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Endivius -> No race card. (10/14/2011 10:30:09 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: tj444
yeah, being a black man... I remember reading that stats show non-white people get found guilty more often and are sentenced to longer prison terms.
Head over to P&R and look up the death penalty thread. You might learn something. In fact, at both federal and state levels, the majority of the prison populace is white, and in fact, on a ratio of prisoners to populace by race caucasian males still hold the majority accross all but 3 crime catagories. Two of wich are misdimeanors.
http://www.bop.gov/
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/
There is something to be said of minorites facing prison and crime, a paper was done using the Blumstien method.
www.cjcj.org/files/racial_disproportionality.pdf
The abstract :
"Statistics indicate that racial/ethnic minorities, particularly black and Hispanic males,
face a disproportionately high risk of incarceration in the United States. We argue that this is
the most serious issue facing contemporary criminal justice policymakers. This determination is
made by assessing the negative impact that incarceration can have on individuals, their
communities, and the integration of minorities into the nation’s larger social, economic, and
political landscape. Our paper also reviews literature that uses Alfred Blumstein’s method of
calculating the amount of racial disproportionality in prisons that is explained by arrest rates.
This review identifies a number of themes in the research. Two key themes are that a national
figure of explained racial disparity in imprisonment is not generalizable to the states and that
drug offenses consistently have one of the lowest amounts of disproportionality explained by
arrest. The paper concludes by discussing several new opportunities to use Blumstein’s method
in the study of race and justice. A couple of these opportunities include using the Blumstein
method to monitor locations of potential discrimination across the country and guide research
on judicial discrimination in prison sentencing."
Noteably, the paper goes on to argue that prisoners are placed back into society in a position to fail and return to prison because of the impact of incarceration on the communities from wich each individual comes from. And because minorities come from predominantly poorer neighborhoods, a cycle of behavior is created. More importantly, because the Blumstien method was used for the paper, it presents a verry narrow view of the research data in question. While it does make compelling arguments and does point out many consistencies among our class structures, it does have it's flaws. It is still a very interesting read for those who are interested.
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