Racial Disparities in the American Criminal Justice System
Introduction
The United States criminal justice system is the largest in the world. In 2015, there were more than 6.7 million people under some form of correctional control within the United States, including 2.2 million incarcerated in federal, state, or local prisons and jails. By being the world leader in incarceration rates, the United States eclipses the rate of any other nation. These statistics from “The Sentencing Project” emphasize the significance of mass incarceration in America and the racial inequality that takes form in its criminal justice system. Extensive evidence from the American Bar Association shows that African Americans are incarcerated at a rate higher than white
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Methods such as the Implicit Associate Test, IAT, which “measures the strength of associations between concepts and evaluations or stereotypes to reveal an individual’s hidden or subconscious biases” (Loyola) and was first published in 1998 by Project Implicit and has since been continuously updated, would aid in the evaluation and prevention of implicit bias in the criminal justice system as it “bypasses the social biases that happen when using explicit techniques that can influence responses” (BitBrain). The IAT is already commonly used by academics and businesses to assess implicit attitudes (BitBrain), and for this to take place in the justice system, state governments, judicial ethics organizations, Congress, and state and local legislatures should “provide regular and routine training programs for court personnel on implicit bias” (Transforming) and consider the ample research that shows discrimination in their system. Still, it’s impractical to screen all decision-makers due to the considerable amount of people involved–but no matter how extensive, work must be done in order to protect the lives of innocent Americans that are being disadvantaged because of the racism that takes place in a system that is supposed to be “believing in the interest of justice or the public good, or such like, and not any view to pleasure or glory”