The American Criminal Justice System

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that racial disparities in the American criminal justice system refer to the difference in the number of minorities versus whites represented inside correction institutions; the incarceration rate for blacks is 8.2 times greater than that of whites. The author points out that, contrary to public belief, the higher arrest rates of black drug offenders do not reflect higher rates of drug law violations; whites actually commit more drug crimes than blacks do, but arrests appear to be easier to obtain in low-income areas because most drug transactions are conducted in public in predominantly black neighborhoods; whereas, drug transactions are more likely conducted indoors in working, upper-class, white neighborhoods. The paper recommends that establishing accreditations for law enforcement, increasing the data collection, continuing to diversify the workplace, and reforming court procedures and sentencing guidelines will help reach the goal of fairness in the justice system.

From the Paper:

"One discriminating practice used by police officers is racial profiling. Racial profiling can be defined as practice of stopping, questioning, and searching potential criminal suspects in vehicles or on the street based solely on their racial appearance (Human Rights Watch, 2000). Profiling has contributed to racially disproportionate drug arrests, as well as, arrests for other crimes. It makes sense that the more individuals police stop, question and search, the more people they will find with reason for arrest. In retrospect, if the majority of these types of stop and frisk searches are done on a certain race then it makes sense that that race would have a higher arrest rate. This is the problem that racial profiling creates and it is most obvious in drug arrests."

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