Race in the United States criminal justice system refers to the unique experiences and disparities in the United States in regard to the policing and prosecuting of various races. There have been different outcomes for different racial groups in convicting and sentencing felons in the United States criminal justice system. Although prior arrests and criminal history is also a factor. Experts and analysts have debated the relative importance of different factors that have led to these disparities.
Academic research indicates that the over-representation of some racial minorities in the criminal justice system can in part be explained by socioeconomic factors, such as poverty, exposure to poor neighborhoods, poor access to public education, poor access to early childhood education, and exposure to harmful chemicals (such as lead) and pollution. Racial housing segregation has also been linked to racial disparities in crime rates, as blacks have historically and to the present been prevented from moving into prosperous low-crime areas through actions of the government (such as redlining) and private actors. Various explanations within criminology have been proposed for racial disparities in crime rates, including conflict theory, strain theory, general strain theory, social disorganization theory, macrostructural opportunity theory, social control theory, and subcultural theory.
Research also indicates that there is extensive racial and ethnic discrimination by police and the judicial system. A substantial academic literature has compared police searches (showing that contraband is found at higher rates in whites who are stopped), bail decisions (showing that whites with the same bail decision as blacks commit more pre-trial violations), and sentencing (showing that blacks are more harshly sentenced by juries and judges than whites when the underlying facts and circumstances of the cases are similar), providing valid causal inferences of racial discrimination. Studies have documented patterns of racial discrimination, as well as patterns of police brutality and disregard for the constitutional rights of African-Americans, by police departments in various American cities, including Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia.
History.
Race has been a factor in the United States criminal justice system since the system's beginnings, as the nation was founded on Native American soil. It continues to be a factor throughout United States history through the present, with organizations such as Black Lives Matter calling for decarceration through divestment from police and prisons and reinvestment in public education and universal health care.
Legal background (1763–1829).
Lynching and Lynch-Law date back to the 1700s when the term was first used by the Scotch-Irish in reference to an act pursued by the Quakers toward Native Americans. The law was originally regulatory, providing regulations regarding how lynching could and could not be carried out. Most crimes of and relating to lynching prior to 1830 were frontier crimes and were considered justifiable due to necessity.
Groups of armed White men, called slave patrols, monitored enslaved African Americans. First established in South Carolina in 1704, the slave patrols' function was to police slaves, especially runaways. Slave owners feared slaves might organize a revolt or rebellion, so state militias were formed to provide a military command structure and discipline within the slave patrols to detect, encounter, and crush any organized slave meetings that might lead to revolt or rebellion.
In the construction of the United States Constitution in 1789, slavery and White supremacy were made part of the justice system, as citizens were defined as free White men.
Antebellum (1830–1860).
Lynch law was renewed with the anti-slavery movement, as several acts of violence towards people of color took place in the early 1830s. In August 1831, Nat Turner led the slave insurrection in Virginia. Turner, an African-American Baptist preacher, believing that the Lord had destined him to free his race, followed through with his plans to conquer Southampton county through the enlistment of other slaves. He did so by traveling from house to house murdering every White person he could find. Due to this act, many innocent slaves were killed by the police.
The court decision in "Dred Scott v. Sandford" made it so that African slaves and their descendants were considered non-citizens, further incorporating racism into the justice system.
Postbellum (1865–).
When slavery was abolished after the Civil War through the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the constitution, violence against African Americans increased tremendously and thousands of African Americans experienced lynching. African American men were routinely rounded up, charged with being unemployed or having changed jobs without the consent of their previous employer (which were both illegal for Blacks in some southern states), and subjected to years of forced hard labor in a system of convict leasing and chain gangs.
During the same time period, unequal treaties towards Native Americans led to a large decrease in Native American land holdings, and Native Americans were forced into reservations.
Latin Americans entering the country were also a target for the penal system during this time.
Reconstruction Period (1865–1877).
The Ku Klux Klan, was founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee as a vigilante organization whose goal was to keep control over freed slaves; It performed acts of lawlessness against negroes and other minorities. This included taking negro prisoners from the custody of officers or breaking into jails to put them to death. Few efforts were made by civil authorities in the South against the Ku Klux Klan.
The Memphis Riots of 1866 took place after many Black men were discharged from the United States Army. The riot broke out when a group of discharged Negro soldiers got into a brawl with a group of Irish police officers in Memphis, Tennessee. Forty-six African Americans and two White people were killed in the riot, and seventy-five people received bullet wounds. At least five African American women were raped by predatory gangs, and the property damage was worth over $100,000.
In 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution overruled the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford by establishing that those born or naturalized in the United States are entitled to equal protection under the law, regardless of race.
"Norris v. Alabama" (1935).
In 1935 the United States Supreme Court overturned convictions of the Scottsboro Boys in "Norris v. Alabama". These were nine African American teenagers who had been previously denied equal protection under the law as stated in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution because African Americans were purposely excluded from their cases' juries.
By stage of the criminal justice process.
Among key findings on the literature is that Whites with the same bail decision as Blacks commit more pre-trial violations and that Blacks are more harshly sentenced by juries and judges than Whites when the underlying facts and circumstances of the cases are similar.
Race and policing.
Studies have documented patterns of racial discrimination, as well as patterns of police brutality and disregard for the constitutional rights of African-Americans, by police departments in various American cities, including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.
Police killings.
A number of studies referencing both the CDC's National Violent Death Reporting System, as well as crowdsourced sources on police killings, have concluded that Black people are more likely to be killed by police than White people, with one 2019 study from the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America" stating that police violence is a leading cause of death for young men of color. At least three quarters of those killed were armed. A database collected by "The Guardian" concluded that 1093 people in 2016 were killed by the police. In total numbers, White people make up the majority of police deaths in the database, but not the highest rate per million. The rate of fatal police shootings per million was 10.13 for Native Americans, 6.66 for Black people, 3.23 for Hispanics; 2.93 for White people and 1.17 for Asians. One study indicates that there is a correlation between measures of structural racism (e.g. residential segregation, differences in incarceration rates, differences in education level, employment rates) and racial discrepancy of police violence, at the state level. Exact estimates vary, but these sources indicate that Black people are at least twice as likely as White people to be killed by police, and are significantly more likely to be unarmed.
Although some studies indicate that Black people are more likely than White people to be victims of police shootings in particular, a 2015 study by Roland G. Fryer, Jr. concluded that nationwide, White people were more likely to be shot by police than Black people in similar situations, while Black and Hispanic people were more likely to experience excessive force, even when compliant and law-abiding. A 2019 paper by Princeton University political scientists disputed the findings by Fryer, saying that if police had a higher threshold for stopping Whites, this might mean that the Whites, Hispanics and Blacks in Fryer's data are not similar. A separate "PNAS" study found that there were no racial disparities in police shootings by White police; the findings of the study were disputed by Princeton University scholars who argued that the study's method and dataset made it impossible for the authors to reach that conclusion. Following the criticism by the Princeton scholars, the authors of the original "PNAS" study corrected their significance statement to read, "As the proportion of White officers in a fatal officer-involved shooting increased, a person fatally shot was not more likely to be of a racial minority." A study by Texas A&amp;M University economists found that White police officers were more likely to use force and guns than Black police, and that White officers were five times as likely to use gun force in predominantly Black neighborhoods. A 2016 study published in the Injury Prevention journal indicated that the racial disparity in police killings may be due primarily to a disparity in how often Black, Native American, and Hispanic people are stopped, as they did not find much racial differences in deaths after being stopped.
A 2014 study involving computer-based simulations of a police encounter found a greater likelihood of undergraduate student participants shooting Black targets over White ones. The study found that a majority of police officers see "ambiguous behavior as more violent when the actor is Black rather than White," but found that in the simulation, police did not generally show a biased pattern of shooting. Another study at Washington State University used realistic police simulators of different scenarios where a police officer might use deadly force. 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." The study concluded that the results could be because officers were more concerned with using deadly force against Black suspects for fear of how it would be perceived. A 2016 study, which reviewed 812 fatalities from on-duty law-enforcement between 2009 and 2012 in 17 different states, concluded that unarmed Black people were 1.57 times more likely to be killed by police than White people.
General use of force.
Police behavior depends on the social dynamics of a scenario in a police to citizen interaction. Within scenarios of a police to citizen interaction, different levels of force can be applied to the citizen. A 2017 study found that people of different races are treated differently by police officers throughout the time of their interaction. 62 White, 42 Black, and 35 Latino use-of-force cases were studied from a medium-to-large-sized urban police department in the United States. 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.
Reports by the Department of Justice have also found that police officers in Baltimore, Maryland, and Ferguson, Missouri, systemically stop, search (in some cases strip-searching) and harass Black residents. A January 2017 report by the DOJ also found that the Chicago Police Department had "unconstitutionally engaged in a pattern of excessive and deadly force". An independent task created by the mayor of Chicago to examine the department concluded that they "have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color." A 2020 "American Political Science Review" study estimated that 39% of uses of force by police