Title: Racial Discrimination in the Criminal Justice System - Criminal justice, Criminal Law Essays, Justice
Headings: Racial Discrimination in the Criminal Justice System
Racial Discrimination in the Criminal Justice System
Introduction
Race in the Criminal Justice Systems

Content: Some interesting reports in discrimination in sentencing have been carried out with some supporting the view that the criminal justice systems in some instances have been lenient on convicts from the dominant race or a particular minority race while others have found no tangible evidence for these claims. Claims of racial discrimination in sentencing and convictions have however been supported by the disproportionate number of people of color in the American correctional facilities. Over two million adults are incarcerated in the American prisons with about seventy percent of them being people of color. This is disproportionate when the figure is compared to the total number in the general population. Moreover, research indicates that the rate of crimes among the people of color is roughly the same as the rate in the white population which suggests that the number of incarceration of each race should be fairly proportional to the percentage in the population (Banks, 2004). It is interesting to note that despite the blacks consisting of just over twelve percent of the United States population; almost fifty percent of all adults incarcerated in American prisons are blacks. When the crime rate is considered, reports indicates that over seventy percent of illegal drug users in the United States are whites but more blacks are arrested and convicted of drug related offences. According to Banks, researches in the 1970s and 1980s confirmed that there were cases where the offenders were favored or treated severely by the judicial systems based on their race. This mainly included drug related offences where black drug dealers were treated more severely by the justice systems when compared to the white dealers.