Atherley
Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System
By:
Kevin Atherley
Submitted for CRIM 500 Term Paper
Department of Criminal Justice, Anthropology, and Forensic Studies
Edinboro University of Pennsylvania
Edinboro, Pennsylvania
Date: February 18th, 2018
Abstract
Many are using social media as a platform to shine light on racism in the criminal justice system and around the world. We have recently been hit with a wave of controversial video footage of police officers abusing their authority towards a selected group of individuals in our society. They have been an outcry that members of the criminal justice system are not being held accountable for their actions and officials are protected by laws that are put in place to prevent these same issues we are currently facing. These issues has been going on for centuries but are now being publicized because of the rise in technologies and social media. Many innocent individuals have been sent to prison wrongfully due to either misconduct by officers, flaws in the criminal justice system or racial discrimination. Smart phones, body cameras that are worn by officers and security cameras have been capturing wrongdoing of officers and their actions are being put on display in hopes for a change. This paper will propose the viewpoint of society who believes that this issue needs to be addressed and that the criminal justice system needs a change for the better. It will also display the racial disparities in the criminal justice system and why some race and communities lack the trust of law enforcement officials and the criminal justice system. I will conclude this paper on whether or not the criminal justice system is fair to African Americans or other race that believe that they are discriminated against and how can these issues be rectified. This paper gives a better understanding of why inequality in the criminal justice system is a difficult problem to solve completely. This issue is always addressed but some believe there is rarely ever any change coming from it and the presented survey will show why that is.
Purpose Statement
The purpose of this paper is to determine if there’s disparities in the criminal justice system. I will prove that there’s a disproportion of a selected race in the prison system due to racial hierarchy in the criminal justice system. I will prove that racism contributes a high percentage of African Americans being incarcerated, while other race is less likely to be incarcerated for the same crimes. I will perform my studies by reviewing social media postings, corruptions in police precincts, racial profiling cases, academic books, peer reviewed articles, and surveys, along with some graphs. The War on Drugs played a major role in why African Americans were and are more likely to be targeted by cops that practice bad policing. In 2004, over 40% of sentenced inmates in the United States were African American, with African-American males incarcerated at seven times the rate of white males (Innovations for Poverty Action). These numbers are not surprising and have only been getting worse due to African Americans and minorities not having fair opportunities when released back into the community and not having the proper change take place in the criminal justice system. It is becoming obvious that one race is treated poorly while other races are getting away with transgressing. The goal is to reveal disparities in the criminal justice system and prove that a selected race is systematically oppressed and misrepresented. This paper will have a large study of data that analyzes race within prisons and jails that are reported by the US census. According to Ashley Nellis, a senior research analyst with the Sentencing Project, the disparity rate was more than double the average. This paper will bring awareness to the sad truth of our criminal justice system and explain why it is hard to resolve these issues.
Importance of the Study
This study is important to me because it is wrong to ill treat individuals because of the color of their skin or because they lack the resources to better themselves. I grew up in a poor neighborhood where statistics show that I should not amount to anything. I had a better chance being arrested for selling illegal substances to survive or dead before I reached a certain age because I was using drugs, etc. Stereotypes also play a role in why African Americans are more likely to be stopped and search for drugs than any other race. Oklahoma had the highest rate of black people incarcerated with 2,625 black inmates people per 100,000 residents (Ashley Nellis). This paper will provide a viewpoint of minorities being treated unfairly in the criminal justice system and how stigmatization contributes to the issue. A friend of mine recently told me that she was arrested for an offense that would usually be classified as a misdemeanor but she was charged stricter for it being her first offense, compared to another friend of ours. The offense is similar but this individual has done it multiple times but because her parents can afford an expensive but probably a more qualified lawyer, she got off with a lighter sentence. Why should your wealth dictate your freedom or the level of treatment you receive in the criminal justice system? Everyone deserves to be treated equally. This country promotes fair treatment and equality for all but yet there’s still individuals living their day-to-day life, concerned about if they will be discriminated against. This study is not done to make anyone feel uncomfortable but to shine light on the disparities that goes unannounced or not being properly addressed. I pursue criminal justice because I want to help improve the criminal justice system for the better. An African American child born today has a 1 in 3 chance of ending up in prison (Shelden, 2008, p.182).
Definition of Terms
Racism: prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.
Racial disparities: the proportion of a racial or ethnic group within the control of the system is greater than the proportion of such groups in the general population.
Criminal Justice System: the system of law enforcement that is directly involved in apprehending, prosecuting, defending, sentencing, and punishing those who are suspected or convicted of criminal offenses.
Law enforcement: is any system by which some members of society act in an organized manner to enforce the law by discovering, deterring, rehabilitating, or punishing people who rules and norms governing that society.
Incarceration: the state of being confined in prison.
Racial Caste system: according to Alexander Michelle, the author of The New Jim Crow, this term means, “to denote a stigmatized racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom.
Racial profiling: the use of race or ethnicity as grounds for suspecting someone of having committed an offense.
Racial hierarchy: is a system of stratification that focuses on the belief that some racial groups are either superior or inferior to other racial groups.
Sentencing: the punishment given to a person convicted of a crime.
Police corruption: is the misuse of police authority for personal gain.
Stereotypes: a widely held but fixed oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.
Jim Crow Law: was the name of the racial caste system, which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and Border States. It enforced racial segregation in all public facilities as African Americans were relegated to the status of second-class citizens.
Civil Rights Law: Civil rights law guarantee rights for individuals to receive equal treatment and prohibits discrimination in a number of settings, including employment, voting, education, housing, etc.
War on Drugs: is a campaign of prohibition of illegal drugs that was initiated by President Richard Nixon after his press conference given on June 18th, 1971. The goal was to create drug policies intended to discourage the production, distribution and consumption of illegal drugs.
Drug Enforcement Agency: is a United States federal law enforcement agency under the U.S. Department of Justice created by President Richard Nixon in 1973. The agency is responsible for tackling drug use both domestic and abroad.
Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer and scholar who decided to write a book that addresses the truth our nation has been reluctant to face. In school we were taught that the Jim Crow laws were banished decades ago and that it was illegal due to civil rights law that was put into place. Michelle Alexander explained that the war on drugs is helping the criminal justice system mask their modern racism, she believes that a racial caste system is alive and well in America. In Michelle’s book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” she addresses and points out multiple racial disparities in the criminal justice system. She provided evidence to back up her statements, that poor people of color, particularly black men are leading the percentage of mass incarceration. According to Michelle, there was a study done in Washington D.C, and it states that “ 3 out of 4 black men, and nearly all those living in the poorest neighborhoods could expect to find themselves behind bars at some point in their life”. This goes back to what I aforementioned in the beginning of this paper, poor minorities are trained to believe that they will be arrested for committing an offense even when they know that they will not offend. This is the mindset of most minorities because they know that the color of their skin or economic status is what decides their future in a broken system.
I will perform surveys around my campus, community and my job to get some of the public’s viewpoint on if they believe that poor minorities have a better chance of being targeted by police without reasonable suspicion or probable cause versus the upper class or wealthy. “A massive new penal system has emerged in the past few decades and it is driven almost entirely by race and class” (Michelle Alexander). Poor individuals of color have a better chance of being in prison than they have completing college. Once they are branded as a felon or criminal, which eventually happens because of excessively being targeted, they lose all rights in society that would have applied due to the civil rights act. They are no longer able to vote, obtain proper jobs, educational opportunities are limited and so is their access to resources that may benefit their survival on a clean non-criminal path. According to Michelle, it is perfectly legal to discriminate against convicted criminals in nearly all the ways in which it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. In her words, “we have not ended racial caste in America, we merely redesigned it.”
In this paper, I will be looking at different researchers viewpoints on the criminal justice system. They are persons who really believe that the criminal justice system is perfect and that every individual who is incarcerated deserves to be there because they may have done something that put them there. This is a blinded mindset because those who believe such don’t want to accept the evidence that is provided that clearly shows, “African American males had an imprisonment rate 3,059 per 100,000 while white males had a rate of 456 per 100,000” (Bureau of Justice Statistics). These stats provided are from 2010 and is nearly 7 times higher without including individuals who are locked up in jails and are on probation and parole. Why Is the United States the only country leading in arrest and incarceration rates compared to other countries? Why are they better-funded prisons in the United States than they are of Schools? “We went from a prison and jail population of about 300,000 to now more than 2 million” (Alexander). Has mass incarceration become normalized in the United States? Why is it so easy for the wealthy to profit from incarceration by investing in private prisons? These are a few questions I will answer in this paper and the findings will explain why the criminal justice system remains damaged. I also want to state that a reason why the criminal justice system may not be seeing a change for the better any time soon, because some Americans don’t actually know or care about the disparities in the incarceration rate because it does not affect them directly. In my study, I will ask my subjects if they believe that disparities in the criminal justice system exist and what are their take on it? This paper will be looking at the systematic racism in more details and it will explain why are incarceration rates in the United States high even though the crime rate is at an historical low. Why is black incarceration rate still increasing rapidly than other race and what are some things that may be contributing to these factors other than just solely racism. More people need to bring awareness to the racial and ethnic inequality in the criminal justice system.
War on Drugs
‘War on Drugs’ is a war on minorities and the poor (Kain, 2011). The goal of America is to help bring an end to drug abuse and decrease the crimes related to drugs, but in reality we are noticing a pattern of only a selected race being targeted. I agree that this is an important issue we need to focus on and it is a solvable problem but only if implemented correctly. It may seem though that government officials and other leaders are using the drug war for their own personal gains. The United States for almost a century has been strict on violators who illegally use drugs by incarcerating offenders. It is obvious that this approach is not working completely because it is still being used. Drug war program is in place to prevent drug abusers from filling up our court systems, prison systems, hospitals, and the street from related crimes. It seem like only organized crime members, drug dealers and prison investors are the true beneficiaries of the war on drugs. We are filling jail and prison cells with individuals who may or may not be addicted to drugs. Some individuals are doing time for using, distributing or just being in the same vicinity of drug offenders and they are doing more time than serious felons.
In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse as “public enemy number one”, when he created policies to combat and control drug abuse. The United States government was spending millions of dollars per year into campaigns of prohibition of drugs, military aid, and military intervention in attempt to reduce access to illegal drugs. Today the amount being spent to fight these same issues have increased from millions of dollars to billions without seeing a big change. Nixon led these initiatives because of the increase in drug use in the 1960’s and he targeted substance abusers by proposing stricter prison sentences for drug crimes. I believe that an individual who has trouble with substance abuse should not be locked away behind bars but should be treated for their addiction. The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimated that 2.5 million drug-users could have benefited from treatment but only 1.4 million users were treated in 1993. More money was spent on drug enforcement programs compared to treatment programs. Since the United States have stricken their prison sentencing for drug criminals, prison population have increased tremendously and has become overpopulated by drug offenders compared to other criminal offenders. In the federal prison, more than forty seven percent of sentenced prisoners were serving time for a drug offense and in the state prison, more than thirty five percent was arrested for drug offense (E. Ann Carson, PhD. Prisoners in 2016). Nixon’s proposed drug enforcement agency led the charge in combating drug smuggling and drug use in the United States. He signed off on million dollar policies that created the Drug Enforcement Administration, which is now a subsidy of the Department of Homeland Security. As of 2017, they are over 5,000 special agents employed by the Drug Enforcement Administration, compared to Nixon’s time; it was only about 1,500 special agents and a budget of less than $75 million.
President Nixon’s domestic policy chief came forward in an interview suggesting that the War on Drugs campaign is a cover for targeting African Americans and minorities. John Ehrlichman said in an interview that the Nixon campaign had two enemies, “antiwar left and black people.” Many African Americans in poor neighborhoods were already questioning or against some of the protocols agencies were taking to combat drug issues but after the interview more leaders started speaking out. Ehrlichman said that he knew what they were doing was illegal but by criminalizing individuals heavily for drug use, made it easier to disrupt the black communities and break into their homes legally. John Daniel Ehrlichman was the counsel and assistant to the president for Domestic Affairs under President Nixon. The war on drugs need a better approach and it is shown to have failed countless times under different administration. Instead of s spending so much money on imprisoning abusers, we need to treat them and figure out what causes an individual to use drugs. Half a million of people are in prison because of drugs and this is starting to become an overpopulation issue in the prison system.
African Americans and the Prison System
The shocking truth is that African Americans spend more time in prison on drug-related charges than other race do for violent crimes (The Sentencing Project, 2012). As pointed in the interview by Ehrlichman, the wars on drugs have always been concentrated in the black communities. Statistics shows that more African Americans are arrested for drugs and that’s usually the base argument for drug combatant administrations but they fail to include that the reason the statistics shows this is because it only targets one group of individuals in particular communities. If you aggressively look for drugs in one area you are more likely to find them there and more arrests are made. This becomes a chain reaction and it increases poverty in a community. Individuals are targeted for drugs then get charged as if it’s a serious offense and they are then put on probation and released to the public. Due to their record, it becomes difficult for them to find proper jobs or pay off their fines so they turn to something they think will help them get by which are almost always drugs or crimes. More than twenty five percent of adults are on probation for drug offenses and that was their most serious offense. Thirty percent of people in the U.S are on parole for drug offenses. According to the National Poverty Center (2010), 15.1 percent of people living in the United States are living in poverty but mostly are African Americans and Hispanics. We need to focus more on not just arresting individuals for using drugs but preventing them from turning to is as an aid in their financial struggles. More jobs and opportunities need to be provided in the poverty stricken neighborhoods and we are guaranteed to see a change for the better. Nellis stated that, Incarceration creates a host of collateral consequences that include restricted employment prospects, housing instability, family disruption, stigma and disenfranchisement. These are the formula for keeping a community below the poverty rate and when strategically applied, it becomes a cycle that makes people believe that systematic racism doesn’t exist but the individuals in these environments are the problem. This approach weakens the criminal justice system and proves that disparities exist. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that 35% of state prisoners are white, 38% are black and 21% are Hispanics. Oklahoma has the highest overall black incarceration rate, 1 in 15 black males ages 18 and older in prison. Stigmatization is part of the reason why these incarceration rates are so high. African Americans are more likely to be targeted for stops because they are stereotyped as being individuals who are more likely to be doing drugs or committing crimes.
Methodology
Participants
My study will observe individuals in my community, around my campus and at my job. I chose multiple areas to do this study to prevent bias age group, race and socioeconomic status when determining if individuals believe that disparities exist in the criminal justice system. Individuals will be randomly chosen in these different settings and will be asked to answer a questionnaire. The questionnaire will be comprised of five questions with subjects related to the criminal justice system. I will select twenty participants from the three different locations to do this study.
Materials
The five questions I will be asking my subjects are listed below.
1. What is discrimination?
2. Which race do you think have a higher population in the prison system?
3. When participant answers question two, ask them why they chose that race?
4. Do you believe that discrimination plays a role in the criminal justice system and why?
5. Have you ever been discriminated against, when and why do you think so?
Procedure
The participants for this study were 20 students enrolled in Edinboro University in the United States. Each subject was given a questionnaire and they were given privacy when answering their questions to prevent and forced answers. I wanted the subjects to feel confortable with whatever answer they chose to give in the questionnaire. The students ranged from ages 18 to 50 years old. They are all studying different majors and minors. I took my questionnaire around campus and randomly selected individually from different buildings around campus. I did the same at different stores in the community and different offices at my job. By doing this, it helped gather viewpoints from different backgrounds in different entities. The time of the day the study was taken place varied as well, some were done at the same time for all three locations as well as days. This procedure was repeated until my study was completed. I predicted that a high number of individuals will believe that racial disparities exist in the criminal justice system while some believe that it does not play a role and a few will not know if it does or not. This survey will not be perfect in pinpointing the inequalities in the criminal justice system but it will help guide the public’s perspective on this topic.
Analysis
The data collected from my study will be analyzed and all answers from my questionnaire will be compared and assessed. All questions will be proof read to make sure subjects understood what was being asked. All participants will be asked to take a survey after their questionnaire to understand if they were uncomfortable doing the study. This study will give me a better understanding of my community when relating to this topic. It is important that my study does not build on bias answers due to the random selection process.
Findings
Majority of the participants knew what discrimination is and they believe that everyone experience some form of discrimination. When asked if they think that it can be found in the criminal justice system, 70% believe it plays a big role, 15% thinks it does not play a role and the other 15% was uncertain. More males believe that discrimination plays a big role versus females. Younger participants experienced more discrimination and think that it is a big issue in the criminal justice system. They were a higher number of male participants taking the survey than female but younger participants than older. African Americans were more likely to think that discrimination exists in the criminal justice system and 5% have never experienced it before so they disagreed. Older participants don’t believe that racism still exists. Most participants believe that the prison system is populated with African Americans and 10% believes its equal. This study shows that Africans do experience inequality in the criminal justice system and society agrees.
Conclusion
After performing this research and studies, it is proven that there is a structural disadvantage and inequality in the criminal justice system. Our society is aware that our criminal justice system needs a change and most are using their platform to spread awareness. This issue has been in effect for decades and it will take multiple parties to fix this broken system. Body cameras and law enforcement agents coming forward against their brothers who break the law is only a small percentage of the solution. More policies need to be created to prevent a repetition of the war on drug campaign. It is evident that African Americans are imprisoned more than two times the rate of whites and that the United States prison system is flawed. These are all areas we need to focus on to decrease the rate of poverty and injustices by the broken criminal justice system.
References:
Alexander, M. (2010). The new jim crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: The New Press.
Ashley Nellis, Ph.D. “The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prison”, (June 14, 2016).
Retrieved from: https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/color-of-justice-racial-and-ethnic-disparity-in-state-prisons/
Burch, T. (2015). Skin Color and the Criminal Justice System: Beyond Black-White Disparities in Sentencing. Journal Of Empirical Legal Studies, 12(3), 395-420.
Cole, D. (1999). Discrimination and Denial: Systemic Racism in Ontario's Legal and Criminal Justice System (Book). Canadian Journal Of Criminology, 41(3), 428-432.
Clair, M., & Winter, A.S. (2017). How Judges Can Reduce Racial Disparities in the Criminal-Justice. Court Review, 53(4), 158-160.
Duran, R. J. (2017). A Call to Disrupt Institutional Racism: Racial and Ethnic Inequality in the Criminal Justice System. ACJS Today, 42(1), 36-40.
Kain, E. (2011, June 28). The war on drugs is a war on. Forbes magazine online, Retrieved from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/06/28/the-war-on-drugs-is-a-war-on-minorities-and-the-poor/#5199ad64624c
The Sentencing Project. (2012, May 18). Trends in U.S. corrections. Retrieved March 1, 2018, from: http:/
/www.sentencingproject.org/detail/news.cfm?news_id=1304
U.S. Census Bureau. (2010). United States Census 2010. Retrieved February, 1, 2018, from: http://2010.census.gov/2010census/data/
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