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African Americans In Prison Essay

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Over the last past decades, the rate of incarcerations for minority has risen at an unprecedented rate (Warren, Gelb, Horowitz & Riordan, 2008).Criminals of difference races, sexes, or socioeconomic status receive different sentences for same crimes. The United States now incarcerates more than 1 out of 100 American adults. The United States holds the record for both prison population size and percentage of citizens in prison (Warren, Gelb, Horowitz & Riordan, 2008). American prisons do have a disparate number of minority inmates in their populations.

The disparity may result from race-neutral criteria that create racially disparate result, with or without conscious animus, or from unconscious racial stereotyping (2008). …show more content…

Parenti (1999) and Dyer (2000) have argued that government and citizens were profiting from the mass incarceration of principally African Americans and Hispanics. The length of African American prison term is about 25% longer than for a white offender (Brooks, …show more content…

The date indicates that the Black share of drug crimes is almost exactly equal to the Black share of the population (2009). O’Hear explored different hypothesis and he stated for the second hypothesis, Blacks tend to commit more serious drug crimes than Whites. Blacks are arrested for more serious offenses, but that does not reflect a higher rate of commission of such offenses. The higher arrest rates may be due to racial profiling or the greater law enforcement presence in urban neighborhoods. "Researcher found that Whites were responsible for a majority of the drug distribution but the Blacks constituted a majority of who were arrested"

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