Lee Thomas
4/12/2019
Criminal Justice research essay
When visiting the Equal Justice
Initiative museum, I was struck with newspaper articles, letters, and
advertisements. I studied as much as I could with the time that I had. I looked
at the newspaper articles that talked about the riots or outbursts that lead to
one death or more. All of what I saw was alarming, but one major idea that
caught my attention more than the rest were the numbers and videos that were
spread around talking about the injustice of the justice system. I focused on
this more because I can't change anything from the past, many felt guilt but I
wasn't there to stop it so I can only focus on fixing the future. I decided to
do this by researching the incarceration facts between blacks and whites and
comparing the two.
My first site, pewresearch, showed the
numbers of inmates in 2009 and 2016. In 2009 there were 584,800 black inmates,
with 490,000 white inmates. Those numbers have a difference of 94,800 inmates.
In 2016 however there were 486,900 black inmates with 439,800 white inmates,
and with only 7 years the difference between the two decreased from 94,800
inmates to 47,100, which is a big accomplishment. Now keep in mind that these
numbers are all from federal prisons and doesn’t include other facilities not
funded by the federal government. To get a better look at what those numbers
meant in terms of how many prisons there were, I looked to find how many
facilities there were for those who are arrested. What I found was that there
are 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 1,852 juvenile correctional
facilities, 3,163 local jails, and 80 Indian country jails.
I decided to look back at where my
questions came from. The Equal Justice Initiative, or EJI. Looking on their
website I found statistics that opened my eyes a little more than before.
Violent crime rate has fallen 51% since 1991, along with property crime rate
dropping 43%, yet the money put into jails had gone up. In 2010 the spendings
on prisons rose to 81 billion, which doesn’t make sense if less people are
going to jail. Today there are 7 million people who are incarcerated, on
probation, or on parole in the U.S. According to EJI, 13% of America’s
population is black, yet 28% of all arrests are black. I took this information
and looked at what the government statistics said. They said that 67,954 or 37.8%
of inmates were black, while 105,026 or 58.5% of inmates were white.
I decided to look at the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, for more information.
According to them from 1980-2015 the number of incarcerated people has risen
from 500,000 to 2.2 million. 1 in 37 adults, or 2.7% of the adult population,
are under some form of correctional supervision. In 2014, African Americans
made up 2.3 million out of 6.8 million or 34% of those incarcerated. In 2015,
17 million whites admitted to using drugs, while 4 million blacks admitted to
using, yet African Americans are still arrested on drug charges 6 times as much
as whites. In general, African Americans are arrested 5 times more than whites,
and African American women are arrested twice as much as white women, along
with 32% of the total children arrested are African American.
The issue with this topic is the amount of
information that’s available, yet not much of it matches exactly with other
sites. No one wants to admit that the justice system might be slightly corrupt,
or racist, but on the other hand some might try to make it more serious than it
actually is by exaggerating the numbers of incarceration rates. It’s a topic
that needs to be discussed with facts and not opinions of corruption or false
statistics which is hard to come by over the internet.
Sources:
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