Notable new paper on "Race and Prosecution"

For (too) many years, the work of prosecutors tended to go under-discussed and under-studied in criminal justice reform circles.  But in recent years, lots and lots of folks are giving lots and lots more attention to the work of prosecutors.  As but one example, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice's Institute for Innovation in Prosecution has a notable new publication from its Executive Session on Reimagining the Role of the Prosecutor in the Community.  This new paper, titled simply "Race and Prosecution," is authored by Angela J. Davis, John Chisholm, and David Noble. It gets started this way:

The long-standing inequities in the American criminal justice system and society as a whole cannot be blamed solely on prosecutors.  However, prosecutors do not operate in a temporal vacuum. Every action that a prosecutor’s office takes is colored by this country’s historical record of oppressing racial minorities.  In its present state the justice system both reflects and exacerbates our societal ills.  Prosecutors seeking to address systemic disproportionality and disparity must first come to appreciate how these phenomena came to be. This paper aims to unearth the roots of racial inequality in the United States, discuss how those roots produced racial disparities in the criminal justice system, and provide guidance on how the prosecutor’s office can transform those disparities into positive change in policy and practice.