Injustice in The Criminal Justice System
Due to several injustices within the American justice system, society has become more divided. The criminal justice system in the United States has been criticized for being a race-based establishment Institutions where minorities are subjected to more strenuous punishments than their white counterparts. Nonetheless, it goes without any debate that racism exists in the justice system. Are these realities the errors of a moral justice system, or does it prove that the criminal bias organization is working as expected? Is the criminal justice system utilized to regulate and manage the minority population?
These racial biases are detrimental to society because it leads to many innocent individuals becoming incarcerated. Though officers appropriately released Rodriguez, many others are not as lucky, thus creating a large population of colored individuals in prison. The disproportional ratio of whites to colored inmates perhaps only feeds racial biases because individuals of color are the ones who understood to be criminals. Another important aspect worth investigation is whether or not racial profiling by police officers is a result of the corrupt views of racist officers. A video shown during lecture displayed interviews with officers whom admitted to seeing racism in some of their fellow officers, and often turning a blind eye towards it.
The author’s studies indicate that the criminal justice system choose majority of their targets and suspects predominantly by race. According to studies conducted by the U. S Department of Justice, the imprisonment rate by race per 100,000 residents over 3,000 black males were imprisoned in the year 2000 compared to white males imprisonment rate of less than 500. This shows that conviction of crime, robbery, murder, and other violence and drug related crimes has a clear discrepancy across racial groups.
Discrimination and racial disparities exist at every phase of the U.S. criminal justice system, especially when it comes to sentencing. The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, as there are over 2 million people imprisoned today. The drawing is a visual representation of my annotated bibliography. In it, I stated that the criminal justice system is broken, as it discriminates against people of color. The left side of the illustration depicts the scene of the courtroom during the trial of a white defendant.
I believe that the federal justice system is just and unbiased. The federal justice system has guidelines and rules to keep them from using power improperly and targeting groups of people based on their race. This is talked about in article “Is the Criminal Justice System Racist”. There are statistics given pertaining to the prison sentences given to African Americans, prosecution during a felony trial, and crime/prison rates.
Fast forward to the present day, we have the Ferguson, Mike Brown of Emmitt Till’s still occurring in our justice system. A person must view the criminal justice threw a godly telescope to see the inequalities that exit, and need to come to the forefront of our government, and the population worldwide. Sentencingproject.org statistically show that African American men, women, and juvenile are arrested more often than any other races across the nations. This report will prove, and argues that racial disparity in the justice system is at large in our system. This research paper will further explain, and presents evidence that display the presence of racial bias in the criminal justice system in America.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander published in 2012, is a 261 page book detailing how mass incarceration has become the new form of legalized discrimination. BACKGROUND A large cause for the writing of this book is that there is currently not much research or call for a criminal justice reform. According to Alexander the main goal of the book is to “stimulate a much-needed conversation about the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetuating racial hierarchy in the United States” (2012:16).
Is our justice system corrupted, racist or is it perfect? Did you know African Americans now constitute for nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population? This is probably the case because Blacks are incarcerated six times the rate of whites. African Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people. I believe race, ethnicity and gender disparities play a large role in how our system is executed.
After careful review of the assigned material The Untouchables: America’s Misbehaving Prosecutors, And The System That Protects Them, an article by Radley Balko published in the Huffington Post August 2013 argues Brady violations which are the failure to disclose, as a matter of law, exculpatory evidence, as required under Federal case law. Balko addresses prosecutor misconduct and lists the tens of thousands of prosecutorial misconduct cases that have been studied by ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, USA Today, the Innocence Project , and Yale Law. Senate Bill s. 353 was introduced in Senate on 3 February 2015 titled Justice Safety Valve Act of 2015. This bill authorizes a federal court to impose a sentence in a criminal proceeding
Racial disparities in sentencing. Implications for the criminal justice system and the African American
Even before our nation’s founding, people of color have been discriminated. Decades pass and the criminal justice system is still “racist” labeling people of color as criminal, meaning black equal criminals therefore is fine to discriminate people of color just because they’re criminals. In “The New Jim Crow” the system targets black men because they are associated with crime, meaning crime stands in for race. In the other hand, As Heather Mac Donald writes in her book “The War on Cops”, “The criminal-justice system does treat individual suspects and criminals equally, they concede. But the problem is how society defines crime and criminals” (154).
Addison Thrower English 10 Honors Ms. Gaston 13 April 2023 Injustice in the Court System By most people in today’s society the general court systems in America are seen as unfair and problematic. As known by most there are consequences to one's actions but sometimes the people of the court take it further than it needs to be taken. They do not realize or understand how it affects and changes a person's whole life. So how is the justice system unfair?
Coker gives great evidence that supports racial injustice in the criminal justice system. She discusses on the Supreme Court’s rulings and accusations of racial preference in the system. This article is helpful because it supports my thesis on race playing a role on the system of criminal justice. Hurwitz, J., & Peffley, M. (1997). Public perceptions of race and crime: The role of racial stereotypes.
According to the article Racism and Police Brutality in America, “Whites believe that Blacks are disproportionately inclined to engage in criminal behavior and are the deserving on harsh treatment by the criminal justice system” (Chaney 484). The justice system has unfortunately followed this idea. The African American race has been a minority in the legal system in the past; however, it has been much worse as of 2015. Some individuals assume it is acceptable to refrain from acknowledging this fact. Racism is an issue in the midst of police brutality, and it should be resolved.
The American criminal justice system is supposed to uphold the law, but it has also been a source of injustice and abuses that have impacted the basic rights of those incarcerated. The prisoner's rights movement came about in the United States in the late 1960s in response to the poor conditions and poor treatment of prisoners. Prior to the 1960s, federal and state courts either refused to hear cases regarding the rights of prisoners or treated them in such a way as to make it clear that prisoners had few civil rights. The courts then became involved in prisoner's rights cases as people realized the conditions of prisoners were inhumane. In the Warren Court era, which extended civil rights, the Supreme Court issued a series of opinions that
For years now there has been a lot of controversy involving the looming question: Is the criminal justice system racist? Racism is prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one 's own race is superior. Ever since the Trayvon Martin case of 2012, the justice system has been in a complete downfall including all of the police brutality cases since then also. According to sources, 1 of every 4 African American males born this decade are expected to go to prison in their lifetime. Census Bureau reports that the U.S. is 13 percent percent black, 61 percent white, and 17 percent latino.