The oppression of minorities is not new in the American justice system. Since time immemorial, or at least since Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas, the minorities have no say in whatever happens to them. It is important to note that the African Americans came to the US as slaves, working in the plantations of the whites, who were not even the legitimate owners of the US. The US and the entire North American continent belonged to the Native red Indians, who were either dispossessed or cheated into signing dubious treaties. While no human race is more susceptible to commit a crime than the other is, the number of blacks in American prisons continues to draw criticism over the nature of the criminal justice department. Critics say that the department is the primary tool the whites use to show their superiority over the other races.
It is ironical that while the blacks make about 12.3% of the entire population of the US citizenry, they account for 37% of all the inmates in federal and state penitentiary institutions. "We have more black men in prison than in the colleges." The statement, by then-Senator Barrack Obama, was a tip of the iceberg following a similar report released in 2000 by the Justice Policy. The Justice Policy report claimed that while 791,600 African American males, or under parole, only 603,032 of African American males were in institutions of higher learning (Browning, Miller, & Spruance, 2018). The statistics are indicative of one of two things: either the African Americans are more susceptible to commit crimes compared to their white compatriots, or the justice system has a bias towards the African Americans while the number of incarcerated Americans drops, the number of blacks going to prison is on the rise.
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By the end of 2016, the number of sentenced prisoners in the US stood at 1,458,173, a decrease from the 2009 statistic of 1,553,574. Today, one in every 37 males in the US is either in prison, rehabilitation, or on parole. However, for the black communities, the statistic is grimmer. Studies show that African Americans are five times more likely to undergo incarceration compared to white people. Drug and substance abuse, which is the leading cause for the imprisonment of over 2 million people is the point of the disparity between the blacks and Whites in prison (Wolfers, Leonhardt, & Quealy, 2015). A survey by National Survey on Drug Use and Health conducted in 2015 indicated that while only 4 million African Americans compared to over 17 million Whites reported using a drug throughout the year, the rate at which the blacks faced imprisonment over drug abuse was six times higher than that of the Whites.
Since President Obama took the office of the President of the United States back in 2009, various reforms came into place to address the racial disparities in the prisons department. The Federal Bureau of Prisons, in a report released on Saturday, 23 February 2019, indicated a sharp decline in the discrepancies. Of the 180,218 federal inmates, only 38% of them are blacks (Patricia & Patricia, 2018). The improvement is attributable to the relentless anti-racism campaigns that took the country and the entire world by storm from 2015. The concerted efforts to ensure that justice applies equally to all races are the reason that the statistic is a representative of the American population. The white community stands at 58% while those Whites under incarceration make up 58.3% of the total federal prisoners. While that is an improvement on the part of the federal government, the state governments are yet to replicate the same efforts. The states of New Jersey, Vermont, and Minnesota have a disparity range of 12 to 1 for the incarcerated blacks to whites. The Washington District of Colombia is the only exception with a disparity range of 1 to 1. The low disparity is indicative of the state policies, which are in line with the federal government's policies, probably because they are in the federal government's capital.
The high rate of black men incarcerations contributes to the increased rate of repeat offenders amongst the blacks. It is the ripple effect of the imprisonment of the race. When the black men leave prison, they will most likely go back to jail because of the stigma they face when looking for employment. While a human being must survive, they end up committing other crimes that send them back to prison (Western, Braga, Davis, & Sirois, 2015). With the current rate of minority movements rising and the efforts put in place by the federal government, the percentage of black men in jail is bound to reduce. The Black Lives Matter movement is on the forefront to ensure that the criminal justice department does its job without discrimination of the blacks. Patricia et al. (2018) argue that there is also increased pressure from other similar movements across the globe, as the Yellow Vest movement in France, piling pressure on governments to evaluate their laws and policies concerning other races, especially the minority races. The current shift from the notion that black people are more likely to commit crimes compared to their White counterparts will go a long way in bringing down the number of black men in prison.
References
Browning, S. L., Miller, R. R., & Spruance, L. M. (2018). Criminal incarceration dividing the ties that bind: Black men and their families. In Impacts of incarceration on the African American family (pp. 87-102). Routledge.
Patricia, E., & Patricia, E. C. (2018). The Prison Cage as Home for African American Men. In Impacts of Incarceration on the African American Family (pp. 71-86). Routledge.
Western, B., Braga, A. A., Davis, J., & Sirois, C. (2015). Stress and hardship after prison. American Journal of Sociology , 120 (5), 1512-1547.
Wolfers, J., Leonhardt, D., & Quealy, K. (2015). 1.5 Million Missing Black men. The New York Times , 20 , A1.
