Race and Criminal Justice draft
The criminal justice system is involved in apprehending, prosecuting, and sentencing suspected or convicted criminals. Criminal justice is the process of finding criminals, and taking the proper steps to make sure they’re punished fairly. Which is why, the treatment disparity between people of different races is a major concern. Racial and ethnic profiling by police can cause minority groups who are already disadvantaged to be put in worst positions, where they are more likely to commit more crime. There is a difference in the process of apprehending, prosecuting, and sentencing individuals based on race and ethnicity.
The criminal justice system controls the entire process of apprehending and punishing criminal …show more content…
This may be normal, but there is a major difference in the differences in similar cases and the disparity between sentence lengths between races. An entry in the journal of legal studies, “Do Judges Vary in Their Treatment of Race?” by authors David S. Abrams, Marianne Bertrand, and Sendhil Mullainathan, find that black people serve longer sentence length than other races. They write “with violent crimes receiving the most severe sentences. African American defendants receive longer sentences on average and are more than 30 percent more likely to be incarcerated than are white defendants”. While it’s easy to look at this and say that the criminal justice system is unfairly sentencing black people, many will believe that black people simply commit more crime and deserves harsher sentences. This is something that unfairly labels black Americans as criminals that deservingly take up more space in prison. To come to a final conclusion on what is actually going on in the criminal justice system, Abrams take advantage of the fact that the criminal justice system randomly assigns cases to judges, and uses a statistical technique called a Monte Carlo simulation to show that judges take race into account in their sentencing decisions. Abrams writes “We find evidence of significant inter-judge disparity in …show more content…
There are different ways that prosecution is different based on the race of different individuals, one is the disparity between black and white people arrested, and prosecuted for drug offenses. Even though white and black people use illegal drugs at the same rate, black people make up the majority of people prosecuted for drug possession. Human Rights Watch wrote an article explaining the problem, and gives statistical evidence to show how unfair criminal justice is in this situation. According to Jamie Fellner from Human rights Watch “49% of whites and 42.9% of blacks age twelve or older have used illicit drugs in their lifetimes; 14.5% of whites and 16% of blacks have used them in the past year; and 8.5% of whites and 9.8% of blacks have used them in the past month.” The white population is much larger than blacks in the United States so the total number of white drug users are much larger than black users. The larger white drug users make the fact that more black users are arrested comes from bias. The human rights watch cited a study done in Seattle “A recent study in Seattle is illustrative. Although the majority of those who shared, sold, or transferred serious drugs in Seattle are white (indeed seventy percent of the general Seattle population is white), almost two-thirds (64.2%) of drug arrestees are black.” White people make up seventy percent of the population yet blacks are two-thirds of
The criminal justice system is involved in apprehending, prosecuting, and sentencing suspected or convicted criminals. Criminal justice is the process of finding criminals, and taking the proper steps to make sure they’re punished fairly. Which is why, the treatment disparity between people of different races is a major concern. Racial and ethnic profiling by police can cause minority groups who are already disadvantaged to be put in worst positions, where they are more likely to commit more crime. There is a difference in the process of apprehending, prosecuting, and sentencing individuals based on race and ethnicity.
The criminal justice system controls the entire process of apprehending and punishing criminal …show more content…
This may be normal, but there is a major difference in the differences in similar cases and the disparity between sentence lengths between races. An entry in the journal of legal studies, “Do Judges Vary in Their Treatment of Race?” by authors David S. Abrams, Marianne Bertrand, and Sendhil Mullainathan, find that black people serve longer sentence length than other races. They write “with violent crimes receiving the most severe sentences. African American defendants receive longer sentences on average and are more than 30 percent more likely to be incarcerated than are white defendants”. While it’s easy to look at this and say that the criminal justice system is unfairly sentencing black people, many will believe that black people simply commit more crime and deserves harsher sentences. This is something that unfairly labels black Americans as criminals that deservingly take up more space in prison. To come to a final conclusion on what is actually going on in the criminal justice system, Abrams take advantage of the fact that the criminal justice system randomly assigns cases to judges, and uses a statistical technique called a Monte Carlo simulation to show that judges take race into account in their sentencing decisions. Abrams writes “We find evidence of significant inter-judge disparity in …show more content…
There are different ways that prosecution is different based on the race of different individuals, one is the disparity between black and white people arrested, and prosecuted for drug offenses. Even though white and black people use illegal drugs at the same rate, black people make up the majority of people prosecuted for drug possession. Human Rights Watch wrote an article explaining the problem, and gives statistical evidence to show how unfair criminal justice is in this situation. According to Jamie Fellner from Human rights Watch “49% of whites and 42.9% of blacks age twelve or older have used illicit drugs in their lifetimes; 14.5% of whites and 16% of blacks have used them in the past year; and 8.5% of whites and 9.8% of blacks have used them in the past month.” The white population is much larger than blacks in the United States so the total number of white drug users are much larger than black users. The larger white drug users make the fact that more black users are arrested comes from bias. The human rights watch cited a study done in Seattle “A recent study in Seattle is illustrative. Although the majority of those who shared, sold, or transferred serious drugs in Seattle are white (indeed seventy percent of the general Seattle population is white), almost two-thirds (64.2%) of drug arrestees are black.” White people make up seventy percent of the population yet blacks are two-thirds of