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Racial Disparity in Sentencing - Coggle Diagram
Racial Disparity in Sentencing
Is the U.S. moving backwards?
2004 - 9x as many African Americans in prison or jail as on the day the Brown decision was handed down.
2014 - African Americans made up 13% of the U.S. population but 35.8% of all federal and state inmates.
Non-Hispanic whites made up 63% of the total population on but only 33.6% of the state and prison population.
Critics contend that at least some of the over incarceration of racial minorities is the result of racially discriminatory sentencing policies and practices.
2009 - 4,749 of every 100,000 African American men, 1,822 of every Hispanic men, and 708 of every 100,000 white men were incarcerated.
Black and Hispanic offenders sentenced under the federal sentencing guidelines in the U.S. District Courts from 1997-2000 received harsher sentencing than white offenders.
A study done during 2010-2011 revealed that African Americans were more likely than other offenders to receive a sentence of incarceration.
Why are more African Americans and Hispanics making up the majority of the prison population?
African American and Hispanic males face greater odds of incarceration than white males primarily because the commit more serious crimes and have more serious prior criminal records.
Poor defendants are not as likely as middle-or upper-class defendants to have a private attorney or to be released prior to trial.
They are more likely to be subject to facially neutral laws and policies that prescribe more severe sentences or sentence enhancements.
Institutional Discrimination - Judges are biased or have prejudice against racial minorities.
Racial discrimination - the disparities occur in some contexts but not in others.
Historical Statues on Sexual Assault, Virginia Code of 1819, Georgia Penal Code of 1816, Pennsylvania Code of 1700, Kansas Compilation of 1855. Statutes that dictate harsher punishment for African Americans who commit sexual assault than White people.
Reviews of recent research
Found significant evidence of direct impact of race on imprisonment.
Evidence concerning direct racial effects...provide few clues to the circumstances under which race matters.
The combination of race/ethnicity and other legally irrelevant offender characteristics produces greater sentence disparity than race/ethnicity alone.
Racial minorities are sentenced more harshly than whites if they are convicted of less serious crimes or convicted of drug offenses or more serious drug offenses.
Summary
Most researchers acknowledge that it is overly simplistic to ask whether race matters at sentencing. We know that it does.
A number of studies have uncovered evidence of racial discrimination in sentencing, others have found that there are no significant racial differences.
Researchers disagree on racial disparity in sentencing even existing, some say it does exist, others say it does not.
Although flagrant racism in sentencing has been eliminated, equality under the law has not been achieved.