Race and Ethnicity in the Criminal Justice System

There is a tendency to define the American criminal justice system as groundbreaking and one of the foundations of the democratic ideology, channeled to provide justice and equality of what the law can do. Nevertheless, as history tends to show, race and ethnicity have historically been significant determinants in the outcomes within the system. Since unequal arrest rates and unequal access to sentencing are only some examples, it is evident that racial and ethnic subgroups are subjected to inherent inequity in the system that compromises the ideology of equal justice. The influence of race on the justice system is great due to its additional outcomes on policing, sentencing, imprisonment, and social beliefs of people on the justice system.

Racial profiling in policing has been demonstrated to be one of the most apparent impacts of race and culture in criminal justice. Moreover, when the police are compared to White individuals, Black and Hispanic people will have a higher chance of being stopped and searched by the police even after controlling the crime rates (Vomfell and Stewart, 568). Such acts do end up alienating and distrusting the minority communities as well as energizing inequities within law enforcement regimes.

The sentencing process is another way in which inequality is propagated because the race and ethnicity of the found guilty are likely to influence the type of punishment. As one example, the average sentence of Black males, when charged with similar crimes in prison, is 19 percent longer in comparison with the sentences received by White subjects who possess similar violent offenses (Klein et al. 348). Latino offenders are more harshly punished in the case of offenses related to drugs. When almost all crack cocaine was used in the Black neighborhood, the crack versus powder cocaine condemning gap was a sophisticated demonstration of this disparity, with crack cocaine representing almost a third of the imprisoned population.

Mass incarceration is also racially and ethnically constructed by the justice system. The rate of incarceration of Black Americans is nearly five times that of White Americans, and the rate of incarceration of Hispanics is 1.3 times greater (Bigham et al. 2874). It is disproportional incarcerations such as these that contribute to more broad-based social ills and breaks, including family breakage and economic opportunity loss, as well as the poverty and disadvantage cycle. This and other consequences shed light on the discussion that the latent inequalities of the criminal justice system extend far beyond the cases and into the lives of entire communities.

Police, sentencing, and incarceration are intergenerational effects of inequalities between races and ethnic groups, which deprive the civilian confidence in the criminal justice system. A survey conducted by Cox has found that 84 percent of the surveyed Black adults agree that the system unfairly treats them compared to the Whites, whereas 63 percent of the surveyed Hispanic adults and 44 percent of the surveyed White adults do the same (Cox Par. 2). This deprivation of trust does not only guarantee the act of delegitimizing the system by the communities of minorities, but it also obstructs the capacity to develop effective working ties between the police and the local people. The fact that people did not trust the efficacy of the justice system to guarantee that a society is safe and justice is enforced appeals to the massiveness of its suffering.

Ultimately, the implications of ethnicity on measures in a justice system are quite high: policing, sentencing, opposing imprisonment, and general trust. These inequalities show that the system may not be able to inculcate the code of equal impartiality under the law. These inequities can be remedied with policy changes such as bias training of law enforcement, changes in sentencing that eliminate racial disparities, and community-based programs related to restorative justice.