Race has been a factor in the U.S criminal justice system since beginning of times. Conflict theory stipulates that conformity in society is maintained through power, domination, and racial inequality. Majority of incarcerated people in the U.S are black men. The criminal justice system is intentionally targeting black men.
Purpose / problem
Race has been a factor in the United States criminal justice system since the system’s beginnings, as the nation was founded on Native American soil.It continues to be a factor throughout United States history through the present.
HISTORY
The court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford made it so that African slaves and their decedents were considered non-citizens, further incorporating racism into the justice system.[9]
The Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee as a vigilante organization whose goal was to keep control over freed slaves;[9] It performed acts of lawlessness against negroes and other minorities. This included taking negro prisoners from the custody of officers or breaking into jails to put them to death. Few efforts were made by civil authorities in the South against the Ku Klux Klan.[8]
Emmett Till, 14-year-old African American boy in Mississippi was murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman. His mother’s insistence on an open-casket funeral led to the publishing of images of his mutilated body in many newspapers and magazines to showcase the scrutiny of the Mississippi criminal justice system in the 1950s and 1960s
Data
Blacks had a higher chance of going to prison especially those who had dropped out of high school. If a Black male drop out of high school, he had an over 50% chance of being incarcerated in his lifetime, as compared to an 11% chance for White male high school dropouts.Socio-economic, geographic, and educational disparities, as well as alleged unequal treatment in the criminal justice system, contributed to this gap in incarceration rates by race.
Failure to achieve literacy (reading at “grade level”) by the third or fourth grade makes the likelihood of future incarceration twenty times more likely than other students. Some states use this measurement to predict how much prison space they will require in the future. It appears to be a poverty issue rather than a race issue.[74]
Racial profiling
racial disparity in imprisonment, particularly with African Americans, subjects them to political subordination by destroying their positive connection with society.Institutional factors – such as the prison industrial complex itself – become enmeshed in everyday lives, so much so that prisons no longer function as “law enforcement” systems
A conviction leads to all sorts of social, political, and economic disadvantages for felons, and has been dubbed the “new civil death” (Chin 2012, 179). In the aggregate, these obstacles make it difficult for released inmates to transition to society successfully, which, in turn, makes it diffi cult for these communities to achieve social stability.
Black ex-inmates earn 10 percent less than white ex-inmates post incarceration.[78]
A 1998 study found that black defendants in Florida were significantly more likely to be sentenced as habitual offenders than were whites, and that this effect was significantly larger for drug offenses and property crimes of which whites are often the victims.[72]
A 2010 analysis of U.S. Sentencing Commission data found that blacks received the longest sentences of any ethnicity within each gender group (specifically, their sentence lengths were on average 91 months for men and 36 months for women)
