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Racial Inequality In The Correctional System

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When one examines the racial inequality in the American correctional system you must first understand the historical event of slavery. Many Criminologist has ignored the idea that American history of slavery has any effect on the reason why African Americans make a big portion of the correctional system. The ideal of institutional racism seems foreign and almost seems as a myth to those in corrections or the legal system. That fact remains that institutional racism effect minorities because they are targeted and incarcerated more than their white counterparts. The institutional racism theory believes that racism occurs whenever there are laws, regulations, and bias that have an intentional and unequal impact on racial minorities (Whisner, 2015). Historically institutional racism in the United States has been directed primarily towards nonwhite protestant males that come from different countries. This lead to whites singling out minority groups for differential and unequal treatment wither it comes in social, political and economically. Institutional racism also acknowledge that minorities have been denied equal opportunities in areas such as housing, employment, education, and criminal justice.
African slaves were brought to America as …show more content…

Lynching was a tool used to enforce segregationist ideologies and devalue the lives of African Americans (Feliks Garcia). Many African Americans could not trust the police, judges and politics because of the fear of being sent to jail or killed. There was no justice for African Americans and nobody could protect them from being lynched or beaten. This created a distrust between the legal system and the African American community which can still be seen today. These horrific historical facts created the institutionalize ideology that makes racial disparity so unfair when it comes to African American

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In the later 1800’s and early 1900’s the lynch law was created. The phrase lynch law “…refers to instances in which mobs, not juries, would decide whether people who have been accused of crimes were guilty (Wells). These mobs had the “…right to sentence people and execute them, usually by hanging” (Wells). Between 1882 and 1900 over 3,000 people were and a majority of them were African Americans living in the South. African Americans were lynched for a variety of reasons including prevention of negro domination, engaging in a fight with a white man, not exposing the hiding places of wanted relatives, and all other offenses “…from murders to misdemeanors…”

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ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, M. (2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Rev. ed.). New York, NY: The New Press. Michelle Alexander in her book, "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" argues that law enforcement officials routinely racially profile minorities to deny them socially, politically, and economically as was accustomed in the Jim Crow era.

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On the report of Tiana Mobley, a writer for the White House asserts that, “A lynching is the public killing of an individual who has not received any due process. These executions were often carried out by lawless mobs, though police officers did participate, under the pretext of justice”(“Ida B. Wells Lynch Law in All Its Phases - ). Lynching was an act based on the hate and urge to control the colored people during the 20th century. Lynching always resulted in hanging, rape, and even being burnt alive. From the late 1800’s to the mid 1900’s lynching was mainly done to the black community just to terrorize and unequal them from the world.

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Annotated Bibliography Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: The New Press. Alexander opens up on the history of the criminal justice system, disciplinary crime policy and race in the U.S. detailing the ways in which crime policy and mass incarceration have worked together to continue the reduction and defeat of black Americans.

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It was speculated that people who were angry with blacks saw lynching as a way to relieve tension between the two groups of people. Because of the blatant aversion many people had towards black people, they were subject to many hate crimes. With the levels of violence as high as they where, protection was necessary, and Anti-Lynching laws would have been

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The Johnson v. California 2004 Supreme Court case, questioning a prison’s policy to segregate inmates by race, remonstrated by prison officials stating: “that the practice reduces racially motivated violence” (Racial Segregation in Prison). This exposes a biased stereotype of African-American men, making the assumption that they are easily subject to gang violence; therefore, they are unjustly separated from others based on their race and the presumption they are inherently violent. Within this prison, “When cell assignments are made, the inmates are divided into four general categories: black, white Asian, and other” (Racial Segregation in Prison).

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Is it fair that an African American man is sentenced up to life in prison for possession of drugs when Brock Turner is sentenced to only 14 years, later to be reduced to six months for sexually assaulting an unconscious women. The judiciary system are believed to have a high african american incarceration rate as a result of discrimination. At a presidential debate on Martin Luther King Day, President Barack Obama said that “Blacks and whites are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, and receive very different sentences… for the same crime.” Hillary Clinton said the “disgrace of a criminal-justice system that incarcerates so many more african americans proportionately than whites.”

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In her book, The New Jim Crow Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander who was a civil rights lawyer and legal scholar, reveals many of America’s harsh truths regarding race within the criminal justice system. Though the Jim Crow laws have long been abolished, a new form has surfaced, a contemporary system of racial control through mass incarceration. In this book, mass incarceration not only refers to the criminal justice system, but also a bigger picture, which controls criminals both in and out of prison through laws, rules, policies and customs. The New Jim Crow that Alexander speaks of has redesigned the racial caste system, by putting millions of mainly blacks, as well as Hispanics and some whites, behind bars

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Michelle Alexander, similarly, points out the same truth that African American men are targeted substantially by the criminal justice system due to the long history leading to racial bias and mass incarceration within her text “The New Jim Crow”. Both Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Michelle Alexander’s text exhibit the brutality and social injustice that the African American community experiences, which ultimately expedites the mass incarceration of African American men, reflecting the current flawed prison system in the U.S. The American prison system is flawed in numerous ways as both King and Alexander points out. A significant flaw that was identified is the injustice of specifically targeting African American men for crimes due to the racial stereotypes formed as a result of racial formation. Racial formation is the accumulation of racial identities and categories that are formed, reconstructed, and abrogated throughout history.

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I am interested in mass incarceration due to the fact the USA is a leading county of mass imprisonment. In my opinion, the most important social fact of mass imprisonment is the inequality in penal confinement. This inequality produces tremendous social problem in the USA with extraordinary mass imprisonment rates among racial minorities with no more than a high school education.

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Over the decades, mass incarceration has become an important topic that people want to discuss due to the increasing number of mass incarceration. However, most of the people who are incarceration are people of color. This eventually leads to scholars concluding that there is a relationship between mass incarceration and the legacy of slavery. The reason is that people of color are the individuals who are overrepresented in prison compared to whites. If you think about it, slavery is over and African Americans are no longer mistreated; however, that is not the case as African Americans continue to face oppression from the government and police force.

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Along with African-American/Blacks, the Hispanic population is underrepresented at both the state and federal levels while the Caucasian/White population are underrepresented (Walker, Spohn, & DeLone, 2018). This essay will discuss multiple different races and ethinicities to regard their population make up within the prison system. Although race and ethnicity relate to one another they are different. According to Walker et al. (2018), race is defined as the, “major biological divisions of mankind,” for

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1566 Words | 7 Pages

Further more, between 1985 and 2009, the white male prison population increased by forty one percent and the Black and Asian community grew by an extortionate rate of one hundred and four percent and two hundred and sixty one retrospectively (Home Office 1986; MOJ, 2010). This figures are shocking as it should be in line with the rate of population growth in the UK but it is not; therefore suggesting forms of discrimination are taking place at some or all points of the CJS. There have also been many racial incidents that have taken place in prisons in which many have lead to fatality; the Zahid Mubarek case being infamous and it received huge media attention. Mubarek was a young Asian male in Felthams Young Offenders Unit and was beaten to

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1109 Words | 5 Pages

For years now there has been a lot of controversy involving the looming question: Is the criminal justice system racist? Racism is prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one 's own race is superior. Ever since the Trayvon Martin case of 2012, the justice system has been in a complete downfall including all of the police brutality cases since then also. According to sources, 1 of every 4 African American males born this decade are expected to go to prison in their lifetime. Census Bureau reports that the U.S. is 13 percent percent black, 61 percent white, and 17 percent latino.

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Mahatma Ghandi once said, “You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.” Ghandi believed that even with the wrongs in humanity there is still good in human nature. Despite the negative actions of verbal abuse and non-acceptance that people commit today, we still have the people in the world that make it a better place. We also have people to this day that still discriminate against race even though they have been educated with the issues that come with their actions.

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