Talk:Race in the United States criminal justice system

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Race disparity in the death penalty

This is a topic that probably deserves its own article. The paragraph in there now is wholly inadequate, addresses only one study, makes its own conclusions from the study, and does not present any contrary opinions. The Paternoster study at least should be mentioned. Most studies have found little significant difference in the race of the defendant in the pursuing, sentencing, and realization of the death penalty (Phillips, 2008 disagrees), but have found differences in the race of the victims (prosecutors are more likely to seek the death penalty in cases involving a white victim). However, these studies tend to involve little to no information about the non-racial nature of the crime, and those who oppose the conclusion tend to emphatically point out this omission. Kunderscoreuy (talk) 16:16, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

On second thought

This whole article sucks and needs to be completely rewritten. Kunderscoreuy (talk) 16:25, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

I agree. I started to make some changes to the article (some of the assertions made were blatantly false) and eventually gave up. It's also probably the most poorly written article I've come across on wikipedia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.172.236.159 (talk) 00:33, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Third, I also can't think of a worse article I have seen on this website. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.23.187.121 (talk) 21:33, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Fourthed... should be deleted. Some of the beginning is OK-ish (e.g. statistics), but everything after that is horrible and reads like a poorly written blog article. Doesn't belong on Wikipedia. Sanchonx (talk) 04:56, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Actually it struck me, that the title of this article reads like from soviet-bloc encyclopediae. I live here, and believe me, these had to have some "added value" like "imperialism, american" or "class prejudice in western world". To see such a thing on wikipedia made my day, but it's also sad. 23:08, 27 December 2011 (UTC)62.61.58.183 (talk)

Yes. The title may be defective. It postulates that an outcome (many blacks in jail) is caused by racial prejudice. It is not a neutral title. A npov title would be "Justice system in the United States analyzed by race." Okay, it needs to be a bit shorter than that. But presuming an cause from the results is probably WP:SYNTH. At least the title is. It would be okay to have most of the current criticism that is there. Student7 (talk) 01:19, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

What particular problems with the article are the bases of these objections? 71.215.74.243 (talk) 00:04, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Lead

Lead stunk so I rewrote it. Still stinks! Sorry. Hard to make something objective out of subjective title. Student7 (talk) 23:23, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Decision to charge defendants with crimes requiring a mandatory minimum sentence accounts for 90%+ of institutional racism

Prison population "racial disparities ... can be almost entirely explained by disparities in a single prosecutorial decision: whether to file a charge carrying a mandatory minimum sentence" -- Rehavi and Starr (2012) "Racial Disparity in Federal Criminal Charging and Its Sentencing Consequences" Working Paper Series, no. 12-002 (Univ. of Michigan Law & Economics, Empirical Legal Studies Center). 71.215.74.243 (talk) 23:40, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Hang around courtrooms. Generally, first time offenders, unless violent, get off with plea bargaining to something of a lesser nature. Usually several times. Both white and black. So by the time they get to prison, they have several real and several "overlooked" transgressions behind them. In both black-run and white-run cities.

The poor blacks problem (and this is not a middle class black problem!) is "hanging around" on streetcorners where troublemakers are found and find young impressionable people to manipulate. Some whites, too, but just not in the large proportion. Part of this is due to women-led households in black families not able to exert discipline over their teen-aged boys. Once they attain their majority, they are forced to face the music.

For the record, there is a slight statistical bias in sentencing blacks more in black-run cities than in white-run cities. Maybe statistically irrelevant.

But the point here is that they are "doing the crime and therefore doing the time." Student7 (talk) 13:45, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Proposed rename

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Result was move

---

As noted above in #On second thought the title of the article presupposes inequality. Suggest renaming this article to Race in the United States criminal justice system. Like Race and crime in the United States the proposed title would not assume equality or inequality. The use of United States also is parallel to the other closely related article, and is more specific. Zodon (talk) 05:25, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

• Move. More objective. I realize that "Race in the criminal justice system of the United States" is a mouthful, but would prefer the latter. Student7 (talk) 13:18, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

For now moving to shorter name - dealing with the objectivity, but trying to keep it concise. Zodon (talk) 07:46, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Article needs to talk about crime

Currently this article is almost totally lacking in information on crime rates by race. Are any of the differences noted related to unequal treatment by the criminal justice system - no way to know unless the rates of incarceration, etc. are compared to the proportions of crimes committed by people of the various races/ethnicities.

One way to address this would be to merge this article into Race and crime in the United States, since that article duplicates much of what is here. Another way would be to provide a summary of race and crime data here. Zodon (talk) 05:34, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

"racial imbalance in criminal activities" is EXTREMELY biased

I seriously doubt that there is any conclusive source proving a racial imbalance in criminal activities. The people who measured the variance in the decision to charge criminals with crimes requiring a mandatory minimum sentence upon conviction explicitly controlled for criminal histories, as well as age, gender, education, socioeconomic status, and other variables.[1] Accordingly, I added a {{POV}} tag but removed it after commenting out the offending statement, [citation needed] tag and all. Student7? 71.215.84.127 (talk) 22:09, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Note that a cited statement says that "Various studies have shown that, in recent decades, there has been no noticeable disparity in black vs white crime statistics in black-run vs white-controlled cities, say Atlanta vs San Diego. In the largest counties, the rates of conviction for accused blacks was slightly less than the conviction rates for whites, for example.[4]"

Do you think that the (black) police (and justice system) in Atlanta deliberately target blacks for arrest, thus raising the rates? There are a number of realistic factors contributing to incarceration. Among them are single parent (usually single mom) households, poor educational levels, poor role models, low goals, poor self-esteem, etc. etc. But this (eventually) leads minorities to hang out with the wrong people, commit crimes, and (eventually) get arrested.

The reverse challenge in the 21st century is to try to demonstrate bias on the part of the authorities after all bias has nearly been removed by either the state or the federal government, or both, sometimes via the judicial system (which now has black justices as well as black prosecutors). Kind of hard to prove at this point. These same negative factors above also affect whites, and in roughly the same quantity, but there are more whites to start with, so the rates are lower. Rates (but not necessarily quantity) of crimes committed are higher for blacks. Student7 (talk) 12:34, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

It would be easier to approach this from a neutral pov. Find out what is there and actually happening, not starting from what one wants to believe. Student7 (talk) 12:45, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps if someone would like to conquer the rampant bias in this article, one can start by looking at this article: http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/rd_reducingracialdisparity.pdf regarding racial disparity in the criminal justice system. For example, "According to self-report

data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, African Americans constituted 14% of drug users in 2006, only slightly higher than their percentage in the general population. Yet African Americans represented 35% of those arrested in 2006 for drug offenses, 53% of drug convictions, and 45% of drug offenders in prison in 2004 (the most recent year for which prison data are available)." User:cmbarth, 15 May 2012 (PDT) —Preceding undated comment added 01:01, 16 May 2012 (UTC).

But this material does not say that the percentage of users is proportional to the number of offenses for any given group. 1) Rather notoriously, inner city blacks sell drugs in higher proportion to their use of drugs. That is, for every n users among blacks there is a higher percentage of pushers! 2) blacks sell to whites! Is this a surprise? but again, 3) Are black police officers/drug squads in black run cities deliberately arresting, and the black judicial system deliberately incarcerating, blacks? Why? Why would they do this? Student7 (talk) 23:00, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

Plans for Improvement

• Obvious: many citations needed ;-)
• Student7, we see that you've made a lot of the changes here in the past few months. It's great that you're working on the article. Have you considered doing research to see what the scholarly literature says about the material you deleted? Also, if you are actually not aware of the connections between Race and the War on Drugs you may wish to peruse this article on Race and the War on Drugs. Power/crack cocaine sentencing disparities are one particularly well-known example of racist legislation in this area.
• The graphs of victimization by race seem like they would belong more at Race and crime in the United States. Strangely, the latter page seems as though it's currently organized (poorly) around the question "How come Black people commit so many crimes??"
• The "Effect of race on likelihood of conviction" section stands out as woefully inadequate, and seems to focus on an issue (the racial makeup of a city's political class) that is marginal to the issue raised by the section title.

Happy 4th, groupuscule (talk) 17:02, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

Peer review

I liked the added historical timeline because it contextualizes the proceeding information. I think there can be improvement on a couple of wording issues that somewhat affect the readability of the information such as "were made part of" or "made it so that." Overall, the information was comprehensive and covered important topics, figures, and events in history.

MYao (talk) 01:10, 22 October 2015 (UTC)MYao

I think there is a lot of valuable information on this page and I think the timeline is very nice. I think it would be a good idea to label all the time periods as best as possible with what was going on at the time. Like Pre-Civil War, Post-Civil War, which was probably an important defining time. The information was really good with people and topics in general. Romildcp (talk) 03:07, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

I think this article is very readable and offers a comprehensive view of this complex topic. I would suggest adding more in-text citations as you proceed, as well as remedying the current citation problems (places where other users noted that the citation doesn’t support the claim or that a citation is needed). I would also think about maybe adding a photo or illustration to the existing graphics on the page. Overall, great job, and I can’t wait to see where this article ends up! Khanzar (talk) 17:35, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

Hi Gilperkins — Good job on your recent edits! Here are some recommendations for the article. There are a few formatting changes you could make (following the MoS), including changing titles to sentence case instead of the current title case. Along with those, I think each historical point could be further expanded—it's a really great way to organize the information, but needs a bit more detail to place events in context and to explain their significance. I would suggest using details from some additional scholarly sources to expand upon these points, and also to link them (when possible) to main articles. Keep up the good work! Kqzhong (talk) 19:07, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

Hey! I liked the content you have added to the page so far. I have a few recommendations for the article and will send you a more comprehensive list through email. I agree with Kqzhong in that the historical and events affecting racism in American can be expanded upon. I would also make sure in order to keep neutrality that you add more information about each of these topics and the debates with each sub-section. I would also connect these points with further information or main page references so viewers can easily access more information about a specific event or time period. With that, I would also add more blue links in general and scholarly sources. Reillybrooks (talk) 23:34, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

Comparing the US with other countries

One item reads "there are more African American men incarcerated in the U.S. than the total prison populations in India, Argentina, Canada, Lebanon, Japan, Germany, Finland, Israel and England combined."

Problems: In India, nothing ever seems to get to trial, much less resolved. Police corruption is rife. No police report, no trial.

Finland has the population of a medium sized US city. Japan has a society based on honor, quite different from any other country. Their Yakuza (mob) may escape punishment due to shenanigans. Lebanon is tiny and strife ridden. You'd hardly want to live there. Probably not many people in prison in Somalia either! I've no personal knowledge of Argentina. Germany may be appropriate, but has few African-Americans, neither does Canada. These are foolish comparisons. Yes, we have more people (and Afro-Americans) in prison than we would like to have. But making foolish statements trying to exaggerate the situation rather than explain it, are unhelpful, IMO.

You do the crime, you do the time. The question is why Afro-Americans commit a disproportionate amount of crime? Student7 (talk) 02:31, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

War on drugs

The war on drugs was based on people's fears about the Manson Murders of the late 1960s, and other killing sprees that shocked Middle America. If anything, they were hippie (Caucasian) directed than anything. Race played little part. The mob (mostly Caucasian at the time) dealt in drugs. Student7 (talk) 22:39, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Relation to crime

This article seems to include every "blame it on the whiteman" trope, but no mention of crimes committed by race and the effect of that on race in the criminal justice system. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:643:8402:AED3:1E7:5F26:1BFB:1BAF (talk) 06:01, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Asians

In the box on the top right, Asians are not mentioned separately. If they were, the figures would probably show that they are less likely to be imprisoned than whites. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.15.21.214 (talk) 15:28, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

Title Graph :/

Hey everyone, Kobentori. Not really feeling the title graph for this article. For one, it’s incredibly unclear as to what the percentages are, initially confusing the reader into thinking that they add to a total of one hundred. The column “All” is also very unclear as to what it truly represents - is it all other races or the sum of the data in total? The information is not presented in a manner that’s both visually appealing and conducive to a reader’s understanding.

Kobentori (talk) 10:52, 7 December 2019 (UTC)

Merger proposal

I propose to merge Race in the United States criminal justice system into Race and crime in the United States. The two are on the exact same topic. The existence of two pages on the same topic will result in a worse treatment of the topic (doing a disservice to Wikipedia's readers and undermining the efforts of Wikipedia's editors), because efforts will be divided improving two different pages rather than creating one coherent comprehensive article. Snooganssnoogans (talk) 02:18, 13 June 2020 (UTC)

Looking over the sections, I see very little overlap. "Race and crime…" addresses offenses committeed, whereas this article addresses policing, prosecution, punishment, incarceration, and recidivism. Only the last of those could reasonably be pushed into the other article. "Race and crime…" is lengthy, so I don't see a merger as fruitful.--Carwil (talk) 23:22, 28 October 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, thumbs down. The actual race-related categorizations of crime victims and perpetrators and the effects of crime, and uneven law enforcement and uneven efforts to combat crime, on different communities is a very different topic from the operation of the "greater carceral state" as it were—a supposed "justice system" the way the military is under the "Defense Department" rather than the "War Department" now, in a country that switched from racially-conditioned slavery to primarily-racially-conditioned prison labor for its lowest-rung inexpensive workforce, and has never really dealt with or reformed the consequent institutional and systemic biases.

(13th on Netflix is a really great documentary film about this directed by Ava DuVernay, if you have a subscription and 100 minutes to spare; it was released in 2016 but very concisely and neatly explains many of the viewpoints contributing to the 2020 United States racial unrest‎ and many other racial reckonings which have come to a cusp in 2020, which are yet further topics of completely separate notability.) --‿Ꞅtruthious 𝔹andersnatch ͡ |℡| 00:45, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Race in America, sec 1

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 10 January 2024 and 24 April 2024. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Aiden Mclain (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Us3ernam3e.

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