Two men are in college, they are both college athletes at well respected schools. Both of them rape an unconscious drunk girl and are sent to court. One of them receives fifteen years in prison, and one of them receives 3 months at the local jail (Barchenger). One of them is black, and one of them is white, can you tell which is which? Brock Turner, a collegiate swimmer at Stanford University, and Cory Batey, a collegiate Vanderbilt Football Player both committed rape, but their punishment could have not been more different. Outrage from America’s youth used social media to voice their opinions of Brock Turner’s case, raising attention to the injustice. The majority of people would think that two people who had committed the same crime, with the same backgrounds, and same criminal record would receive the same punishment. But, that is not the case, at least when discussing America’s Criminal Justice System. Criminals are still receiving different sentencing lengths based on the sole aspect of their race. This is most evident when talking about white males vs. male minorities, especially African Americans.
But, this is not news. Racial discrimination has been present as long as the criminal justice system has been present. From slavery to Jim Crow Laws to the present day, there is still outrage to the bias that judges/juries/prosecutors hold against the minorities of America. Movements like Black Lives Matter and The Sentencing Project have been putting pressure on lawmakers to take action by documenting violent crimes committed by America’s Police Force, organizing protests, and using social media to bring awareness to the inequality and corruption of America’s so called court system, which is supposedly based on the principle of “all men are created equal”. Racial discrimination in America’s Criminal Justice System still exists because of prosecutor bias, and the solution is to enforce uniform sentencing regardless of race and create programs to prevent mass incarceration.
From the beginning, the American Criminal Justice System has always been used as a tool to suppress minorities. People in power have wrongly used their authority to push their agendas and target African Americans by incarcerating them for unjust causes. Once the Civil War ended, discrimination, especially in the south, flourished. Jim Crow Laws came into effect, creating unjust laws that created a hostile and unfair environment for African Americans. After the war, ex confederate soldiers took jobs as police officers, and judges (Jim Crow Laws). African Americans were arrested without probable cause, and were sentenced much longer sentences compared to white people who committed the same crime, sound familiar? (Jim Crow Laws). They were sentenced to work camps, where they were treated as slaves and most likely died there (Jim Crow Laws). This lasted for 100 years, until African Americans started to rebel and successfully created the Civil Rights Movement.
The rise and success of The Civil Rights Movement made white people feel threatened, especially ones in power. During this movement, COINTELPRO was created, an illegal FBI agency that spied on American citizens, most of which were targeted towards civil rights and anti war activists (Frederique). “They wanted to prevent the rise of a black ‘messiah’ and Martin Luther King Jr. had been amongst the candidates until his assassination in 1968” (Frederique). Because of the cancellation of COINTELPRO, and the rise of success of the civil rights movement, Nixon declared his “War on Drugs”. This movement was supposedly to decrease illegal drug crimes, but it’s true motives had almost nothing to do with limiting drug use. The discrimination in court systems was enforced by the government. They did not investigate people of other races, because they wanted to suppress and marginalize African Americans. White people used the criminal justice system as a way to diminish the threat of African Americans “taking over”. They used unfair practices, and illegal activities to lock them away. The War on Drugs led to a massive increase in incarcerations for nonviolent drug offenses, from 50,000 in 1980 to 400,000 in 1997 (Perry). Who made up most of the arrests? Unsurprisingly, African Americans. This movement affected policies, including lengthening minimum sentences for drugs, and enormously increasing incarceration rates (Perry). This had disproportionately larger effects on African Americans and Latin Americans, than any other group (Perry). African Americans have been targeted and unjustly punished for hundreds of years. People in authoritative positions take advantage of their power and imprison those who threaten their unjust rule.
The opposition might argue that Nixon’s War on Drugs was a true response to the drug epidemic in America, and that COINTELPRO was actually trying to seek out intelligence to prevent more violence from happening to American citizens. Yes, at the time 48% of Americans thought drug use was a serious problem in the states (War on Drugs). Yes, COINTELPRO was not just spying on Civil Rights Movement Groups but also investigating white supremacist groups like the KKK.
But, Nixon’s true agenda was revealed in The Erlichman Tapes were released in 1968. Ehrlichman, Nixon’s Chief Advisor, stated that the War on Drugs was a way to target minorities and incarcerate them (War on Drugs). In the Erlichman tapes, he revealed Nixon’s true motives “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did” (War on Drugs). The War on Drugs was a political strategy for Nixon to win the next election. He criminalized African Americans, and made the public associate them with illegal drugs. COINTELPRO didn’t just investigate threatening groups. They flooded the nation with propaganda designed to criminalize primarily black men, civil rights members, anti war activity, independence movements (Frederique).
The very principle of every man being equal, even after slavery was abolished, has never been true in the country that it was founded in. Instead, our country was founded on the “colonial analogy”. The colonial analogy is an idea that the politics and the economy of African Americans being controlled by the “racially dominant” group is still practiced in today’s society (Staples). As historian Robert Staples writes in his influential and groundbreaking journal “Thus what is “good” or “bad”, “criminal” or “legitimate” behavior is always defined as in terms favorable to the ruling class” and “The American Black man has never known law and order except as an instrument of oppression” (Staples). There were always hidden agendas in America’s Criminal Justice System and its political system. Instead of using these tools as creating a more just society, they were used to create a deeply rooted unjust system that was unfavorable to African Americans, and was designed to lock them away and assert power over them.
The majority of people want criminals to be punished fairly. If two people commit a crime, they should be punished the same. If someone has not committed a crime, they should not be punished. A criminal’s punishment should be proportionate to the crime that they have committed. If there are violent people out in the community, they should be kept away from society. These are common principles that a safe community is built on.
Despite the present efforts, sentencing guidelines have not been effective enough to deter judge and jury bias when sentencing criminals. Blacks are incarcerated five times more than white people (Serrano). Evidence also proves that in same crime cases, black criminals sentences are usually 20% more than white people’s sentences (Board). If two people commit the same crime, they should be charged the same. But, judge and jury bias have a huge part in the fate of criminals, and prosecutors take advantage of this. The case Blakely vs. Washington, establishes that judges and juries must only look at facts of the case (Blakely v. Washington). But, prosecutors will recognize if a judge was instilled before this case, and take advantage of this by charging mandatory sentences, without a possible override by the judge (Ingraham). The facts are there. Sentencing should be across the board, not just case by case, but from state to federal courts. Being African American puts a big target on their back.
Opposition to this might argue that the high rate of African Americans in prison are because of African Americans committing more crime than white people, not because they are specifically targeted.When most people think of Chicago or Ohio, they think of crime ridden streets, filled with impoverished African Americans, and high gun crime. Yes, it is true that African Americans are arrested for being suspected of homicides 52% of them time (Worrall). African Americans were also arrested 38% of the time for murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, and assault (Worrall).
The key words in the research is arrested. Yes, many African Americans are arrested, but not all are incarcerated. Of the 1,900 that are exonerated each year: let go because of false accusations, 47% of them are African Americans (Lopez). This goes to show how our police force target African Americans, automatically associating any type of crime with this particular group, without substantial evidence. The graphic on the right shows how African Americans are wrongfully convicted of each type of crime each year, drug crimes being the most with African Americans being 12 times as likely to be wrongfully convicted ( Lopez). “Exonerations of innocent murder defendants take longer if the defendant black, 14.2 years on average, than if he is white, 11.2 years” (Lopez). Even when they are wrongfully accused, there is much more resistance to be exonerated because of their race. The targeting of African Americans by the criminal justice system has always been around, whether it be rules that were put in place that were designed to be broken, pushed by hidden political agendas, the police force, or secret illegal FBI operations.
Increased incarceration is not the answer. Most jury air on the side of caution and vote to incarcerate criminals who “seem” to be dangerous to the community. In other words, it is easier for the jury to lock up innocent people than to prove their innocence. Contrary to popular believe, locking up more people does not have a significant effect on crime rates. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, Incarceration is not only an expensive way to achieve less public safety but it may actually increase crime by breaking down the social and family bonds that guide individuals away from crime, removing adults who would otherwise nurture children, depriving communities of income, reducing future income potential, and engendering a deep resentment toward the legal system (Study finds Increased Incarceration Rates). States that had above average crime rates, spent 9.5 billion dollars on prisons, and it resulted in only a 2 percent decrease in crime rates (Libaw). The government does not need to be allocating more money to building more prisons, and locking more people up. There are other ways to achieve a decrease in crime rates and to prevent sentencing disparities. In any community, people want to diminish crime, but where people differ is how we do it. Increasing incarceration rates lead to more possibility of wrongful incrimination. Shouldn’t we focus on preventing the crime from even happening rather than focusing on punishing criminals?
First, policies of sentencing created by the US Sentencing Commission need to change. According to Dr. Faulkner, a professor at Virginia Tech who is specialized in constitutional and administrative law and race and public policy, argues that “One of the primary solutions is to get rid of mandatory minimum sentences at both the state and the federal level” (Pollman). According to the American Constitution Society, when it comes to a case involving an African Americans, prosecutors are twice as likely to charge them with minimum sentences than white people (Racial Disparities in Sentencing). The power is not in the judges hands anymore, it’s in the prosecutors. Mandatory minimum sentences were suppose to level the playing field, but it has been used as an unfair tool by prosecutors to increase sentence lengths. Another way to prevent prosecutors from charging unfair sentences is to “blind cases”. Blinding cases means to exclude race from police reports that are then analyzed by the prosecutors. This is already being done in medical research, tech companies, and juries for death penalty cases (Conversation). Every case will have the right to a fair trial once race is out of the picture. Prosecutors will not be able to use the criminals race to their advantage, and this will result in a fairer playing field.
Yes, blind sentencing will not completely eradicate bias. Gender and prior criminal backgrounds plays a large part in deciding sentencing lengths. Compared to men, women are 58 percent less likely to be sentenced to prison (Goulette). Also, men get sentenced to prison an average of 47 days, whereis women get sentenced an average of 19 days (Goulette). But, even with women getting less sentencing, there is still a difference between white women sentence lengths and black women sentence lengths. Black women are four times more likely to be incarcerated than white women (Goulette). There will always be some type of prosecutor bias, that’s how most of them win a case. But, taking race out of the discussion will help instill a fairer court.
Organizations like The Sentencing Project, a non profit organization based in DC, is funding and performing research on sentencing disparities, and lobbying for fairer trials, and crime prevention (Criminal Justice Facts”). Their publications have spread awareness of racial disparities across the country. From their research, they believe that eliminating mandatory minimum sentences, allocating funds to crime prevention and substance abuse treatment, putting money to interventions, and examining practices that lead to racial disparities in the court will help eliminate the racial divide in America’s Criminal Justice System (Criminal Justice Facts”). Their work has changed the conversation and has done important research for this cause.
Policy changes have been introduced to the senate as well to promote crime prevention and deal with mass incarceration. Senator Cory Booker and Richard Blumenthal have introduced the “Reverse Mass Incarceration Act”. It’s purpose is to end mass incarceration in America by allocating funds to states to prevent crime (Eisen). It will give states 20 billion dollars in incentive funds over ten years to cut their crime rate seven percent every three years (Eisen). This bill is designed to reverse the effects of the 1994 Crime Bill, which ultimately increased incarceration rates because it incentivized states to incarcerate even more people (Eisen). With bills like these being introduced, prosecutors’ biases will be limited in court, and African Americans will be less targeted. More government regulation will diminish unfair practices. By focusing on decreasing incarceration rates, there will be less wrongful incarceration of African Americans.
Systemic racism in America’s Court System has always been a part of our history. But, just as the way things from the 1500’s have become outdated, so has this. We have become too complacent as a society and have blissfully ignored the injustices happening right in front of our eyes. As citizens of our ever changing country, we have a responsibility to construct a country that is fair and protects all its citizens, not just the future generations of our founding fathers. We must recognize that there has been discrimination in the criminal justice system from its birth, and that there is still discrimination in the criminal justice system now. Lawmakers need to create policies that make minimum sentencing illegal, and that promote crime prevention, rather than increased incarceration. America has a long ways to go, but change has to start somewhere. Hopefully one day, we will live in a country where criminals like Cory Booker, and Brock Turner will receive the same amount of sentencing.
