Racism may well be the biggest crime in the justice system. Statistics say that 1 of every 4 African American males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime. The Census Bureau reports that the U.S. is 13 percent black, 61 percent white and 17 percent Latino.
Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, this was about 100,000 African Americans were in prison. Now there are about 800,000 African Americans locked in the justice system; 538,000 in prisons and over 263,000 in local jails. Black men are as likely to be incarcerated as white men, and Hispanic men are 2.3 times as likely, according to the Sentencing Project.
Why? Because our country has dramatically expanded our jails and prisons and there is deep racism built into every step of the criminal legal system. Some think the criminal legal system has big problems that need to be reformed. Others think the racism in the
…show more content…
system is helping it operate exactly as it has been designed to incarcerate as many black and brown people as possible. The foundation of the problem is police stops. Proof of racial profiling continues to accumulate. University of Kansas professors found the police conducted investigatory stops of African American males at twice the rate of whites. A black man in Kansas City 25 or younger has a 28 percent chance of being stopped, while a white male in that age group has only a 12 percent chance. In New York City, police continue to stop blacks and Hispanics at rates far higher than whites even though they are stopping many fewer people due to a successful civil rights federal court challenge by the Center for Constitutional Rights. An illuminating study in Connecticut showed racial disparities in traffic stops during the daytime, when the race of the driver can be seen, but not at night. Police searches are another problem. Many minorities do not know their rights. Once stopped, during traffic stops, three times as many black and Hispanic drivers were searched as white drivers, according to U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics. According to the same statistics, white drivers were also given tickets at a slightly lower rate than black and Hispanic drivers. Use of force during arrest is one of the things that people of authority in the criminal justice system take advantage of. A repoort by Center for Policing Equity researched that police are more likely to use force like Tasers, dogs, pepper spray and physical force against black people than white people when making arrests. This is one of the ways minorities are treated very unfairly when it comes to being arrested in America today. Some police that are racist take advantage of people’s lives and instead of helping save lives they are more dangerous than a person with a normal job. The minority youth are the most at risk to be targeted with racism in America today. They are so quick to put a youth into the system and label them a delinquent. African American youth are twice as likely to be arrested for crimes in school as Caucasian kids. Over 2.5 times as likely to be arrested for curfew violations as white kids, twice as likely as white kids to be arrested for all crimes, and much more likely to be held in detention than white kids, according to the Sentencing Project. The War on Drugs is war on communities of color. The racial statistics are horrible. Despite the fact that white and black people use drugs at similar rates. Black people are jailed on drug charges 10 times more often than white people are. African Americans are also five times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than white people are. Racial bias keeps more black people in prisons and on probation and parole than ever before. One in twenty African American men and women can expect to be incarcerated in their lifetime. Compare those statistics to the one in twenty-three Latino males and one in twenty-seven white males. The effect of the War on Drugs on communities of color has been staggering. At no other point in U.S. history has so many people of color been deprived of their liberty. The US has seen big in arrests and putting people in jail over the last five decades. Most of the reason is the war on drugs. Whites and blacks engage in drug offenses, possession and sales, at roughly comparable rates; this is according to a report on race and drug enforcement published by Human Rights Watch in May 2010. While African Americans comprise 14% of the US population and 15% of monthly drug users they are 47% of the people arrested for drug offenses according to 2011 Congressional testimony by Marc Mauler of The Sentencing Project. The police stop minorities at rates that are much higher than whites. In Los Angeles, where minorities make up about half of the population, 70% of the LAPD stops were of blacks and Latinos. When whites were stopped, only 6% were frisked. When blacks and Latinos are stopped 75% were frisked according to information provided by the LAPD. In a New Hampshire study, the ACLU found blacks are four times more likely to be stopped than whites. Since 1971, drug arrests have skyrocketed rising from 321,000 to close to 1 million according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice. Minorities are arrested for drug offenses at rates 1 to 10 times higher than the rate for whites according to a May 2010 report on disparity in drug arrests by Human Rights View. Once arrested, minorities are more likely to remain in prison awaiting trial than whites. For example, the Texas state division of criminal justice did a 1985 review of disparities in processing felony arrests and found that in some parts of Texas minorities are 44% more likely to be detained awaiting felony trials than whites facing felony trials. Once arrested, 65% of the people in the criminal justice system get a public defender as their lawyer.
Race plays a major role here as well. In any urban courtroom if you pay attention to the races of the people who are waiting for public defenders. Despite often high efforts by public defenders, the system gives them much more work and much less pay than the prosecution. The American Bar Association reviewed the US public defender system in 2006 and concluded “All too often, defendants plead guilty, even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights or what is occurring. The fundamental right to a lawyer that America assumes applies to everyone accused of criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the US.” African Americans are frequently illegally excluded from criminal jury service according to a June 2008 study released by the Fair Justice Initiative. For example in Houston County, Georgia, 9 out of 10 minorities qualified for jury service have been struck by prosecutors from serving on high profile
cases. The biggest crime in the U.S. criminal justice system is that it is a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people. Saying the criminal justice system is racist may be controversial in some aspects. But the statistics are overwhelming. Are these statistics the mistakes of an otherwise good system, or are they evidence that the racist criminal justice system is working exactly as planned? Is the criminal justice system operated to bash and manipulate hundreds of thousands of minorities? Statistics on race are shown from the use of drugs, police stops, arrests, getting bail, public defending, jury duty, trial, sentencing, prison, probation, parole and freedom to live a normal life as an American.
In many nation states, it is noticed that there is a disproportionate number of black people especially those youngsters going through the criminal justice system. The overrepresentation is illustrated by related data released by the U.S. Department of Justice and the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee. In America, almost 3500 per 100,000 residents of the black male were sent to jail in 2013 which was over seven times more than the ratio their white counterpart had and in England and Wales, 8.5% of young black people aged between 10-17 were arrested during the same period .This essay aims to explore the reasons behind the ethnic overrepresentation in the criminal justice system and believes that the higher rate of offending for some race groups and the existence of systematic racist which partially stems from the contemporary media distortion are attributive to the overrepresentation.
Despite the efforts of lawyers and judges to eliminate racial discrimination in the courts, does racial bias play a part in today’s jury selection? Positive steps have been taken in past court cases to ensure fair and unbiased juries. Unfortunately, a popular strategy among lawyers is to incorporate racial bias without directing attention to their actions. They are taught to look for the unseen and to notice the unnoticed. The Supreme Court in its precedent setting decision on the case of Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), is the first step to limiting racial discrimination in the court room. The process of selecting jurors begins with prospective jurors being brought into the courtroom, then separating them into smaller groups to be seated in the jury box. The judge and or attorneys ask questions with intent to determine if any juror is biased or cannot deal with the issues fairly. The question process is referred to as voir dire, a French word meaning, “to see to speak”. During voir dire, attorneys have the right to excuse a juror in peremptory challenges. Peremptory challenges are based on the potential juror admitting bias, acquaintanceship with one of the parties, personal knowledge of the facts, or the attorney believing he/she might not be impartial. In the case of Batson v. Kentucky, James Batson, a black man, was indicted for second-degree burglary and receipt of stolen goods. During the selection of the jury the prosecutor used his peremptory challenges to strike out all of the four black potential jurors, leaving an all white jury. Batson’s attorney moved to discharge the venire, the list from which jurors may be selected, on the grounds that the prosecutor’s peremptory challenges violated his client’s Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment rights to have a jury derived from a “cross-section of the community”(People v. Wheeler, 583 P.3d 748 [Calif. 1978]). The circuit court ruled in favor of the prosecutor and convicted Batson on both counts. This case went through the courts and finalized in the U.S. Supreme Court.
The majority of our prison population is made up of African Americans of low social and economic classes, who come from low income houses and have low levels of education. The chapter also discusses the amount of money the United States loses yearly due to white collar crime as compared to the cost of violent crime. Another main point was the factors that make it more likely for a poor person to be incarcerated, such as the difficulty they would have in accessing adequate legal counsel and their inability to pay bail. This chapter addresses the inequality of sentencing in regards to race, it supplies us with NCVS data that shows less than one-fourth of assailants are perceived as black even though they are arrested at a much higher rate. In addition to African Americans being more likely to be charged with a crime, they are also more likely to receive harsher punishments for the same crimes- which can be seen in the crack/cocaine disparities. These harsher punishments are also shown in the higher rates of African Americans sentenced to
criminal justice system. If the current trends persist, one out of every three African American men can expect to go to prison over the course of his life, as can one out of every six Latino males, compared to only one in seventeen white males (Bonczar 2003). For females, the figures are significantly lower, but racial and ethnic disparities are very similar. For instance, one out of every eighteen African American females can expect to go to prison, as can one out of every 45 Latino females, and one out of every one-hundred and eleven white females (Bonczar 2003). The racial disparities in imprisonment have been felt the most by young African American males (Western and Pettit 2010). Males are a significant majority of the prison and jail populations, accounting for around ninety percent of the population (Western and Pettit 2010). Racial disparities in incarceration are astounding when one counts the men who have been incarcerated in their lifetime rather than those serving time on any given day (Western and Pettit 2002). For instance, in 1989, approximately two percent of white men in their early thirties had been in prison compared to thirteen percent of African American men in their early thirties (Western and Pettit 2002). These extreme racial disparities disproportionately affect communities of color and have significant collateral effects such as family stress and dissolution,
This research essay discusses racial disparities in the sentencing policies and process, which is one of the major factors contributing to the current overrepresentation of minorities in the judicial system, further threatening the African American and Latino communities. This is also evident from the fact that Blacks are almost 7 times more likely to be incarcerated than are Whites (Kartz, 2000). The argument presented in the essay is that how the laws that have been established for sentencing tend to target the people of color more and therefore their chances of ending up on prison are higher than the whites. The essay further goes on to talk about the judges and the prosecutors who due to different factors, tend to make their decisions
A study of race and jury trials in Florida published last year in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, found that “conviction rates for black and white defendants are similar when there is at least some representation of blacks in the jury pool.” But all-white juries are a very different story—they convict blacks 16% more often than they convict whites (2).
As you can tell by the studies that have been conducted and research that race and crime always correlate with each other. Whether it’s pre-trial or the actual sentencing ones race will always matter. There is always a stigma that goes along with anyone of any race and unfortunately it translates into the courtroom. Blacks have always been sentenced unfairly, when a other person of a different race commits the same crime and with the same type of weapon and the black person gets more time. The white man has usually gotten away with a lot of murder during the years. The reasons for their crimes could be the same as a Hispanic or a Black person. This goes to show that race matters and it always will.
These authors’ arguments are both well-articulated and comprehensive, addressing virtually every pertinent concept in the issue of explaining racially disparate arrest rates. In The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System, Wilbanks insists that racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is a fabrication, explaining the over-representation of African Americans in arrest numbers simply through higher incidence of crime. Walker, Spohn and DeLone’s The Color of Justice dissents that not only are African Americans not anywhere near the disproportionate level of crime that police statistics would indicate, they are also arrested more because they are policed discriminately. Walker, Spohn and DeLone addi...
In theory if this trend continues it is estimated that about 1 in 3 black males being born can be expected to spend time in prison and some point in his life. One in nine African American males between the ages of 25 and 29 are currently incarcerated. Although the rate of imprisonment for women is considerably lower than males African American women are incarc... ... middle of paper ... ... King, R., and Mauer, M., (2007).
These statistics demonstrate that racialized mass incarceration exists in the U.S. There are a few reasons why African Americans are discriminated against by the legal system. The primary cause is inequitable protection by the law and unequal enforcement of it. Unequal protection is when the legal system offers less protection to African Americans that are victimized by whites. It is unequal enforcement because discriminatory treatment of African Americans that are labeled as criminal suspects is more accepted.
Racism within the Justice System. Living in the twenty first century, Americans would like to believe that they are living in the land of the free, where anyone and everyone can live an ordinary life without worrying that they will be arrested on the spot for doing absolutely nothing. The sad truth, with the evidence to prove it, is that this American Dream is not all that it appears to be. It has been corrupted and continues to be, everyday, by the racism that is in the criminal justice system of America. Racism has perpetuated the corruption of the criminal justice system from the initial stop, the sentencing in court, all the way to the life of an inmate in the prison.
Racism is the mistreatment of a group of people on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, place of origin, or ancestry. The term racism may also denote a blind and unreasoning hatred, envy, or prejudice (Dimensions of Racism). Racism has had a strong effect on society. Despite the many efforts made to alleviate racism, what is the future of African Americans' Racism's long history, important leaders, current status, and future outlook will be the main factors in determining how to combat racism. Racism is still present in many societies, although many people are doing their best to put an end to racism and its somewhat tragic ordeals.
According to “Is The criminal Justice System Racist” article it stated that whites are more likely to get convicted of a felony. Most people will stay that is not true. In 1994, the justice department looked at the country’s 75 largest urban areas. The department discovered that African Americans had a lower chance of prosecution for a felony. At the end of the research it was discovered that white people were convicted of a felony that African Americans.
Race and crime is a major topic in today’s world because it is a highly debated subject and has a major impact on how society is today. Race and crime go hand in hand. No matter who commits a crime, there is always a race involved. With race and crime there are many stereotypes that come with the subject. Race and crime are both active matters in everyday life. It is everywhere. Social Media involves race and crime in practically anything. If one is active on say for example twitter, the point of twitter is to keep your followers interested by what you are showing them. There is a reason why the news opens up with the most violent crimes and twitter is no different. As a matter of fact any form of media grasps onto it. Another example would
Racism is a huge social problem in the world today. Many races today are being discriminated for being a certain race. Racism has been a social problem for a quite long time now, and it is still a social problem. The vast majority are being discriminated because of a certain group of a race, or person, done something that was awful, but this does not mean the whole race is to blame for the actions of others. Other races are looked down upon because of the color of their skin or maybe because they look very different. Racism has led up to genocide because one group fears another, or because of the way a race looks. A person who is racist is not born racist, they are taught to be racist or they see other people being racist, and they want to