Cultural Diversity Training in Criminal Justice: A Progressive or Conservative Reform?

Abstract

IT IS DISCONCERTING TO FIND ONESELF IN THE MIDST OF A PROGRESSIVE AND CRITICAL movement in criminal justice and to face the possibility that efforts aimed at challenging structures of control will serve to strengthen them instead. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the current movement to develop cultural diversity awareness training for police officers and other criminal justice personnel is already showing signs of supporting rather than transforming the status quo. After all, our own research locates all major criminal justice innova? tions in the United States (e.g., public police, institutionalization, community based corrections) within the context of social structures of accumulation and efforts by the capitalist state to control problem populations (Barlow, Barlow, and Chiricos, 1993). Still, dramatic and tragic incidents have drawn public attention to the racist nature of U.S. law enforcement and have created a window of opportunity for efforts to bring multicultural education to police officers. It seems like the right thing to do. At the same time, participants in the current movement to develop cultural diversity training for police officers will do well to heed the counsel of history and look critically at the impetus for the movement as well as its outcomes. In this article, we describe the cultural diversity training movement as arising out of a growing sense of urgency regarding the tensions in police-minority relations ; we discuss our own observations from having been intimately involved in this movement at the local, state, and national levels during the past four years;1 finally, these observations are located within a broader historical perspective on criminal justice innovations in the United States.