Free Racism In The Criminal Justice System: Incarceration Research Proposal Example

Introduction

Los Angeles was witness to a violent civil disturbance in 1991 as a result of the brutal shellacking of an African American man, Rodney King. Though the prosecution had an extremely damaging piece of evidence in the videotape of the vicious beating, the court acquitted the police officers for the beating and using inordinate force. When the verdict was released, Los Angeles erupted into a tumultuous riot.
Though two of the officers were subsequently found guilty by a Federal court, a number of commentators coming from the African American as well as the other fringe communities proffer that the case is indicative of the difficulties that “people of color” have to overcome in securing relief from the criminal justice system. Simply put, racism seeps through American criminal justice system. This is the main argument posited by criminologist Robert Staples in his article “White Racism, Black Crime, and American Justice (1975), where Staples poses the claim that the American criminal justice is reeking with racist inclinations.
With its emphasis on persons and their motivations, American constitutional precedents will not be able to offer much aid for African American victims of modern day injustice. Racial disparities in the criminal justice system exist not only due to obvious deliberate factoring of race in the equation, but that the racial inequalities are deep seated into the operation of the system itself. The Constitution is silent in addressing the presence of racial imbalances not only in the wider societal framework, but also in the criminal justice system. The law offers no relief for the inordinately high imprisonment and arrest rates for African Americans that is fueled more by racially oriented political propaganda rather than as a result of a growing “crime wave.” This is also indicative of the dominance of the “white” sector in American society (Fellner, 2009, p. 1).
However, discrimination against African Americans can be unplanned or random in nature. These instances can occur at any point in the criminal justice system. For example, probation officials generally prepare sentencing reports preceding the release of the judgment of the court. In turn, the judge uses the reports to craft and render the decision in a particular case. These reports contain several critical points such as employment history, educational level, and previous criminal records.
Regrettably, many African Americans have negative reports-poverty, delinquency and school violence, prior criminal records, and little or no educational attainment-and these are regular features on these reports for African American offenders that stand before the courts. Judges, who traditionally come from the wealthier to the middle classes in society, are unable to empathize with the situation of the person being tried in their courts. This inability can result in the judges meting out severe sentences on the suspect (Constitutional, 2015, p. 1).

Prior literature

Racial intolerance is the ultimate product when the stereotypical character of a criminal is an African American man. The police have an enormous amount of leeway whom to target and where to “source” their targets. One of the components of “racial profiling” is that the police allocate a significant amount of resources to communities with a heavy concentration of “colored people” even though “whites” engage in similar activities, yet the police do not allocate the same amount of resources (Griffith, 2012, p. 19). The American criminal justice system has frequently been characterized as innately intolerant of African Americans; the design and operation of the system is such that the main objective is maintain the superior position of “whites” over other fringe groups in American society. This is the “status quo” that is allegedly being imposed in the United States.
If then the goal of the “status quo” is to preserve the dominant position of the “white” man in society and continue the denigration of the African American sector in the society, then it can be said that the “status quo” has been successfully imposed in American society. The groundwork of the contemporary police state, according to Manning Marable, is geared to perpetuate the violence and criminal activities against the minorities, particularly the African Americans, in society while ensuring that the “whites” will be protected from this threat.
Criminal law is used by the state and the ruling class to secure the capitalist systemthe underclass, the class that must remain oppressed for the triumph of the dominant economic class, will continue to be the object of crime control as the dominant class seeks to perpetuate itself, that is, as long as capitalism exists (p. 86) (Highsmith, 2015, p. 1).
One of the “favored” malefactors for the disproportionate incarceration rates among African Americans in the US criminal justice system is a bigoted justice system, heavy handed counter-narcotics policies, and even incarceration policies itself. The incarceration rates for African Americans are a function of the “black crime” phenomenon. Contending for another position will only serve to exacerbate the estrangement of the African American sector and puts off a real resolution to the problem of African Americans in society (MacDonald, Fellow, 2008, p. 1).
However, it is interesting that there are those that hold that the American criminal justice system is not racially intolerant. William Wilbanks, in his work The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System (1987), purports that the American criminal justice system is unprejudiced (Souryal, 2014, p. 268). In essence, “white” neighborhoods, though laden with the possibility that criminal acts are also committing criminal acts, are traditionally overlooked by the police; in comparison, African American communities are subjected to saturation point policies and even the slightest provocation is clamped down upon.
This leeway in the implementation of the policies results in the “mass incarceration” of African Americans in the system. In the opinion of Ohio State University associate professor for law and author Michelle Alexander, the lynching of era’s past now comes in the forms of “felony charges” and imprisonment; when the lynchings in the past were done by masked individuals, today’s version are committed by police and law enforcement personnel (Griffith, 2012, p. 18).

Research Design and Methodology 

Research must play a key role in establishing the level of racial inequality that is present in a specific jurisdiction. The evidence that can be gathered here can be indicative to a low level of racial disparity in one jurisdiction, while the other data sets gathered in the course of the research can point to the need to adopt policies and programs to facilitate the reduction of the disparity in other jurisdictions. Here, approaches to tracking racial inequalities are offered in a theoretical jurisdiction’s criminal justice structure; however, there is recognition that there will be difficulties in the collection and acquisition of the data and these can hinder the completion of the research steps.
In order to establish the prevalence or absence of racial inequality in a particular jurisdiction, several steps can be taken to achieve this goal. One, the determination whether the number of minorities within the criminal justice system at all levels of the criminal justice structure is unreasonable. Two, evaluate the “decision points” where these asymmetries are seen. Three, establish tenable reasons for the asymmetry identified and the scope that it is associated to public safety goals. Fourth, develop and apply plans to decrease these inequalities, and fifth, oversee the effectiveness of these policies (The Sentencing Project, 2000, p. 21).
Though commentators have posited that racial intolerance is embedded in all components of the criminal justice system, and that others have challenged this holding in that deliberate bigotry is non-existent, the practical data is more complicated. A number of analysts have deduced that, using the disciplines in social science that racial intolerance does operate in a number of stages within the processing stages of the system.
In addition, research has found that rather than a single accumulation of inequalities in the system, the disparities tend to accrue as the individual passes through all components of the system. These “partial” asymmetries will gather over time, resulting in completely divergent results by way of race (American Sociological Society, 2007, p. 3).

Summary


African Americans have been subjected to bigotry on the basis of race, by slavery, isolation and elusion, both in official and unofficial forms, by way of laws and judicial decisions that have strengthened government-sanctioned racial bias. This practice has been practiced from the time of slaves to the movement of the Civil Rights era. At present, “blacks” come from a diverse set of populations, inclusive of Jamaicans, Somalis, Ethiopians, and are unique from African Americans. Nevertheless, even though there is this variegation in terms of nationality, racists single out these sectors solely on the color of the person’s skin.
With regards to victimization, “blacks” and African Americans are unreasonably seen as the suspects as well as victims of brutal crimes. In a 2006 study conducted by Banks, Ross and Eberhardt (1177), the members of this demographic are 7 times more prone to be murdered and twice as likely to be sexually attacked, robbed, or assaulted. There are reports that state that racism is innate in the criminal justice system, though it only occurs at some points in the structure.
In the aftermath of the Rodney King attack, the report of the “Christopher Commission” in 1991 noted that the police officers in the report exercised inordinate use of force, and this wanton disregard for restraint was exacerbated by discrimination and bigotry. A poll conducted in the LAPD evinced the fact that 25 percent of all officers in the department sheltered racial intolerances to members of the minorities. Furthermore, more than 25 percent of the surveyed sample believed that this hostility towards minorities can degenerate into incidents of inordinate use of force.
Withal, there are studies that the conduct of statistical research is not only ineffective, it is also counterproductive. Hetey and Eberhardt oversaw two experiments; one sample lot viewed a video where 25 percent of the photographs were “black” inmates; the other lot was 45 percent of the photographs were African American inmates. The samples were both briefed on California’s “three strikes law” and then were requested to evaluate the law on a 1-10 scale.
The results of the survey were stunning. Of the lot that viewed the video with “less number of blacks,” more than 50 percent of the lot agreed with the law; of the lot with “more number of blacks,” only 28 percent agreed with the proposition. The latter lot viewed the law as extremely harsh compared to the former who believed that the law was lenient.
The relations of race, criminality and efforts at restructuring the criminal justice are on similar planes. Propagandize the fact that “blacks” and African Americans are over monitored or overrepresented in the American prison and penal system, and this will fuel thoughts of criminality, degenerating to fear, and this will significantly alter the impressions of people, giving in to the fear and supporting calls for strident, inordinately vindictive laws. Here, it must be discussed why African Americans are the ones that are impacted the most, whether there is a distinct pathology to this factor. Or one other, or more disturbing claim, is whether the racial stigma system in the United States is stronger than earlier believed (Boiue, 2014, pp. 1-2).

References

American Sociological Association (2007) “Race, ethnicity, and the criminal justice system” Retrieved 24 March 2015 from <http://www.asanet.org/images/press/docs/pdf/ASARaceCrime.pdf
Banks, C. (2013). Chapter 3: racial discrimination in the criminal justice system. Criminal Justice Ethics (pp. 65-85).Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications
Bouie, J (2014) “White people are fine with laws that harm blacks: the futility of fighting criminal justice racism with statistics.” Retrieved 24 March 2015 from <http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/08/racial_bias_in_criminal_justice_whites_don_t_want_to_reform_laws_that_harm.1.html
Constitutional Rights Foundation (2015)“The color of justice.” Retrieved 24 March 2015 from <http://www.crf-usa.org/brown-v-board-50th-anniversary/the-color-of-justice.html
Fellner, J. (2009). Race, drugs, and law enforcement in the United States. Stanford Law and Policy Review
<http://www.hrw.org/news/2009/06/19/race-drugs-and-law-enforcement-united-states#_C._Race,_Crime,
Griffith, N (2012) “Racism in the criminal justice system.” Retrieved 24 March 2015 from <http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1080&context=socssp
Highsmith, G (2015). “Black skin, white justice: race matters in the criminal justice system.” Retrieved 24 March 2015 from <http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1996/1/96.01.10.x.html
MacDonald, H., Fellow. J. (2008). “Is the criminal justice system racist?” Retrieved 24 March 2015 from <http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_2_criminal_justice_system.html
Sentencing Project (2000) “Reducing racial disparity in the criminal justice system: a manual for practitioners and policymakers.” Retrieved 24 March 2015 from <http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/rd_reducingracialdisparity.pdf
Souryal, S. (2014). Ethics in criminal justice: in search of the truth. London: Routledge