Racial Disparity In Prison Essay

The United States has a large disparity when it comes to race in our prison population. The following two studies Unnever, J. D.( 2008), and Keen, B., & Jacobs, D. (2009) research this disparity in different ways. Unnever, J. D.( 2008) attempts to uncover the different perceptions that whites and blacks have on why more blacks are incarcerated, and Keen, B., & Jacobs, D. (2009) research the factors that are involved in the racial disparity in prison admissions including political variants. This essay will explain these differences. Unnever, J. D. (2008) shows how blacks and whites differ on their views on why there is a large disparity of blacks in the prison system. Blacks have different opinions overall compared to whites on this issue and have a more common view together. A causal factor of this difference is theorized to be the racial discrimination that African Americans personal experience. Unnever, J. D. (2008) showed that 71 percent of blacks thought a big reason why blacks were incarcerated was due to police bias and whites at 63 percent thought the reason was poverty. Another big difference in the results was that whites thought that the least likely reason more blacks were incarcerated was due to the courts, and blacks thought the least likely reason was that black man …show more content…
Many Republican candidates have more support for law and order ideals in their campaigns which correlate with this higher disparity for the minority threat. The racial disparity in prison admissions was also strongest in ex-Confederate states with large and growing black population. There seems to be a threshold of the growth in African Americans in the population and the racial differences in Prison Admissions. This is likely due to the voting power that happens when there are a certain amount of African Americans in the