Bureau Of Justice Statistics: The Criminal Justice System

The Bureau of Justice Statistics is an important collection of data that seeks to report information about the criminal justice system. It is important in analyzing our justice system. I was interested in determining the demographics of incarcerated offenders and the results surprised me. I found that in 2014, 37% of the male prison population was black, 32% was white, and 22% was hispanic. While a 5% difference between black and white incarceration may not seem like a large discrepancy, it does seem incredibly noteworthy when blacks make up only 12.8% of the population compared to whites who make up 63% of the population. “Imprisonment rates for black males were 3.8 to 10.5 times greater at each age group than white males and 1.4 to 3.1 times greater than rates for Hispanic males”. …show more content…
I argue that the reason for this is because black males and white males are given different treatments with regards to the law due to their ethnicities. More specifically, I believe blacks arrested for a crime are far more likely to have a classical experience, whereas whites arrested for a crime are far more likely to have a positivist experience. To research this, I looked through the BJS to figure out how long the trial times were for different ethnicities on average or how different ethnicities were perceived during the judicial process. Perhaps the perception of different ethnicities is the reason for such a disparity between white and black imprisonment rates. However, while I was searching for this information, I could not find it on the BJS website. I would be interested to learn on if this is the