Research Paper on "Racism in the Criminal Justice System"

Research Paper 4 pages (1239 words) Sources: 4 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Racism, a term which is defined as the infliction of an obviously unequal consideration which is motivated by the strong desire to dominate on the basis of race alone is noted by several scholars to be rife in the criminal justice system. In this paper we explore this issue with focus on a supervisory issue impacting the criminal justice system with regards to racism. Make sure you include ethical issues found within the criminal justice system.

Elements of racism in the judicial system

The persisting element of racism in the American social system has raised several issues in regard to racial injustice that is being witnessed within the nation's judicial system (Tonry, 1995; Hacker,1992). There is a major source of inquiry within the context of criminology in regard to the investigation if racial status indeed influences the nation's administration of justice. A debate has been raging on the issue of race and the extent to which it serves as an illegal characteristic that can be used to disproportionately subject minorities to sanctions that more stringent in nature .On the contrary, a relatively few number of studies have been carried out in order to explore if Whites and African-Americans perceive that the judicial justice system has elements of racism within it. As noted by Hagan and Albonetti (1982), there is a need for the actual and perceived racial discrimination within the judicial system to be accorded separate studies. This is due to the fact that the studying of the perceptions of racial injustices has conceptual/theoretical implications. This implies that a general lack of the racial divisions would somehow lend a lot of support for the consensus views of the criminal justice while the proposition or even finding that there is a difference between the races in regard to the process of judging of the level fairness of the existing criminal justice system would ultimately support the proposed conflict theory.

The rates of incarceration in deferral prisons have been noted by Nicholson-Crotty and Meie (2003) to have tripled since the year 1975.This growth unfortunately was accompanied by a corresponding increase in the level of racial imbalance. The imbalance which has since seen black Americans constituting close to 50% of all the new admissions as noted by Blumstein and Beck (1999). The racial disproportion has therefore raised serious concerns regarding equity. However, regardless of the subject of race, the large number of prisoners makes the U.S. criminal justice system at the federal level to be of great importance in regard to policy issues. Over the last 25 years, the U.S. federal government has adopted a policy of racial equality in a subject which previously was a domain of the local and state governments.

The national policy has continuously generated a rapidly growing population in their federal penitentiaries which has also seen a massive relocation of the funds towards the federal criminal justice system. It is worth noting that despite the importance of the U.S. criminal policy, several political scientists have been very quiet on the issue. Quite a number of quantitative studies have unearthed evidence to suggest that there is often a political interference on the national criminal justice systems' output. These models however, fail to sufficiently include the necessary controls as noted by Davey (1998).The rest of the works have a deep focus on the police as well as the local law enforcement agencies. Even though they are enlightening, this category of literature has been mainly concerned with issues of compliance while offering generalized explanations for the observed punitiveness of the national criminal justice system as noted by Lipski (1980).Most of the literature is deeply focused on the elements of criminal justice at a mere state level and not at the… READ MORE

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