Coramae Richey Mann was a professor emeritus

Professor

A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

 of criminal justice

Criminal justice

Criminal Justice is the system of practices and institutions of governments directed at upholding social control, deterring and mitigating crime, or sanctioning those who violate laws with criminal penalties and rehabilitation efforts...

 at the University of Illinois at Chicago

University of Illinois at Chicago

The University of Illinois at Chicago, or UIC, is a state-funded public research university located in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its campus is in the Near West Side community area, near the Chicago Loop...

. She argued vehemently that the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 criminal justice system was racist

Racism

Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...

.

Mann criticized the arguments of William Wilbanks (in his book The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System (1987)), countering in her 1989 book Unequal Justice that Wilbanks' reliance on quantitative and statistical

Statistics

Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....

 data

Data

The term data refers to qualitative or quantitative attributes of a variable or set of variables. Data are typically the results of measurements and can be the basis of graphs, images, or observations of a set of variables. Data are often viewed as the lowest level of abstraction from which...

 hides the reality of racism.

Early life

Coramae Richey-Mann was born in Chicago, Illinois on January 25, 1931. She gained undergraduate (1956) and graduate (1961) degrees in Clinical Psychology

Clinical psychology

Clinical psychology is an integration of science, theory and clinical knowledge for the purpose of understanding, preventing, and relieving psychologically-based distress or dysfunction and to promote subjective well-being and personal development...

 from Roosevelt University

Roosevelt University

Roosevelt University is a coeducational, private university with campuses in Chicago, Illinois and Schaumburg, Illinois. Founded in 1945, the university is named in honor of both former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The university's curriculum is based on...

. Her doctorate in Sociology (with an emphasis in Criminology) was awarded by the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1976.

Recognition

The Division on People of Color and Crime of the American Society of Criminology presents the annual Coramae Richey Mann Award recognizing professional members of the Division who have made outstanding contributions of scholarship on race/ethnicity, crime, and justice.