2020: The Bias in the Criminal Justice System
The events of 2014 and the summer of 2020 reinforced the degree to which structural racism tainted all aspects of American life.
This racism is especially clear within the criminal justice system. Bonilla-Silva (2018) notes, “a record number of black people were killed by law enforcement in 2015, more than the deadliest year of lynching in the United States” (p. 34). The anti-Black practices enshrined in American criminology through eugenics, the historically entrenched influence of Hoffman’s “Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro” (1896), and underlying attitudes and ideologies of distrust towards blacks have continued to produce disproportionate arrests, killings, and use of excessive force in African American communities.
The higher number of African American arrests and convictions do not indicate higher crime rates among that population, they instead speak to “how supposedly race-neutral laws can be applied at the discretion of officers and departments to control the black population” (p. 36) Especially when looking at drug-related crimes, white antiracist activist Tim Wise (2018) notes that statistically
White high school students are seven times more likely than blacks to have used cocaine; eight times more likely to have smoked crack; ten times more likely to have used LSD and seven times more likely to have used heroin … What’s more, white youth ages 12-17 are more likely to sell drugs: 34 percent more likely, in fact, than their black counterparts. And it is white youth who are twice as likely to binge drink, and nearly twice as likely as blacks to drive drunk. And white males are twice as likely to bring a weapon to school as are black males. (p. 36, as cited in Bonilla-Silva).
The statistical divergence continues across categories, including criminal sentencing practices. Research indicates that Blacks charged with murder of a white individual have a much higher chance of receiving the death sentence than any other race-on-race equation (Bonilla-Silva, 2018, p. 38). Statistics are similar in cases of rape. African Americans charged with raping a white woman are more likely to be sentenced to death than cases of white-on-white rape (p. 38). Even beyond sentencing disparities, blacks face higher arrest rates than whites:
[F]or virtually every type of crime, African-American criminals are arrested at rates above their commission of the acts. For example, victimization reports indicated that 33 percent of women who were raped said that their attacker was black; however, black rape suspects made up fully 43 percent of those arrested. The disproportionate arrest rate adds to the public perception that rape is a “black crime.” (p. 39).
Across the criminal justice system and in the court of public opinion, Black people are routinely seen as “suspicious” and deemed more likely to commit a crime.
The attitudes from the street cop to the judge to the public reinforce a racist message that keeps America locked in a debilitating cycle of incarceration for people of color. As a result, the United States boasts the largest prison system on the planet, which is shocking considering the prison systems used in China and Russia punish political dissidents. Further, as Hinton (2016) notes, “the United States represents 5 percent of the world’s population but holds 25 percent of its prisoners” (p. 5). African Americans and Latinos make up 59 percent of the United States’ prison inmates. Together they represent roughly 25 percent of its population (p. 5).