Throughout American history, minorities have always been at a disadvantage compared to white people, and one of the biggest disparities is within our criminal justice system. People of color are much more likely to enter our justice system than the rest of the American population. Everyone realizes there is a disparity in our system, so policymakers and researchers are working to figure out what is causing the disparities and what we can do to address it. In this blog, I am gonna give a general overview of the disparities in our justice system by addressing data from multiple aspects of our system, as well as looking at how our country is looking to address these disparities.
Contact with law enforcement, particularly at traffic stops, is the most common interaction everyday citizens have with the criminal legal system. Police stops and search decisions constantly suffer from persistent racial bias. According to a large scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0858-1.pdf), Black drivers are less likely to be stopped by an officer after sunset, when it is more difficult to determine a drivers race. This suggests bias in stop decisions. Also, by examining that rate at which stopped drivers were searched and turned up contraband, it was found that the bar for searching Hispanic and Black drivers was much lower than the bar for searching a White drivers vehicle. There are a good amount of states that have laws requiring a collection of data when a person is stopped by law enforcement. The purpose of these laws are too prevent racial profiling. A collection of demographic data is useful to use as a means of ensuring compliance with the law. The amount and kind of data varies by state, but most at minimum require the collection of data such as race, color, ethnicity, minority group or state of residence, age, and gender.
Incarceration statistics help show the major disparities in our criminal justice system. If a person is incarcerated, it means they are confined in a jail or prison. Significant ethnic and racial disparities can clearly be seen in both prisons and jails. According to the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge Website (https://safetyandjusticechallenge.org/the-problem/), while Black and Latino people make 30% of the US population, they account for 51% of the jail population. Black Americans are incarcerated across the United States at significantly higher rates than White American’s. To have a clearer sense of the racial makeup of who is incarcerated throughout our country, some systems developed data dashboards to provide information on their jail populations. In Allegheny County, Pa., for instance, the Jail Date Dashboard (https://www.alleghenycountyanalytics.us/index.php/2021/03/04/allegheny-county-jail-population-management-dashboards-2/) is publicly available and provides information on who is incarcerated in the jail. The dashboard provides a look at the race, gender and age of the jail population. According to the dashboard, on average from January 2019 – November 2021, 65% of people in the jail were Black.
Dashboards may also be established by the individual state, though these usually look back over a specified time, rather than providing a somewhat live look at the jail population. Colorado passed a law in 2019 (https://cdpsdocs.state.co.us/ors/Data/Data_Instruments/HB1297/2019a_1297_signed.pdf) requiring county jails to collect data and report it to the state Division of Criminal Justice. The data is compiled in a publicly available Jail Data Dashboard. The dashboard includes information on the racial and ethnic makeup of jail populations in the state. In the second quarter of 2021, 88% of people incarcerated in jails in the state were white, 16% were Black, 2% were Native American and 1% were classified as “other race.” In the same quarter, ethnicity data for incarcerated people showed 67% were non-Hispanic, 33% were Hispanic and 9% were classified with “unknown ethnicity.”
Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections has an online dashboard (https://dashboard.cor.pa.gov/us-pa) providing similar information for the state prison population. The dashboard shows Black people make up 12% of the state’s overall population but 44% of the population in state correctional institutions, while white people make up 74% of the state population and 45% of the state prison population. While dashboards themselves don’t reduce disparities, they help create a clearer understanding of them.
Racial and ethnic disparities can also be seen in the sentencing of people following a criminal conviction. The use of sentencing enhancements and federal drug sentencing both provide examples of the disparities in sentencing. Sentencing enhancements in California have been found to be applied disproportionately to people of color and individuals with mental illness according to the state’s Committee on Revision of the Penal Code (http://www.clrc.ca.gov/CRPC.html). More than 92% of the people sentenced for a gang enhancement in the state, for instance, are Black or Hispanic. The state has more than 150 different sentence enhancements and more than 80% of people incarcerated in the state are subject to a sentence enhancement. In response to recommendations from the committee, AB 333 (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB333) was enacted in 2021 to modify the state’s gang enhancement statutes by reducing the list of crimes under which use of the current charge alone creates proof of a “pattern” of criminal gang activity and separates gang allegations from underlying charges at trial.
States are also taking a closer look at racial disparities within criminal justice systems by creating legislative studies or judicial task forces. These bodies examined disparities in the criminal justice system, investigated possible causes and recommended solutions.
In 2018, Vermont legislatively established the state’s Racial Disparities in the Criminal and Juvenile Justice System Advisory Panel (https://ago.vermont.gov/racial-disparities-criminal-juvenile-justice-system-advisory-panel/). The panel submitted its report to the General Assembly in 2019. Part of the report recommended instituting a public complaint process with the state’s Human Rights Commission to address perceived implicit bias across all state government systems. It also recommended training first responders to identify mental health needs, educating all law enforcement officers on bias and racial disparities. Finally, the panel agreed that increased and improved data collection was important to combat racial and ethnic disparities in the justice system. The panel recommended “developing laws and rules that will require data collection that captures high-impact, high-discretion decision points that occur during the judicial processes.”
In conclusion, there has been major disparities in our criminal justice system throughout all of American history, and it still persists to this day, but the American people and policy makers are working very hard every day to solve the disparities in our criminal justice system.
Good post! It was thought-provoking and well-researched. Please include media in your next post. Keep up the good work. – VP