According to official statistics, there are some significant ethnic differences in the likelihood of being involved in the criminal justice system. Black people, and to a lesser extent Asians are over represented in the sample. For example black people make up just 12.8% of the population, but 11% of the prison population and Asians make up 4.7% of the population, but 6% of the prison population. By contrast, white people are under-represented at all stages of the criminal justice process. The Ministry of Justice states that members of the black communities are seven times more likely than white people to be stopped and searched , three and a half times more likely to be arrested, and five times more like to be sent to prison.
The social and economic disparities in criminal justice have faces and many are that of color. African Americans are more likely than others to have social histories that include poverty, exposure to neighborhood violence, and exposure to crime-prone role models. For instance, African American children with no prior admissions to the juvenile justice system were six times more likely to be incarcerated in a public facility that Caucasian children with the same background that were charged with the same offense. A major study sponsored by the Department of Justice in the early 1980’s noted that juvenile justice system processing appears to be counterproductive, placing minority children at a disproportionally greater risk of subsequent incarceration (Fessenden,
Even though all of these strains have an influence on the racial differences in crime, I believe that the community contributes a lot to these differences. By observing at a community, one can derive that a community branches out to numerous types of strain. According to the text, African Americans show a disproportionate number of residents who occupy areas where there are higher rates of violence and economical disadvantages. These disadvantaged neighborhoods usually lack good public schools, job opportunities, and more often promote criminal behavior. With the lack of job opportunities in a poverty infused area, one might succumb to criminal
Such an approach in this case would seek to understand the attitudes of ethnic minorities towards the police through methods such as semi-structured or unstructured interviews. Unstructured interviews are informal sessions with the interviewer asking open ended questions, in this case about attitudes to the police. The idea is that respondents are free to answer in depth. However a potential problem here is that researchers could ask leading questions or put across an anti police bias, which might encourage the respondents to exaggerate their experiences. A qualitative approach ought to collect data that are high in validity.
Whites began to lynch blacks due to the belief that they were the superior race. In the years between 1882 and 1968, as many as 3,440 blacks were lynched, including men, women, and children. Some whites saw lynchings as offensive, but they supported them in order to keep order among the blacks. Whites believed that if blacks were not in constant fear, they would rebel. The belief of stereotypes played into the lynchings a significant amount.
Stuart Hall argued in his writing of ‘Policing the Crisis (1978) where he dealt with the stereotypical image of a black youth that was presented by the media with their uneven amount of attention which they paid to certain varieties of crime. The media however tend to radicalise, dramatic and decontextualised crime, such as presenting the riots in the 1980’s as tremendously ‘black riots’ (Campbell, 1993; Gilroy, 1987), not to reject the major involvement of young blacks being the offenders of certain crimes, and not labelling the criminalisation (Keith 1993). Such as the vast array of evidence that the victims of crime are committed by black offenders which are usually living in the same area (Burney, 1990). This should not be seen as ‘black on black crime’ as the media mostly describes it to be but should be seen as neighbour on neighbour, youth on youth and poor on poor. Youth crime is normally seen as something they usually will get bored of and grow out of where they normally stop as they grow up and eventually starts to build a family of their own and settling down.
If the only reason to pull someone over depends on his or her race, this causes a discriminatory impact. Police departments begun to review data on stops and change police officers behaviors, arguments and attitudes towards the leading of stereotype based discriminatory treatment. (Racial profiling, 2012) This researcher frowns much upon racial profiling but with surveys conducted every day on who is likely to commit a crime, and what age, and what sex, and what minority group then people tend to lean towards these surveys proving that race is a huge part of crime involvement. In conclusion, criminal profiling works as an investigative tool to help solve crimes. Criminal profiling has come a long way and still needs a lot of improvement.
Examples of Disparity in Law Enforcement A study was conducted by a private nonprofit company called the Rand Corporation and they discovered that blacks and Hispanics were more likely to be searched than whites when stopped by a police officer within the city of New York; however they did not determine it to be racial profiling. This nonprofit group looked at not only who was stopped (what race) but also the reason for the stops which was the reason to lead to their decision (Baker, 2007). The bigger issue is the reason for stopping people on the streets and performing what are known as
Racism is very apparent in our criminal justice system as well. Drug laws, prison sentences, and police contact disproportionately affect African-Americans in a negative way. According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report of 2009, the percentage of arrestees in metropolitan areas of African-American race was 24.2% with Whites making up74.4% and the remaining made up of Pacific Islander, Asian, Alaskan American Native, or Native American. This shows a disproportionate rate of offending among African-Americans seeing as according to 2009 U.S. Census data they only make up 13.6% of the United States population. Why are the rates disproportionate?
By doing so the school district, whether unintentional or not, alienated qualified teachers of other races. This includes the majority race of the students, in favor of white teachers. One major example of institutional racism is in our legal system. According to the FBI Homicide Table 3, in 2010 there were 4,849 white offenders convicted of murder and 5,770 black offenders convicted of murder. Considering African Americans make up only 13.1% of the American population, these numbers are astonishing.