Savage Portrayals: Race, Media and the Central Park Jogger Story

9. They Didn’t Do It!

9 They Didn’t Do It! The Central Park Jogger Case as a Racial Project BY DEFINITION, a racial project does “ideological ‘work’” that creates or changes the nature of racial “dynamics” (Omi and Winant 1994: 56). The case of the Central Park jogger definitely changed forever the lives of the five teens put on trial. Prior to this case, none had ever been arrested. The Central Park Five, as they came to be known, were tried as adults under New York State law. Based on statute, four of the five received juvenile sentences. Those sentenced as juveniles served the early years of their sentences at a juvenile facility and were moved to adult prisons at age twenty-one. Antron McCray, fifteen, was convicted of rape, assault, robbery, and riot. He spent his adult time at Clinton Correctional Facility (also known as Dannemora) (Burns 2011). Yusef Salaam, fifteen, was convicted of rape, assault, robbery, and riot. At twenty-one, he also was moved to Clinton Correctional (Burns 2011). Raymond Santana, fourteen, was convicted of rape, assault, robbery, and riot. Upon becoming an adult, he served at Downstate Correctional Facility (Burns 2011). Kevin Richardson, fourteen, was convicted of attempted murder, rape, sodomy, assault, robbery, and riot. He served his adult time at Coxsackie Correctional Facility (Burns 2011). Korey Wise, sixteen, was the lone defendant in the group who was tried and sentenced as an adult. He was sentenced to five to fifteen years; he served thirteen years at Auburn Correctional Facility (Burns 2011). The injuries the boys suffered as a result of their arrest, trial, conviction, and incarceration are immeasurable. That would be bad enough if the case had affected only the five young men and their families and loved ones. But the evidence suggests that the impact has been much greater. I argued earlier that the Central Park Five were ensnared in the growing association between young They Didn’t Do It! 183 black and Latino males and criminality that developed with the War on Drugs. After the sexual assault on Trisha Meili, the “wilding”/“wolfpack” narrative built by police and prosecutors also provided support for spurious claims being made by the media and by a prominent political scientist whose research falls within the field of criminology. John J. DiIulio Jr. (1995), among others, promoted the idea of an impending youth crime wave that was purportedly indicative of a real relationship between young minority males and crime.1 This hypothetical affinity young black and Latino males have for crime supposedly exists for those in their late teens and for those just entering their teens. In a 1995 article published in the Chicago Tribune, DiIulio appeared to reference the Central Park case in discussing criminal activity of fourteen- to seventeenyear -olds: “While it remains true the most violent youth crime is committed by juveniles against juveniles, of late young offenders have been committing more homicides, robberies, and other crimes against adults. There is even some evidence that juveniles are doing homicidal violence in ‘wolf packs.’”2 The media coverage of the jogger case—with its lurid headlines of children committing interracial rape and violence—occurred almost a decade into the War on Drugs. The race-neutral frame used in the prosecution of the drug war, which focused on individual choice, would make it easier for minority male minors to be locked up in adult facilities as states changed their juvenile justice laws to incorporate the underaged into the adult court system. With these changes, more and more minority male youths would be saddled with criminal records, locking them out of the possibility of advancement into the mainstream and making it more difficult to achieve a just social order. Critical race theory scholar Michelle Alexander (2010) contends that the drug war was implemented with “race-based targeting” of cases by police and prosecutors; this made young black and Latino males primary targets for law enforcement agencies. “Imprisonment . . . now creates far more crime than it prevents, by ripping apart fragile social networks, destroying families, and creating a permanent class of unemployables” (Alexander 2010: 224). The increasing rates of incarceration of minority male youths set this group apart, marginalizing them into a “caste,” Alexander (2010) argues. But the contours of this caste system have taken on a particular character— the members are very young. And the numbers of those under eighteen years old included in this group are growing. Black youths (younger than eighteen years old) are even more overrepresented in the total population...