Title: The Criminal Justice System Is Not Broken, It’s Doing Exactly What It’s Meant To Do - KENNEDY SCHOOL REVIEW
Headings: The Criminal Justice System Is Not Broken, It’s Doing Exactly What It’s Meant To Do
The Criminal Justice System Is Not Broken, It’s Doing Exactly What It’s Meant To Do
Content: Our system is not broken. It does all of that beautifully. Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow (The New Press 2012), revealed the connections between racial oppression and incarceration in a 2011 speech when saying that there are more Black men in prison now than were enslaved in 1850. The statistics: Blacks and Latinos make up 58% of all prisoners yet only 25% of the American population. Despite similar drug usage rates across all communities and races, people of color are more likely to be prosecuted and receive harsher sentences for a drug-related crime. Prosecutorial and jury bias means that 1 in 3 Black men will spend time in prison. In addition, the Sentencing Project in the Criminal Justice Primer found that Blacks serve the same amount of time in federal prison for drug offenses (58.7 months) as Whites serve for violent offenses. A racist criminal justice system purposefully harms communities of color and hurts all Americans. Researchers Christopher Lyons and Becky Pettit found a 21% lower wage return for formerly incarcerated people of color compared to that for formerly incarcerated Whites.