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Overrepresentation In The Juvenile Justice System

1112 Words5 Pages

There is a belief that Socrates was the first philosopher to predominantly recognize the issue of ethics and moral behavior. Socrates essentially invented a new mechanism of a practical and political focus on ethics. While society evolves into another generation, the questioning of ethics and behavior have grown more complex and difficult to manage. As a result, leadership personnels, such as law enforcement officials, have a fundamental duty to ensure public safety to mankind. With recent controversies with cases of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, etc., hostility has targeted towards all police officers and the criminal justice system for racial profiling and police brutality. Despite the claims of the U.S entering “post-racial …show more content…

Disproportionate minority contact involves the divergent racial representation of racial and ethnical groups of the criminal justice system. A federal mandate addressed states to resolve the issue. “This mandate led to an increase in the information on racial disparities in the juvenile system and efforts to reduce these numbers” (Hartney and Vuong). The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 2002 was created. However, there were no such efforts in the adult justice system. Overrepresentation is frequently used when researching DMC. It refers to a large proportion of a particular group is found at various stages of the justice system then is represented in the general population. An example that is well alive today is judging blacks for most of the crime rate and ignoring the white felony rate. The DMC not only represents the racial and ethnic groups arrested, but also pretrial detention and court processing, prosecution, sentencing, incarceration, capital punishment, probation, and …show more content…

Higher arrest and incarceration rates for African Americans and Latinos are not reflective of increased prevalence of drug use or sales in these communities, but rather of a law enforcement focus on urban areas, on lower-income communities and on communities of color as well as inequitable treatment by the criminal justice system. We [Drug Policy Alliance] believe that the mass criminalization of people of color, particularly young African American men, is as profound a system of racial control as the Jim Crow laws were in this country until the mid-1960s”

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