The role and significance of prosecutors has become an area of growing interest and analysis among criminal justice scholars and advocates. So this new AP piece, headlined "Trump’s top federal prosecutors are overwhelmingly white men," should be of interest for many reasons and to many people. Here are a few excerpts:
The nation’s top federal prosecutors have become less diverse under President Donald Trump than under his three predecessors, leaving white men overwhelmingly in charge at a time of national demonstrations over racial inequality and the fairness of the criminal justice system.
The Associated Press analyzed government data from nearly three decades and found that a persistent lack of diversity in the ranks of U.S. attorneys has reached a nadir in the Trump administration. Eighty-five percent of his Senate-confirmed U.S attorneys are white men, according to AP’s analysis, compared with 58% in Democratic President Barack Obama’s eight years, 73% during Republican George W. Bush’s two terms and at most 63% under Democrat Bill Clinton.
White men lead 79 of the 93 U.S. attorney’s offices in a country where they make up less than a third of the population. Nine current U.S. attorneys are women. Two are Black, and two Hispanic....
The enduring imbalance leaves U.S. attorneys looking less like the people they serve, and is in stark contrast to the population of federal prisons, where a disproportionate share of those incarcerated are Black....
White House spokesman Judd Deere did not answer questions about the diversity of U.S. attorneys under Trump’s watch, but said in a statement that the administration has “worked closely with U.S. Senators to identify the best candidates to serve as the chief law enforcement officer in their districts back home, and we are very proud of the work that they are doing to keep all Americans safe.”...
A lack of diversity has long been an issue throughout the federal law enforcement and criminal justice systems. In some places it’s grown more acute under Trump. Then-FBI Director James Comey said in 2016 that the bureau’s failure to recruit more minorities had become “a crisis.” In the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, recent court filings show 8% of the agency’s more than 4,000 special agents are Black while about 77% are white.
An AP analysis also found nearly 86% of the 206 federal judges confirmed to lifetime positions under Trump have been white — the highest rate of white judicial appointments since George H.W. Bush’s presidency. Two-thirds of Trump’s judicial appointees have been white men; fewer than a quarter have been women.
And at the top of the Justice Department, Trump’s two attorneys general — Barr and Sessions — are also white. That compares with the past three administrations in which Black people, a Latino man and the first female attorney general served as the nation’s top law officer.
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