Summary: High Police Surveillance

Although the justice system is supposed to enforce and prohibit flaws in our country's system there still is much discrimination and injustice towards people of color. The text “Fact Sheet: How Bad is the School-to-Prison Pipeline” shows how the school-to-prison pipeline, which refers to the inequality giving to the students who are doing poorly in school, is one of the many problems affecting the justice system. For example, “Others blame educators, accusing them of pushing out students who score lower on standardized tests in order to improve the school’s overall test scores” by Amurao Carla. This is important because it shows how educators are excluding students who need more help because their test scores are low. Those students are losing

Racial inequality in the American criminal justice system has a strong effect of many realms of society such as the family life, and employment. Education and race seem to be the most decisive factors when deciding who goes to jail and what age cohort has the greatest percentage chance of incarceration. Going to prison no longer affects just the individual who committed the crime. Instead, the family and community left behind gain a new burden by one individual's actions. The United States still has a large disparity between Whites and Blacks and now a growing Hispanic population. This racial disparity in the educational

Although we would like to believe the world is not as racially charged in 2013 as it was in the 1960s, a look in our penal system would show that minorities are still arrested and incarcerated at a higher rate than whites. The United States has experienced a rise in its prison population over the last 40 years and our incarceration rate is nearly 5 times higher than any other country. Even though 13% of the US population are African American males, they make up 38% of the prison population. Contributing factors to these numbers are mandatory minimum sentences, high crime and poverty areas, and lack of rehabilitative resources within our system (p.77-78).

America has the largest justice system in the world. America also has the highest incarceration rate with over 2 million people in prison. African Americans account for approximately 40 percent of those inmates. Why is the incarceration rate so high for young black males? By examining the data and demographics, and the causes and consequences a greater understanding will be gained as to why these disparities exist.

There are large racial disparities in incarceration and related detainments for African Americans. They are more likely to be under the supervision of the Department of Corrections than any other racial or ethnic group (H.West, Sabol, & Greenman, 2010). Institutional racism is believed to be the reason why African Americans, especially males, are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system. On balance, the public believes that discrimination against black people is based on the prejudice of the individual person, correlates to the discrimination built into the nation’s laws and institutions (Pew’s Research Center, 2017). This belief is actually supported through several experimental studies that provide evidence that African Americans are to be seen as more criminal and threatening than others thus more likely to be arrested or even shot (Greenwald, Oakes, & Hoffman, 2003). Racism within the criminal justice system very much exists and is still relevant.

While African American males have been affected the most more than other demographic group within the criminal justice system, other minorities have also been unequally affected. Hispanics only account for 17% of the prison population nationally, even though they are only 12% of the total population in the United States. The statistics for these inequalities for African Americans can be identified

Minority children are exposed to the juvenile justice system at a higher percentage than their white peers. Minority children are over represented at every level of the judicial process. Minority children are more likely to be charged, detained, and confined. The proportion of minorities increases as each level becomes more restrictive. Research also indicates that minority children receive harsher treatment than Caucasian children do. Minority children are more likely to be sentenced and confined for longer durations of time and less likely to be diverted to community based services, alternative sentences, or probation. As a criminal justice professional, entering into a juvenile correctional facility you cannot help but notice that the majority of the cellblocks consist of African American Males. Several questions come to mind. Are black males more prone to criminal behavior or does society have a negative cognitive schema when it pertains to minority youth, especially African American males?

This high incarceration rate has led researches to say that being in prison has become a normal part of a black man’s adulthood, mainly for the ones that lived in poverty in urban neighborhoods. At this time of high incarceration a whole social group was define as criminals because of their race, age and class. Incarceration is usually associated with low incomes, unemployment, and family, restrictions on voting, social rights and recidivism. “High incarceration rates among black and low education men have been traced to similar sources. The slim economic opportunities and turbulent living conditions of young disadvantaged and black men may lead them to crime”(Pettit and Western, 2004, p. 152). If you add this with poor minority groups the social stigma just increases which then can lead to higher scrutiny by police

Incarceration has negative effects on the education of black students. According to the National Association of State Budget Officers, it shows that elementary and high schools receive about 73 percent of their state funding from a discretionary fund, the exact same fund that colleges and universities count on for half of their budgets. However, $9 out of every $10 that support imprisonment come from the same pot of money. With tons of billions of dollars in prison spending annually, states are finding that there is simply less voluntary money available to invest in education, especially in these lean economic times. The school districts that are considered failing schools, which house a majority of minority students, are significantly impacted. Consequently, education systems for black students are designed to continue the school to prison pipeline. These despairing injustices do not end with the education systems, they are also prevalent in the job force.

Undoubtedly, race defines nearly aspect of the criminal justice system, from police profiling/targeting, to crimes charged and sentencing, to rates of conviction and incarceration. Blacks and Latinos make up sixty-three percent of the prison population while only making up a quarter of the total population (Hunter & Wagner, 2011). According to Michelle Alexander (in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, “More black people are in prison or jail, on probation or on parole than were enslaved in 1850”, despite the fact that whites and blacks engage in criminal activities, especially drug offenses, at roughly comparable rates (2010). Historically, there has been a tendency to strip black and brown bodies of their humanity,

Also of course American statistics on law enforcement proves racism is even present in the state itself not just in civil society, which would be bad enough on its own. Most of the information that was presented at this panel I already was aware of this but one thing they brought to my attention was what effect does the mass incarceration have on families and communities? It plays a tremendous role, because raises new forms of bias and racism by further separating people racially. Also, many children are raised in one parent homes because they have a parent currently in the system so what is that teaching them when they don’t have the guidance to not become a statistic because delinquency as being prominent in the social world as well as prisons is contributing to a majority of black youth in inner-city neighborhoods having criminal records. This impacts their school work, record, and community because the environment we are exposed to its easy to take on a mindset and adopt to the things you see such as violence and drug

Due to the history of the United States, there are inherent biases within a myriad of institutions. One of these institutions which have policies which negatively affect minorities is the criminal justice system. There is an overrepresentation of African Americans and Latinos within prisons. Discrimination and prejudice have morphed throughout time to continue to keep individual without power. There are more African American adults in prison or jail, on probation or parole—than were enslaved in 1850 (Alexander. New Jim Crow.) Through the history of this country, this trend has developed to continue the disfranchisement of minorities. Legally it is acceptable to discriminate against criminals and Africans Americans and Latinos are viewed as criminals (Alexander). “Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal” (Alexander). The United States prison population has quintupled in the last 30 years; now having the highest rate of incarceration in the whole world. This is mainly due to the unproportionate incarceration of minorities.

Our justice system advocates a tough on crime perspective. Society has named those who are innocently incarcerated as predatory criminals, giving them that label has made us separate ourselves from them. Most of the “criminals” that are incarcerated are poor black or Hispanic men. This is an example of how much racial disparities exist in mass incarceration. According to Bruce Western, one in three African Americans will be incarcerated at one point in their life. There has always been a stigma in our country toward black men. Society in our country has always seen them as the outsiders, denying them jobs. There is also a link between failure in education and imprisonment. According to Bruce Western, sixty percent of black males that drop out of high school will experience incarceration before they reach thirty-five. Sixty percent is a large number, this is more than half. Prison is designed to keep crime under control, however, those who get thrown into prison are charged with crimes that they don't commit. Black men are often targeted because of the racial bias in our criminal justice system. We see it all the time in movies, in books, on media. The Black Lives Matter Movement started because all this racial bias has been given a platform on social media. Michelle Alexander labels mass incarceration “The New Jim Crow” because of how often or criminal justice system is racist against black men. However, black men are not the only ones being targeted, Hispanics are also being targeted. Tony N. Brown, a professor of sociology at Rice

The United States of America has the largest prison population in the world. The United States incarcerates six hundred ninety-three people per one hundred thousand people and boasts an incarceration rate that is almost five times higher than most other countries (Wagner & Walsh, 2016). The incarceration rate within the U.S. is significantly higher than the incarceration rates of other countries due to the prevalence of institutional racism within the American criminal justice system. While the criminal justice system unjustly targets minority individuals, African Americans and Hispanics are especially targeted (Brennan & Spohn, 2009). African Americans and Hispanics account for a minority of the U.S. population but make up the majority of the U.S. prison population. Despite comprising only 13.6% of the U.S. population (Rastogi, Johnson, Hoeffel, and Drewery, 2011), African Americans account for 37.8% of all prisoners in the U.S. (Inmate Race, 2017). Hispanics are also targeted by the criminal justice system at abnormally high rates. Hispanics make up

“The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison” (Alexander, 2012). The numbers tell the story better than words can: black people are more likely to go to prison than any other race in the United States, shown by the fact that more than 60% of the prison population is composed of people of color (The Sentencing Project, 2016). These statistics can be traced back to several different cause, including the Era of Jim Crow and the War on Drugs, both of which led to higher policing in minority areas.