Criminal Justice Systems

The US criminal justice system treats different races differently. From policing, to jail,to bail,  to trial, to sentencing, to prison, to post-prison experiences, the disparate impacts of laws and policies on poor people and people of color have been well documented. There are now more men of color in prison, jail, on probation or parole in the U.S. than there were enslaved in 1850. In 2018, Blacks made up 12% of the US adult population but represented 33% of the prison population. Hispanics made up 16% of the adult population, but accounted for 23% of prisoners.

If current trends continue, one in three Black males born in the U.S. in 2001 can expect to be incarcerated in his lifetime, compared to one in six Hispanic males and one in seventeen white males. For Black high school dropouts, the risk of imprisonment is ten times higher than for Blacks who attend college. Black men ages 18 to 19 are 12.7 times more likely to be imprisoned than white men of the same age. The racial disparities apply to women as well. Adult Black females were nearly 2½ times more likely than adult Hispanic females and 5½ times more likely than adult White females to have ever served time in state or federal prison.

A sizable proportion of racial disparities in prison cannot be explained by criminal offending. In its 2018 report to the United Nations, the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy organization, cites three causes of the disparities: the racial impact of laws and policies (for example, broken windows policing or harsh sentences for drug-related crimes that disproportionately affect African-Americans); biased decision making by different actors in the criminal justice system; and structural disadvantages that disproportionately affect communities of color (such as poverty, unemployment and exposure to violence, factors that are associated with higher rates of offending and arrests).

The Sentencing Project argues that these disparities amount to the U.S. operating “two distinct criminal justice systems: one for wealthy people and another for poor people and people of color.” It concludes that through its creation and perpetuation of policies that allow for these racial disparities, the U.S. is violating its citizens’ human right to equal treatment under the law. 

According to journalist Chris Hayes, author of Colony in a Nation, for the wealthy, the criminal justice is concerned with law and functions like a laptop’s operating system “quietly humming in the background.”  But for a poor person of color, the system is concerned only with order and “functions like a computer virus” intruding constantly on people’s lives at the most inconvenient times.

According to Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,these disparities are not by accident, nor a symptom of poverty or poor choices, but rather evidence of a new racial caste system at work. According to Alexander:

"During Black History Month, Americans congratulate themselves for having put an end to discrimination against African American in employment, housing, public benefits, and public accommodations. School children wonder out loud how discrimination could ever have been legal in this great land of ours. Rarely are they told that it is still legal. Many of the forms of discrimination that relegated African Americans to an inferior caste during Jim Crow continue to apply to huge segments of the black population today - provided they are first labeled felons…"

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