Race and Criminal Justice

Crime and justice Licence: Open Government Licence Summary The publication reports statistical information on the representation of black and minority ethnic groups as suspects, offenders and victims within the criminal justice system and on employees within criminal justice agencies. More from this publisher All datasets from Ministry of Justice. Victims tables Download datafile 'Chapter 3: Victims tables ', Format: Offender characteristics tables Download datafile 'Chapter 6: Offender characteristics tables', Format: Offenders under supervision or in custody tables Download datafile 'Chapter 7: Offenders under supervision or in custody tables ', Format: Practitioners tables Download datafile 'Chapter 9: Police activity tables Download datafile 'Chapter 4: Police activity tables ', Format: Defendants tables Download datafile 'Chapter 5: Defendants tables ', Format: This article is also available for rental through DeepDyve.

Email alerts New issue alert. Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic. Related articles in Web of Science Google Scholar. Citing articles via Web of Science 4. A study of decision-making at the Criminal Cases Review Commission. Engaging with Ethics in International Criminological Research. By Michael Adorjan and Rose Ricciardelli eds. Insights from Qualitative Research in Scotland. Thirty years later in , risk of incarceration was partially dependent on education with 30 percent of college dropouts and roughly 60 percent of high school dropouts going to prison.

Education playing a role in either increasing or decreasing the likelihood of incarceration based upon the education and skill a person possesses. In the United States, racial disparities in the juvenile justice system are partly, but not entirely, due to racial differences in offending; differences in treatment by the justice system also appear to play a role.

A study found that black and Hispanic youths were more likely to be detained at each of the three stages of the juvenile justice system examined police detention, court intake detention, and preliminary hearing detention , even after controlling for other factors such as offense seriousness.

Black and Latino juvenile offenders are also vastly more likely to be tried as adults by local prosecutors throughout the US, and are generally likelier to be given harsher, longer sentences by the judges presiding over their trials. These numbers represent a clear racial disparity in sentencing, particularly so, given the fact that during this period New Jersey was only Black teens are commonly over-estimated in age by an average of 4.

This tendency to round black teens up to adults is detailed in a study by the American Psychological Association entitled: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children". Immigrants to the United States commit fewer crimes than native-born citizens.

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The belief that a third of all federal prisoners are illegal immigrants is inaccurate, as government authorities do not categorize all inmates by immigration status. Over the past 70 years, researching the impact that racial identity has on sentencing outcomes has been at the forefront of criminology. But, many studies contradict each other. Some studies found that minorities receive harsher sentences than whites, while others found that minorities received lighter punishments.

Numerous studies have been conducted to examine whether race is associated with sentence length or severity.

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An early study by Joan Petersilia found that in California, Michigan, and Texas, Hispanics and blacks tended to receive harsher sentences than whites convicted of comparable crimes and with similar criminal records. However, when the researchers examined base offenses instead, the disparity was reversed. Sentencing Commission data found that blacks received the longest sentences of any ethnicity within each gender group specifically, their sentence lengths were on average 91 months for men and 36 months for women. A study focusing primarily on black and white men in Georgia uncovered that, on average, black men received sentences that were 4.

A study published by Roland G. The study looked at 1, police shootings between and in 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and California. The study found that black and white suspects were equally likely to be armed and officers were more likely to fire their weapons before being attacked when the suspects were white. For shootings in Houston , the study looked at incidents in which an officer does not fire but might be expected to.

They concluded that officers were about 20 percent less likely to shoot black suspects. They found that there was no racial bias in the likelihood of being killed or injured after being stopped. A database collected by The Guardian concluded that people in were killed by the police. The rate of fatal police shootings per million was The database showed by total, Whites were killed by police more than any other race or ethnicity.

Police behavior depends on the social dynamics of a scenario in a police to citizen interaction. A study found that people of different races are treated differently by police officers throughout the time of their interaction.

The outcomes of the study showed that Black and Latino suspects have more force applied to them early on in the police to citizen interaction, while White citizens receive more violent force as the interaction progresses. A study involving computer-based simulations of a police encounter in which one has to decide whether to shoot or not found a greater likelihood to shoot Black targets instead of Whites when the participants were undergraduate students. The same simulation used with police shows the target race affects the police reaction in some ways but they do not generally show a biased pattern of shooting.

A majority of police officers' see "ambiguous behavior as more violent when the actor is Black rather than White. The study concluded that unarmed white suspects were three times more likely to be shot than unarmed black suspects. The study found that "the participants were experiencing a greater threat response when faced with African Americans instead of white or Hispanic suspects" but were still "significantly slower to shoot armed black suspects than armed white suspects, and significantly less likely to mistakenly shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects.

A analysis of reports from major metropolitan departments found officers fired more shots at white suspects than at black suspects, possibly because of "public sentiment concerning treatment of blacks. A study that considered 34, federal offenders took into account the race, risk assessment, and future arrests of all participating members of the sample. Though the use of the Post Conviction Risk Assessment PCRA , which proved to be highly accurate in predicting whether or not whites and blacks would return to prison after being released, showed that recidivism correlates less with race and more with criminal history.

Other studies suggest that recidivism rates as related to race vary based on state. For example, the Alabama Department of Corrections performed a study where they tracked releases for 3 years. The Florida Department of Corrections performed a similar study; they tracked releases for 5 years. There are two main studies that analyze the issue of habitual offenders in regards to race. Published in and , both studies focused on habitual offenders in the state of Florida. Crawford's studies found that black defendants in Florida were significantly more likely to be sentenced as habitual offenders than were whites, and that this effect was significantly larger for drug offenses and property crimes of which whites are often the victims.

Examining both individual level and county level variables, a new study from updated and evaluated Crawford's work. It affirmed that sentencing policies are becoming harsher, and habitual offender statutes are currently just another tool that lawmakers use to incarcerate minorities at a higher rate than their white counterparts. The study concluded that habitual offender statutes can only continue to be used if they are used in a way that completely disregards race and is unbiased.

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Blacks had a higher chance of going to prison especially those who had dropped out of high school. Failure to achieve literacy reading at " grade level " by the third or fourth grade makes the likelihood of future incarceration twenty times more likely than other students.

Some states use this measurement to predict how much prison space they will require in the future.

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It appears to be a poverty issue rather than a race issue. According to Dorothy Roberts the current prison system serves as a punitive system in which mass incarceration has become the response to problems in society. Field studies regarding prison conditions describe behavioral changes produced by prolonged incarceration, and conclude that imprisonment undermines the social life of inmates by exacerbating criminality or impairing their capacity for normal social interaction. Roberts further argues this racial disparity in imprisonment, particularly with African Americans, subjects them to political subordination by destroying their positive connection with society.



Crime in poorer urban neighborhoods is linked to increased rates of mass incarceration, as job opportunities decline and people turn to crime for survival. Data from the Washington State Department of Corrections and Employment Insurance records show how "the wages of black ex-inmates grow about 21 percent more slowly each quarter after release than the wages of white ex-inmates". In the aggregate, these obstacles make it difficult for released inmates to transition to society successfully, which, in turn, makes it difficult for these communities to achieve social stability.

Black ex-inmates earn 10 percent less than white ex-inmates post incarceration on average. Problems resulting from mass incarceration extend beyond economic and political aspects to reach community lives as well. According to the U. A study by Bresler and Lewis shows how incarcerated African American women were more likely to have been raised in a single female headed household while incarcerated white women were more likely to be raised in a two parent household. The "increase incarceration of black men and the sex ratio imbalance it induces shape the behavior of young black women".

Race and the Criminal Justice System | Equal Justice Initiative

Education, fertility, and employment for black women are affected due to increased mass incarceration. Black women's employment rates were increased, shown in Mechoulan's data, due to increased education. Higher rates of black male incarceration lowered the odds of nonmarital teenage motherhood and black women's ability to get an educational degree, thus resulting in early employment.

Furthermore, this system can disintegrate familial life and structure. Black and Latino youth are more likely to be incarcerated after coming in contact with the American juvenile justice system. Rios argues that these institutions, which are traditionally set up to protect the youth, contribute to mass incarceration by mimicking the criminal justice system. From a different perspective, parents in prison face further moral and emotional dilemmas because they are separated from their children. Both black and white women face difficulty with where to place their children while incarcerated and how to maintain contact with them.

Having parents in prison can have adverse psychological effects as children are deprived of parental guidance, emotional support, and financial help. Societal influences, such as low education among African American men, can also lead to higher rates of incarceration. Imprisonment has become "disproportionately widespread among low-education black men" in which the penal system has evolved to be a "new feature of American race and class inequality". These factors all impact released prisoners who try to reintegrate into society.

According to a national study, within three years of release, almost 7 in 10 will have been rearrested. Many released prisoners have difficulty transitioning back into societies and communities from state and federal prisons because the social environment of peers, family, community, and state level policies all impact prison reentry; the process of leaving prison or jail and returning to society.

Men eventually released from prison will most likely return to their same communities, putting additional strain on already scarce resources as they attempt to garner the assistance they need to successfully reenter society. They also tend to come from disadvantaged communities as well and due to the lack of resources, these same men will continue along this perpetuating cycle. A major challenge for prisoners re-entering society is obtaining employment, especially for individuals with a felony on their record. A study utilizing U.

Census occupational data in New Jersey and Minnesota in found that "individuals with felon status would have been disqualified from approximately one out of every 6. From the viewpoint of employers, the racial stereotypes will be confirmed and encourage discrimination in the hiring process. There have been minor adjustments to reduce the incarceration rate in the United States on the state level. Some of these efforts include introducing Proposition 47 in , which reclassified specific property and drug crimes, and the Rockefeller drug laws in , which pressed extreme minimum sentences for minor drug offenses.

According to The Sentencing Project , there can be other alterations made to lower the incarceration rate. Some changes include reducing the length of some sentences, making resources such as treatment for substance abuse available to all and investing in organizations that promote strong youth development. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Race and crime in the United States.