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Race In The Criminal Justice System Essay

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This research paper will provide an overview of the topic of race within the criminal justice system. At first glance this paper seems to be a simple task, but there is much difficulty to study such a broad subject manner. There are numerous amounts of different perspectives from which a discussion on the decision of race within the system could develop. The term race has changed significantly over the course of human history. Early theories of race allocated many social, intellectual, moral, and physical values to the evident differences between groups of people. After the civil war, The Jim Crow laws were enacted all across the South and in the North (Klarman, 2004). From the 17th through early 20th centuries, the study of race was defined …show more content…

Winant (2000), Bartel (1997), Sweet (1997) argued

“by the time of the Columbian encounter [with the peoples of the New World] . . . race, and especially skin color, defined the contours of power relationships. . .. Biological assumptions that were familiar to a nineteenth-century Cuban slave owner would have been recognizable to his fifteenth-century Spanish counterpart” (p. 166).

About a century ago, Italian, Irish, and southern European immigrants and their descendants were considered by many Americans as “non-white” (Ignatiev, 1996). Oxford professor Edward Freeman supported a dominant late 19th-century perspective with the statement, “the best remedy for whatever is amiss in America would be if every Irishman would kill a Negro and be hanged for it” (Tucker, 1996, p. 34). The social status of “whiteness” was eventually conveyed on many of these immigrant groups on the origin of changes in social agreement concerning their assimilatory possible combined with the establishment of a racial identity appropriately distanced from their “blackness.” The history of race speaks directly to the understatement of the different social

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