Petit Apartheid Essay Examples

Abstract

The United States Criminal Justice System is often viewed as one of the most advanced in the world. Many countries in the world, have in fact modeled their own systems from the one in the US. This does not however mean that the US criminal justice system is perfect and is without any defects. This system has often faced criticism with some claiming that it is plagued by a lot of racial discrimination. This paper looks at one form of discrimination in this system; a form of discrimination that often tends to be hidden does not reveal itself even in many racial discrimination evaluations of the criminal justice system. This n is petit apartheid. The paper will begin by giving a brief overview of the criminal justice system followed by the definition of petit apartheid. The paper will also look at how petit apartheid generates discrimination in the criminal justice system. Finally, the paper will look at petit apartheid from the perspective of one of the course objectives; “the rule of ethics in administration of justice policy”.
Since its inception, the criminal justice system has often been faulted for exhibiting inconsistencies in the process of administering justice. Issues related to racial prejudice and discrimination have often been associated with this system and these are often said to be the main reason for the deficiencies exhibited by system (Neubauer & Fradella, 2013). There is a general agreement that discrimination based on ethnic or racial origin is morally wrong, and that it violates the principle of equality. The criminal justice system sometimes appears to be oblivious to this fact. There seems to be an informal, almost hidden form of racial bias infiltrating almost all the levels of this criminal justice system. This type of racial bias is referred to petit apartheid.
Petit Apartheid appears to be an almost invisible aspect that is not even mentioned when evaluations about racial discrimination in the criminal justice system are done (Milovanovic & Russell-Brown, 2001). Petit Apartheid occurs in a variety of forms. For the most part, petit apartheid relies on some discretional decision making by criminal justice agencies as well as criminal justice agents (Ansell et al., 2008). This apartheid can be constructed from a diverse range of discrimination practices from informal and less covert forms to formal and overt forms. This vice can be perpetuated through postures, gestures and mannerisms (Ansell et al., 2008). These are, in fact, the most hidden and informal forms of petit apartheid. Racial profiling is a formal and overt type of discrimination that may also fall under petit apartheid (Ansell et al., 2008).
It is the existence of such vices that prompts the constant criticism that is often levied on the criminal justice system. Petit Apartheid leads to the generation of discrimination in the criminal justice system. This form of discrimination is systemic. This is why it is often hard to be detected when only a single stage of the criminal justice system is analyzed and when researchers focus only on formal and easily observable decision making points of the criminal justice system (Murphy, 1988). Elements of informal law enforcement actions are ignored when in fact, it such informal decision-making systems that determine the people to be arrested and the people who enter the criminal justice system (Murphy, 1988). However, when these informal systems are analyzed, a systemic discrimination in form of petit apartheid reveals itself and here, it becomes clear that minority races, particularly African Americans are on a consistent basis treated in a manner that is discriminatory when compared to their white counterparts (Murphy, 1988).
This discrimination can be analyzed from the course objective of “the rule of ethics in administration of justice policy. Ethics is supposed to be and ever present feature of the criminal justice system. The absence of ethics in a criminal justice system renders it inefficient and it cannot be entrusted with the maintenance of social order and the effective punishment of those who go against this order (Reichel, 2002). Inadvertently, ethics dictate that each and every persons who is taken through the criminal justice system be treated fairly without any discrimination that is based on race, gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation or any other social categorization (Crew, 1991). Petit Apartheid goes completely against ethics in the administration of justice. The fact that there can exist such a systemic form of discrimination is an indication that the American criminal justice system is not as ethical as it if often thought to be. Clearly something needs to be done, preferably a reconfiguration of the entire system in order to weed out this aspect of petit apartheid.

References

Ansell, A. E., Bejarano, C., Blau, J. R., Bonilla-Silva, E., Brunsma, D. L., Douglas, K. M., & Thompson-Miller, R. (2008). Globalization and America: Race, human rights, and inequality. A. J. Hattery, D. G. Embrick, & E. Smith (Eds.). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Crew, B. K. (1991). Race differences in felony charging and sentencing: Toward an integration of decision-making and negotiation models. Journal of Crime and Justice, 14(1), 99-122.
Maguire, K., & Pastore, A. L. (Eds.). (2001). Sourcebook of criminal justice statistics, 2000. Hindelang Criminal Justice Research Center.
Milovanovic, D., & Russell-Brown, K. (Eds.). (2001). Petit apartheid in the US criminal justice system: The dark figure of racism. Carolina Academic Press.
Murphy, C. E. (1988). Racial Discrimination in the Criminal Justice System. NC Cent. LJ, 17, 171.
Neubauer, D., & Fradella, H. (2013). America's courts and the criminal justice system. Cengage Learning.
Reichel, P. L. (2002). Comparative criminal justice systems: A topical approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.