"Unfair by Design: The War on Drugs, Race, and the Legitimacy of the Criminal Justice System"

a workshop with

Lawrence D. Bobo

Monday, October 24, 2005
Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center, 4:00-6:00 PM

Respondent: Frank L. Samson Graduate Student, Department of Sociology Stanford University

Reading: "A Taste for Punishment: Black and White Americans' Views on the Death Penalty and the War on Drugs" by Lawrence D. Bobo and Devon Johnson.

Lawrence D. Bobo is the Martin Luther King Jr. Centennial Professor at Stanford University. He is director of Stanford's Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and of the program in African and African American Studies. He is formerly the Tishman-Diker Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Science, a former Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and former Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. His research concerns race, ethnicity, politics, and social inequality. He is a founding editor for the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race published by Cambridge University Press. He is co-author of the award winning book Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations (1997, Harvard University Press), senior editor for Prismatic Metropolis: Inequality in Los Angeles (2000, Russell Sage Foundation), and co-editor of Racialized Politics: The Debate on Racism in America (2000, University of Chicago Press). His forthcoming book is entitled Prejudice in Politics: Public Opinion, Group Position, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute to be published by Harvard University Press (March 2006). He is currently conducting research on the "Race, Crime, and Public Opinion" project.

Frank Lao Samson is an advanced doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology where he studies racism, group-based prejudices and inequalities, economic sociology, political sociology, and social movements.