the members of the Vassar community, welcome to our fantastic seniors as you embark on your final year at Vassar. And, an especially warm welcome to Class of 2024, as you begin your educational journey here.
Today is a special day because it celebrates the beginning of a new academic year, albeit this year under extraordinary circumstances. But I believe the very turmoil we’re experiencing may be read as an awakening to the trouble we’re in, and that it presents us, as an academic community, with an obligation and an opportunity to be part of a new beginning.
As I was preparing for this talk, I was thinking about my own educational path. I am entirely a product of Catholic schooling. Twelve long years with teaching sisters, and another five with the Jesuits. To this day, I blame them for every flaw in my character, but I am deeply grateful to them for two gifts.
One is an awareness of the profound value of the liberal arts in enabling us to explore and integrate issues, ideas, and methods across the disciplines in the humanities, the arts, the natural and the social sciences. This ideally provides the time and space to ask questions about ourselves and our world, to think critically, independently, and creatively.
Another gift I received was an emphasis on the purpose of education, and that is as preparation for a meaningful life in service to the common good.
I was taught that education is not for the status or glorification of an individual. It is not for personal gain. It is certainly not to secure a favored place in the job market. Instead, at the deepest level, a liberal arts education can be a source of empowerment and a call to a more just and compassionate society and world.
I’d like to illustrate how this understanding of the liberal arts and social justice has impacted my teaching and my research, much of which has centered on a sociological analysis of crime and the criminal justice system in the United States.
The discipline of Sociology teaches us that crime and criminals are “socially constructed,” meaning that there is not simply an inherent quality that makes something a crime, or someone a criminal. Nor are these categories objective or unchanging. Instead, the social context, social structures, and social values shape our understanding of what constitutes crime in profound ways.
For example, if there is inequality in the larger society, until it is rooted out, it will express itself explicitly as well as insidiously in the institutions of that society, like the criminal justice system.
We are currently getting an education on the racism in the criminal justice system from the protesters in the streets. This racism has always been part of the U.S. criminal justice system, and in direct contrast to our stated ideals of equal justice for all, regardless of wealth, power, or social identity.
In my work, I’ve aimed to illuminate intersecting forms of inequality by viewing crime and criminals through a comparative lens. I’ll use drug violations as one example, but virtually any category of crime (theft, state crime, sexual assault) can be examined in the same comparative way with much the same results.
The dominant narrative we’re taught regarding crime and justice is that most of us are good people, who lead law-abiding lives, in a basically fair and just system. We’re also taught negative conceptions of marginalized groups, as those who commit serious crimes, and are deemed individually responsible for their actions, silenced in terms of their lived experiences, and ultimately irredeemable.
The only problem with this is what classical sociologist Max Weber refers to as “inconvenient facts”—facts that challenge the dominant narrative, and expose a far grimmer reality, not simply of individual success or failings, but of a system laden with class, race, and gender discrimination.
When we think about drug crimes, we typically frame them with a focus on street crime. Emphasis is placed on illegal drugs, drug addicts, the gangs involved in the drug trade, and the imprisonment that frequently results. This focus has significant value. But it keeps us trained on street crime, and on particular groups (largely inner-city people of color) who are stereotyped and targeted as the drug offenders in our society.
But a wider lens necessarily exposes significant power differentials that underlie the entire process of criminalization, and provides empirical evidence of just how “socially constructed” and, indeed, how unjust, it actually is.
For example, the United States has waged a vigorous and utterly unsuccessful “war on drugs” for decades, but enforcement policies have targeted only certain users and dealers. These policies have had nothing short of a devastating impact on communities of color. We know that Black Americans are between three and five times as likely as white Americans to be arrested for drug violations, and twelve times more likely to be imprisoned for them. The “war on drugs” has been primarily a war on Black men, the Latinx community, and the poor, but also a war on women, and some women more than others, especially women of color.
We may delude ourselves into thinking that, well, they’re the ones who violate the drug laws. But the fact is that white people use and sell drugs at roughly the same rates as Black people. As legal scholars Mauer and Cole put it: “Police find drugs where they are looking for them,” and they are looking in central cities, not white suburbs, college campuses, or on Wall Street.
One way to illustrate the injustice of what’s occurring is to expand our knowledge about those sociologists Mohamed and Fritsvold have referred to as the “anti-targets” in the war on drugs. These sociologists did six years of fieldwork exploring illegal drug networks in several universities throughout Southern California. They found these college dealers “virtually immune” to law enforcement. And they were not all small-time dealers; some were making profits of two to five thousand dollars a week. But they viewed law enforcement as an inconvenience, not a real threat—and were confident that if they got in trouble, their parents would come to the rescue. But in six years, not one of these students found themselves in trouble with the law.
This stands in stark contrast to how the “war on drugs” has played out in communities of color in terms of searches, arrests, and punishment. It has reinforced racial hierarchies through the punitive control of people of color, while white, middle-class people have been cast more as victims, and largely insulated from the carceral state.
Looking at various “anti-targets” exposes the fact that the way we define and punish a criminal is not rooted merely in actual behavior, but is instead structured along the lines of race, gender, and class.
We can further expand the focus on drug offenses by considering the crimes of pharmaceutical corporations (which very few criminologists do). But sociologist Edwin Sutherland insisted some 80 years ago that we mistakenly view most criminals as poor and minority, whereas this is immediately challenged if we examine corporate crime.
Obviously, there are significant differences here: different causal factors, different dynamics, very different outcomes in terms of arrests and punishment. But we claim to focus on drug crimes because of the harm they do to individuals, to communities, to society.
It’s impossible to provide an adequate sketch of pharmaceutical crime here, so I’ll make just a few introductory remarks, and then provide a couple of examples to illustrate.
The pharmaceutical industry is one of largest and most profitable in the United States, and it has a notorious record in terms of public safety. The Journal of the American Medical Association, a premier journal in the field, named the drug industry as the third leading cause of unnatural death in the United States, after only cancer and heart disease.
Although we typically think of corporate crime as mainly financial and unintentional, the stunning fact is that it results in more than 100,000 American fatalities each year, and this is the result of deliberate violations.
Virtually all the drug corporations have been involved in illegal activities, most have done so repeatedly, the harm they do is extensive, and if they are called to account, they are generally treated leniently by any standard, but especially when compared to how we punish the marginalized among us.
Here’s one example which may be in the collective memory of some of us. It’s from Merck Pharmaceuticals. Merck marketed a popular drug, Vioxx, which is a prescription painkiller for arthritis. They learned from their own clinical trials that this drug caused six times more heart attacks among those taking it, compared to control groups.
But their researchers and executives hid and misreported this evidence. Instead, they hired ghost writers to draft deceptive articles about the safety and efficacy of Vioxx, and then paid medical doctors to lend their names to these articles. They sent 3,000 highly trained representatives to doctors’ offices across the country with misleading information about the safety of Vioxx, and they prohibited these representatives from discussing any information to the contrary.
By the time Merck was forced to admit the dangers of Vioxx and to pull it from the market, it’s estimated that the drug had killed at least 60,000 Americans through heart attacks and strokes (a danger Merck was aware of from the beginning).
The government fined Merck $950 million as a punishment for “illegally misbranding” Vioxx. But Merck had already exceeded $11 billion in sales of the drug. Merck also faced thousands of costly personal-injury lawsuits, but significantly the government didn’t charge any Merck executives, researchers, or doctors with a crime. Instead Merck pleaded guilty to a marketing violation and paid a fine. Yet these “anti-targets” were responsible for not one, but 60,000 deaths.
It’s important to know that Merck is not an outlier. This behavior is commonplace among pharmaceutical corporations, and the fines leveled against them rarely rise to the level of profits they’ve accrued from their violations.
I’ll briefly offer one more example.
Undoubtedly the most notorious case of utter disregard of public health is that of Purdue Pharma and its pain killer, OxyContin. Purdue marketed and promoted OxyContin for chronic pain, as a less addictive pain killer because of its time-release formula. They claimed that patients would not develop a tolerance to the drug, nor would they suffer withdrawal symptoms. However, their own clinical trials demonstrated OxyContin was highly addictive, and clearly resulted in withdrawal symptoms.
In spite of this knowledge, Purdue engaged in a campaign of misinformation for five years to boost sales. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, opioids, including OxyContin, killed more than 47,000 Americans in 2017 alone. Purdue is regarded as responsible for most of these deaths and for the opioid crisis generally. The human toll of Purdue’s actions now represents one of the largest epidemics in history caused by medical treatment.
A subsidiary of Purdue pleaded guilty to “misbranding” OxyContin, and was fined $634 million, although they had already made billions in profits from the drug.
This case is far from over, since Purdue has been and will be dealing with lawsuits from multiple states involving billions of dollars. But one significant factor is that no arrests or prison time have occurred so far for anyone involved.
So, admittedly we have a serious problem with drug violations in the U.S., and many people are harmed because of this. But rather than a fair, balanced, and effective approach to drugs and drug policy, we dehumanize and severely punish certain portions of our population, while minimizing similar and even more lethal transgressions of others. In the process, we fail to protect people from the whole range of drug problems.
The point here is not to demonize the pharmaceutical industry, nor to valorize or justify street crime. People engage in predatory and destructive behavior that must be addressed.
But the crisis we face is not just about crime and punishment. Instead, our patterns of crime and punishment reflect and reinforce the much deeper problems of social, political, and economic inequalities. These deeper problems will not be solved by the criminal justice system. We cannot punish our way to a better world.
And this is precisely where a social justice perspective enters. The struggle for social justice is essentially a struggle for human rights. It means moving beyond the criminal justice system to address social and economic factors that cause crime, all forms of crime, in the first place. It means addressing inequalities in employment, housing, health care, education, and ultimately predatory capitalism. These conditions are not only viewed as unacceptable, but also as the result of human-made structural violence.
Finally, social justice is not about reforming people so they can fit back into a fundamentally unfair system. Instead, it’s about people working together to challenge injustice and, in the process, transforming themselves as well as their local and global world. The task before us is obviously immense and imperative.
It is particularly important to think clearly and critically about issues of criminal justice at this moment in American history when the current administration is weaponizing a familiar “law and order” platform to gain reelection. This campaign is intended to be divisive, and to stoke fear and racism against marginalized populations, as well as against those fighting for a more equitable system, all under the banner of fighting crime and dangerous criminals.
Let me mention that meanwhile, under the same administration, prosecutions of corporate violations have declined by almost 50 percent.
To conclude:
By now it’s commonplace to say we live in difficult, and I would argue, dangerous times. We also live in a society and a world that was hurting and deeply wounded before this moment. The COVID pandemic, the protests against police violence, and challenges to democracy here and abroad are exposing, once again, profound and longstanding inequalities and injustice. But perhaps this offers us the possibility of change and even transformation.
My hope for all Vassar students, and specifically today for the newest members of our community, the Class of 2024, is that your experience at Vassar does all that a liberal arts education is capable of doing. It is meant to be about transformation. It is meant to affect us deeply. It is also meant to be a space—I would argue a sacred space—where we can come together as a community of learners and reach beyond the social boundaries and inequalities that imprison all of us.
Education certainly takes place in many locations. It’s going on now in multiple grassroots organizations and in the streets. But it is my hope—no, I’d say it’s my faith—that the education you receive here at Vassar can equip you with the knowledge, the understanding, and the critical skills to take your place among those who, in so many ways, are confronting the world’s suffering in an enduring struggle for social justice.
And I wish you the very best on this challenging and lifelong journey. Thank you so much for your attention.