How do you fight racism in the criminal justice system? With brute-force economic policy.

A new paper finds criminal justice racism works mostly by keeping black people poor

A protest against police brutality.
(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

For many Americans, especially African-Americans, their country is not a democracy.

Instead, as Chris Hayes writes in his most recent book, the American government amounts to a system of colonial domination. Many police departments don't protect the citizenry from crime, but instead keep a gigantic fraction of the population under coercive supervision.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.