Racial Disparities in the Judicial Systems

Racial Disparities in the Judicial Systems

Every year the people of the United States of America celebrate the Selma to Montgomery marches for voting rights, also known as Bloody Sunday, which occurred on March 7, 1965 in Alabama. Let's not forget the individuals who stood up for civil rights like Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Gandhi, Thurgood Marshall, Mother Teresa, Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, Emmett Till, and Stokely Carmichael; all of whom have paved the way for where we are today. These celebrations are meant to for us to remember our history of the civil rights movement and our supposed progress with racial equality in our nation. Yet, still today in the twentieth century, we have what is called, "a broken criminal-justice system", which has proven that we still have a long way to go to achieve civil rights equality. Why are minorities targeted or likely to be incarcerated? Is it because they are more likely to live in poverty or less likely to get a good education or have parental support in the home which contributes to challenges in behavior at an early age? A justice system which tolerates injustice is doomed. (The Sentencing Project, 2008)

Why are people of color today continuously out of proportion when incarcerated, policed, and when put on death row at much higher rate than Caucasian individuals? There have been studies of other racial differences in the criminal judicial system that threaten our communities of color and leaving thousands without voting rights and then also taking away their equal rights to employment, higher education, housing, and public benefits in which millions of others races have the right to access. These major disparities make it imperative that our American criminal-justice system gets to where it exhibits the rights of every race and make it a priority of basic human civil rights issue of today. In a study it showed that minorities make up about 30 percent of the United States' population, and they account for 60 percent of those incarcerated (The Sentencing Project, 2008). It was also stated that the population in prisons grew by an alarming 700 percent from 1970 to 2005, in which the crime and population rates are much lower (The Sentencing Project, 2008). The incarceration rates are alarming to see and have a disproportionate impact to our minority men: one in every 15 black men and one in every 36 Latino men are incarcerated in comparison to one in every 106 Caucasian men (The Sentencing Project, 2008).

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime (Bureau of Justice Statistics). Minorities have larger numbers of contact with law enforcement, which is a clear indication that racial profiling still continues to be an issue in our judicial system today. A report that was put out by the Department of Justice found that minorities were three times more likely to be stopped for a search during a routine traffic stop than Caucasian motorists and blacks were twice as likely to be arrested and almost four times as likely to experience the use of force during encounters with the police (Department of Justice).

Minority youth face unusual harsher punishments in the school system than their Caucasian peers, which leads to a higher number of our minority youth to be put in jail or in the juvenile detention system depending on the crime. Minority children represent more than half of youth involved in school-related arrests or actually referred to law enforcement. Currently, black youth make up two-fifths and Latinos make up one-fifth of our confined youth today in America. According to recent data by the Department of Education, "Black youth are arrested more often than Caucasian students. This data shows that an alarming 96,000 students were arrested and 242,000 were sent to law enforcement by schools during the 2009-10 calendar school year. Black and Hispanic students made up more than 70 percent of arrested or referred students of those mind boggling numbers. Are these schools targeting our minority children and putting harsh school punishment on them, from suspensions to arrests? This may have led to the astronomically high numbers of minority youth coming into the juvenile-justice system and at an alarming early age" (Department of Education).

Black youth have higher rate of being in the juvenile system and depending on the crime committed, they are more likely to be sent to an adult prison which demolishes their future at such an early age. The Sentencing Project stated that even though black youth are about 16 percent of the youth population, 37 percent of their cases are moved to criminal court and 58 percent of black youth are actually sent to adult prisons.

Initiatives on both the state and federal level have addressed the racial discriminations in our minority youth that are