Racism in the US Crimminal Justice System

Racism is definitely a very wide subject, and we will look into just one of its aspects: racism as an element of the US criminal justice system.

1. What were the major events, processes, and ideas in the history of racism in the U.S. Criminal Justice System?

One of the most important ideas related to racism in the history of the US justice system development was separate punishment for the colored and for the white. It often happened so, that as a result of it, colored prisoners, and particularly, white, had to do harder work for, sometimes even for commercial companies, which did not want to pay for the labor of hired workers and desired to save their money in such a way.

In the end of the XX century many researches appeared, in the field of the US justice system. Those researches proved very obviously that the number of death sentences varied a lot dependent upon the crimminal/victim couple. Precisely, the likelihood of death sentence was the highest in case an afro-American crimminal killed a white victim. If the victim was black as well as the crimminal, the likelihood of death sentence would fall substantially.

In the 1970s it was widely debated whether or not penalty was more effective when struggling against crimminal behavior. And many states began practicing the approach of education and rehabilitation instead of punishment in the prisons.

One of the most recent events in the history of racism in the US justice system development was definitely adopting so called three strike law, as a part of the "war on drugs".

2. What have been the consequences of the war on drugs?

Unfortunately among the results of the "war" were such, which had to do with racism. In particular, it turned out that the adoption of the "three strikes' law" led to increasing of the number of black prisoners, and, as a result, an increased need for prisons nationwide. The law meant that after the third conviction the prisoner would automatically obtain a life imprisonment. This led to numerous protests of civil rights defenders, who argued that this law was discriminating afro-Americans, who had much higher chances of obtaining three convictions than white people. It was also widely discussed, that the money spent on building the prisons could be much better spent on educating and rehabilitating prisoners and potential prisoners.