Why do jails and prisons always seem to be overpopulated by minorities or by having the population mainly consisting of males? Is it simply a common mistake that just occurs on its own or does the Criminal Justice System have a sole hand in making jails and prisons into this specified population? As within many facets of our society, the issue of race in the Criminal Justice System is like the elephant in the room. Everybody knows it’s there, but everybody sees and approaches the situation differently. It is believed by many that the Criminal Justice System is responsible solely for the population that is within the walls of our jails and prisons by the system being bias on the gender or ethnicity when sentencing or prosecuting inmates. It has been found that the racial and gender bias presented within the Criminal Justice System; the system basing a person’s charges and sentencings upon the color of a person’s skin or by their gender has created these racial one gender overpopulation within our jails and prisons.

Statistics do not lie, especially when discussing the issues surrounding the Criminal Justice System and their bias against minorities. The U.S. is roughly about five percent of the world’s population, but the U.S. is about twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population. This shows that approximately over two million Americans are in prison or jail. But, appallingly of those incarcerated just under half (forty percent), are African Americans (Lawrence, 2011, p. 4). This disparity may be hard to believe, but it is an unfortunate fact that cannot be denied in our society today. For many it is an unacceptable fact, but for others, just a symptom of reality. According to Lawrence, for every 100,000 black men, 4,777 are behind bars (p. 4). In addition, one out of every three young black men will be incarcerated at some point in his lifetime and one in every ten black men in his thirties will be in prison or jail on any given day (The Sentencing Project, 2012). Don’t think that this is solely just for African Americans though, the American Indian youth is three times as likely as the white youth to end up and be held in a juvenile detention facility (The Sentencing Project, 2012). Hispanic men are even 2.3x as likely as white men to be incarcerated (The Sentencing Project, 2012). Overall more than sixty percent of a prison or jails population is made up from people of color (The Sentencing Project, 2012). 

As you can see from all the statistics provided above that prisons and jails mainly consist of and are made up from the male population. Not even one of the statistics listed above even briefly mentioned anything of the female gender. In 2010 within the number of people per 100,000 people of the certain sex only 126 females were incarcerated compared to the 1,352 males who were incarcerated (Wagner, 2010). This statistic not being the only one to show males being incarcerated a whelming more amount of times than females. 

Today, we are actually starting to see rising numbers in females being incarcerated compared to males, but it still is not at the numbers in which it should be with the amount of crimes committed annually. There are 106,000 females in prison in the United States today (The Sentencing Project, 2012). With going back to the race issue, even females of color are more likely to be incarcerated over that of white females. Black females are twice as likely and Latinas are 1.2x as likely to get incarcerated compared to white females (The Sentencing Project, 2012). Most women within the system who end up being incarcerated usually do have long significant histories of physical and sexual abuse as well as having high rates of HIV and substance abuse problems. Most of the times the arrests dealing within these fields of issues, which these do lead to lesser charges based on the facts not solely being dependent on the gender. 

In dealing with cases that are relying solely on gender, Trueman had made a very arguable case when it came to the females within the system. He broke his point down into two main parts. These two parts being the chivalry thesis vs. the double - deviance theory (Trueman, C.N.). With the chivalry thesis, it deals with treating others with respect but this majority being treated with respect pointing to females. By being chivalrous people see it as being nice to females, what this equalizes to in the Criminal Justice System is judges or prosecutors then giving females lesser charges or no charges at all. Then with the double - deviance theory it states that females are in fact treated harsher by the system because of when a female is committing a crime they are going against the norms that society has set in place for females. The system is also seen as being a male dominated setting so females then see it as being harsher environment. 

Some cases do rely solely on facts but in other cases, being many, they do look at your gender and your race using those two things as the only information they need to sentence and incarcerate you for certain crimes. Drug arrests are deemed as higher in certain racial and minority groups in which you can trace this back to beginning around the time of Reagan’s War on Drugs. This all began in 1982 in which spending to drug law enforcement was dramatically increased.  During this time, the main change seen was dealing with incarceration rates. Between 1985 – 1995 incarceration rates rose in the U.S. eighty-four percent, with half of those being drug related (Bobo and Thompson, 2006, pg. 451). It is not solely about the amount of people incarcerated during this time and so on today instead it is about who exactly was incarcerated. It is here that we see the critical point of race and the drug policies of the War on Drugs. While the incarceration rate for drug offenses had been increasing for many racial groups since the ‘80s, for African Americans, the increased incarceration rate had been especially noticeable (Alexander, 2010, p. 98). The incarceration rate for blacks nearly quadrupled during the ‘80s and by today it is “more than twenty-six times the level it was in 1983” (Alexander, p. 98). Though the incarceration rate also increased for whites during the same time but it was comparatively as little as eight times the rate of 1983 (Alexander, p. 98). In some states over eighty percent of those incarcerated for drug offenses are black and or are that of other minorities. Blacks are incarcerated at a rate “twenty to fifty-seven times” that of the white incarceration rate (Alexander, p. 98). 

According to information from years ago that the FBI had of compiled data showed that whites were accountable for fifty percent of the population selling drugs as blacks were responsible for forty-nine percent of that population with other minorities only being responsible for one percent of that population. As for the population of possessing drugs whites were responsible for sixty-three percent of the population with blacks being responsible for thirty-six percent of that population and other minorities again only being one percent of the population possessing drugs (Langan, Patrick). This information from the FBI is an unreliable source though because they didn’t bother to accompany the people within the Criminal Justice System into this study and data. So, they only used a selected set of components within the data which is unreliable, but many studies when it comes to the Criminal Justice System and their bias against minorities being questioned do resolve this such problem by only using a select population in their statistics to make themselves and the system look better. 

Findings of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (conducted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services), show that in 2010, of those surveyed, 10 percent of African American respondents over age twelve had used illicit drugs within the past month, compared to 8.7 percent of whites and 8.4 percent of Latinos (p. 23). As you can see the percentages in this study do seem to be close to one another. They also state within the statement that it is “of those surveyed,” so you don’t know exactly who they went out asking these questions to and gathering their information or exactly what locations they went to in which this could have a big impact on the answers they received.  

It is true that certain drugs do get one’s self into more trouble than other drugs do, but what if it was the same kind of drug but a person who was white got a lesser charge for it than a black person did for the exact same thing? The drug war has long been criticized for its racial overtones. To many, the drug war has never really been a war on drugs at all, but instead, it is a war on African Americans. This belief is supported in numerous books and articles. Nowhere are the racial overtones of the drug war seen more clearly than when it comes to its policies, especially those concerning cocaine. 

There are two forms of the drug, crack and powder cocaine; receiving vastly different levels of punishment. Regarding crack cocaine, Alexander (2010) writes “crack is pharmacologically almost identical to powder cocaine, but it has been converted into a form that can be vaporized and inhaled for a faster, more intense (though shorter) high using less of the drug making it possible to sell small doses at more affordable prices” (p. 51). So, what this is saying is that this new drug is cheaper so it has become the drug of choice within black communities since many are impoverished. It is shown that white people do use cocaine too but they are just more likely to use the powder form. So, while both blacks and whites use cocaine, one form is receiving harsher sentencing. Before 2010 if an individual was caught with just five grams of crack cocaine it was mandated that they receive a five-year federal sentence. But, an individual with powder cocaine would have had to be caught with five hundred grams to receive the exact same sentence (Mauer, 2004, p.84). 

This is interesting, perhaps convenient to the Criminal Justice System that the form most likely to be used by African Americans is the form that receives serious prison time. The case can be made then that it was not an accident that it is this way. That the link between blacks and crack cocaine was made strong (by the media and politicians) that policy-makers knew just who would be primarily affected by their drug and sentencing policies and did it like this on purpose. 

After the appearance and rise of crack cocaine in the inner cities in the 1980s the “media and politicians seized upon the crack phenomenon. They played it up and its perceived status as a drug largely used by “low income inner city [black] dwellers” (Mauer, 2004, p. 83). Newspapers and magazines also reported that it was an “epidemic,” a plague on society, even the “Issue of the Year,” according to the New York Times in 1986 (Mauer, p. 83). Alexander (2010) notes that articles of the time also largely played up racial stereotypes. Attention quickly shifted to blacks with all the media and so the focus also became inner city violence and punishment rather than rehabilitation. The media clearly made crack cocaine a black, inner city problem while suggesting through words such as “epidemic” and “plague” that it was only a matter of time before the drug’s effects were felt elsewhere. 

Racial Targeting is the targeting of an individual by law enforcement based on “his or her race, ethnicity, nationality or religion.” Racial Targeting deals first hand with the racialization process that law enforcement does, the War on Drugs showed this. The practices and policies of law enforcement have contributed to the racialization process predominantly. The media and the Anti - Drug Abuse Acts (1986, 1988) gave a face to the drug war’s number one enemy: black crack users and sellers, but it was and is law enforcement officers who go out and search and arrest individuals who fit their perception of this. The racial profiling that became justified and popularized under the guise of the drug war played a large role in the racial disparities that have been characterizing the criminal justice system for years. This occurs at all levels of law enforcement, from vehicle stops to arrests. 

Race and ethnicity have become a justifiable cause for suspicion which has resulted in the social phenomenon of “Driving While Black.” The statistics surrounding vehicle stops highlight the vast disparities that exist between races in certain parts of the United States related to who has a higher chance of being pulled over. Not only are black people more likely to be stopped by a police officer, but they are also more likely to have their vehicles searched (Coker, 2003, p. 835). In a study by the Bureau of Justice they found that white drivers were subjected to a vehicle search less than five percent of the time but for black drivers the percentage was over ten percent (Roh & Robinson, 2009, p. 141). 

Alexander (2010) notes that profiling isn’t just about race; but law enforcement officers may not approach an individual based solely on the color of his or her skin. Rather, appearance, age, who an individual is hanging out with, as well as the economic make up of a community and its crime rates act as co-factors in making people of color targets for law enforcement to pull-over, question, and search (Alexander, pp. 131-132). This makes racial profiling even more indefensible because it allows law enforcement officers to deny the fact that they are profiling based on race because they can use other factors as simple as an individual’s location in a high crime area as a convenient excuse to approach them, making the color of their skin then seem insignificant (Alexander, pp. 131-132). Law enforcement officers can also easily find minor offenses to blame their discriminatory actions on, this being such things as an individual not using their turn signal (Alexander, p. 132). 

Racial profiling is just a clear example that race does play a role in the Criminal Justice System. The targeting of individuals because of their skin color is as clear a form of discrimination. The same as not hiring a person because of their race. So, racial profiling in terms is the intentional discrimination based on racial stereotyping. Intentional discrimination is a widely-used tactic by law enforcement officers, whether they openly admit to the practice or not. It is happening every day and everywhere, 3as we can now widely see with social media and news coverage everywhere with racial profiling cases being the main ones to be broadcasted. 

Stereotypes can also have a powerful impact not only on normal, everyday citizens but on those who make the laws and enforce them as well. As was discussed earlier with the racialized frenzy surrounding crack cocaine in the ‘80s, stereotypes that are popularized and fed by the media can take on a life of their own and eventually be seen by many as “truth.” Same as with racism stereotypes, they are important to the current discussion of race and the Criminal Justice System because the occurrence with which they carry – out in our society can have a large impact on the ability of the Criminal Justice System to be colorblind. Widely held stereotypes about African Americans give truth to this argument; that crime has been racialized and that the Criminal Justice System is not colorblind. 

Ending this paper, I have shown that it has been found that racial and gender bias is in fact a dilemma presented within the Criminal Justice System. The system basing a person’s charges and sentencings upon the color of a person’s skin or by their gender has created these racial and one gender disparities. Throughout crimes of drugs with males and females to prison population, trafficking, and racial profiling situations the system has proven to in fact not be colorblind. 
