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24 J. Res. Crime & Delinquency 3 (1987)

handle is hein.journals/jrcd24 and id is 1 raw text is: EDITOR'S COMMENTS Disagreements on matters of legal policy between the attorney general of the United States and the Federal Judiciary have occasioned a good deal of contemporary attention; however, they are hardly unknown in other times. One of the more useful interchanges, rare because it elevated understanding of an issue, occurred in the late 1960s between then Attorney General of the United States Nicholas Katzen- bach and Judge David Bazelon of the Washington, D.C. bench. The attorney general, in response to a letter from Judge Bazelon, asserted that the criminal law should not be expected to redress inequities in the larger society and that its appropriate goal in this regard was to minimize the inequities in the criminaljustice system. In sum, he argued that the best we should expect is for similarly situated individuals to be treated similarly. The fact that there may have been an inequity in their initial status was beyond the purview of the criminal justice system. In fact, attempts to redress these kinds of inequities could result in even greater injustices in the end. The first article in this issue of the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency illustrates the difficulty of demonstrating inappropriate inequities in the criminal justice system. In this instance, the concern is race and ethnic bias. Zatz, in the lead article, discusses four relatively distinct eras or waves of research on disparity based on race or ethnic biases in the criminal justice system. The first, through the mid-1960s, typically found discrimination against minorities. The second, in the late 1960s and 1970s, suggested that, with the exception of the death penalty in the South, findings of improper discrimination were more often than not an artifact of poor research designs. Research during this period often confirmed, for example, that the overrepresentation of minorities in the criminal justice system stemmed from their propor- tionally greater involvement in crime. A third wave in the late 1970s and 1980s, using advances in research techniques, found that both overt and, more particularly, subtle forms of biases against minority defendants did occur at least in some social context. The fourth wave, begun in the 1980s and largely directed toward determinate sentencing guidelines, found again subtle biases against minority defendants. The definition of these terms and the forms of this discrimination are an important part of Professor Zatz's article and her analysis, and discussions of these issues 3 from the SAGE Social Science Collections. All Rights Reserved.

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