Effects Of Inequalities In The Criminal Justice System

Of the 2.3 million people currently incarcerated in America 's federal, state, and local jails and prisons, over 1 million of them are African Americans. With that comes the fact that African-American males, born today, have a one-in-three chance of going to prison during their life. According to studies conducted by many major institutions, the American justice system is statistically biased against African-Americans and other minorities at all levels of the judicial system. Nanya Springer discusses this when she writes in her article about how white defendants usually fair better in trials over black defendants for the same types of crimes. (Springer 1) Also in her article, she talks about another major reason why African Americans are being …show more content…
As written in the article Pervasive Inequalities in the Criminal Justice System, “Numerous studies show that students of color are suspended or otherwise reprimanded at higher rates than white students for the same of similar infractions.” (Springer 1). This tells a lot about the state of the education system in this country. By exposing elementary and high school minority students to this biased behavior at such a young age, they begin to believe that the system will always be unfair towards them and with that what do they have to lose. Another author, Nick Chiles, backs up Springer’s statements by writing “Sixteen percent of the overall student population is African- American but they account for thirty-seven percent of students who face out-of-school suspension and they also consist of thirty-one percent of students who are referred to law enforcement.” An example that is seemingly matches those statistics is the case of Dontadrian Bruce. He was suspended from his high school in Mississippi for five months because he allegedly flashed a gang sign in a picture he took with one of his friends. The supposed gang sign turned out to be his football jersey number. This is one of the many incidents that occur around the country every day that involves a minority student not being given the benefit of the doubt when if the student was white, there would never have been an issue. Other similar incidents occurred at the Christina School District in Delaware. According to the Department of Education’s investigation, African American students committing the same offenses as their white counterpart were found to have been given harsher punishments. In many cases, district