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The criminal justice system is biased
Some have argued that the criminal justice system is biased against minorities and favors white people. This has been asserted, not just concerning police, but concerning the laws as such.
Is the US criminal justice system a hotbed of institutional racism; or are all treated equally before the law?
That's not much of a clarification. The state brought charges in both instances. Do you mean to say the criminal justice system is biased in favor of the criminal justice system?
Criminal justice always has been biased in favour of those in whom rests most power: financial power; legal power; cultural power.
In Muslim countries, a white Christian man will get discriminate against in the courts, much the same way a black unemployed man will get discriminated against in American courts.
I meant to keep the debate limited to the US as we are more inclined to value equality before the law as an ideal.
Perhaps you'd could give an example of how our legal system is actually designed in a way that works against an unemployed black man as opposed to others.
Is there a line in some state code somewhere that says to hit him hard if he is jobless and black; or do you simply suspect bias on the part of a judge somewhere?
Equality before the law is a valuable ideal -- one I agree with completely -- but in order to implement it effectively, we need to scrutinize how we are currently implementing it. Most jury members are white, and skin colour subconsciously effects bias, as many scientific and legal studies have shown.
Dasgupta N, Greenwald AG. On the malleability of automatic attitudes: Combating automatic prejudice with images of admired and disliked individuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2001;81:800–814. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.81.5.800. [PubMed] [Cross Ref]
Devine PG. Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1989;56:5–18. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.56.1.5. [Cross Ref]
Devine PG, Monteith MJ. Affect, cognition, and stereotyping: Interactive processes in group perception. San Diego, CA: Academic Press; 1993. The role of discrepancy-associated affect in prejudice reduction; pp. 317–344.
Devine PG, Monteith MJ, Zuwerink JR, Elliot AJ. Prejudice with and without compunction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1991;60:817–830. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.60.6.817. [Cross Ref]
Epstein S. Integration of the cognitive and the psychodynamic unconscious. American Psychologist. 1994;49:709–724. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.49.8.709. [PubMed]
Most judges are white; most criminal lawyers are white, and whites collectively receive at a conservative estimate a 10% shorter average sentence compared to black peers, for the same crimes. (Rehavi, M. Marit and Starr, Sonja B., Racial Disparity in Federal Criminal Charging and Its Sentencing Consequences (May 7, 2012). U of Michigan Law & Econ, Empirical Legal Studies Center Paper No. 12-002. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1985377 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1985377))
So yes, a structural bias exists, even if it wasn't engineered to exist.
All of your sources point to individuals holding personal bias (though not simply because of their pigment). So your position is, as you implied at the end, that the biased people implementing the unbiased system leads to disparate outcomes. This is a reasonable theory and one would expect to see statistical evidence that is explained by this and not by something else.
The problem with the '10% shorter average sentence' example is that it does not truly account for the increased sentences ruled against repeat offenders, since each criminal history is unique as is the effect of an individuals criminal history on a given district.
Whether a charge carrying a mandatory minimum is pressed is most often based on the substance of the evidence provided for the crime. I have heard it asserted that black people are more likely to get caught committing drug crimes than are their white counterparts simply as a matter of police ease of access to the inside of a vehicle or pants pocket vs the inside of someones home (homes are where white people tend to deal from). Since drug crimes often carry mandatory mins, and vehicle evidence is easy, this may account for the some of the difference.
To be clear, I think the criminal justice system works better in some places than others. I expect some judges are racists. But I also seek to account for the bias on the part of researchers who find what they expect to find.
With the general nature of the data you presented (tendencies to be biased, or general sentence length differences), how would you propose to solve the apparent issue? What steps can be taken that are not a further miscarriage of justice?
I would say, blind juries where feasible, and where they aren't feasible, make effort to select juries that proportionally represent the race distribution of the country as a whole, particularly in areas where folk of different race or colour are more openly discriminated against.
I would also say create stricter sentencing laws, for instance the legislation of a rule of consistency for judges and prosecutors, whereby yearly reviews of sentences given out are carried out, and any official found to prescribe sentences that show a clear and significant racial bias, be somehow incentivised to be more consistent. How, I'm not quite sure, but I think it would help, at least at the administrative level.
As for cultural biases and natural inborn aversion to the "other", that's a more difficult problem. I would suppose that altering the content of early-years schooling is the most effective means of achieving some level of reduction in subconscious biases. Media, obviously, play a large role in this, as do cultural stereotypes and tropes. These are, for obvious reasons, much harder to change than legal precedents.
In a similar vein (just as an illustration of how difficult psychological biases are to confront in any meaningful way), just look at ostracization as a form of silent bullying. While overt bullying itself is frowned upon and actively challenged in many schooling systems, ostracization is still a terrible problem, and has been shown to have effects that are often far more harmful to an ostracized individual than the overt kind of bullying tends to be. This is so because of the lack of recourse to challenge it. In the same way, subconscious or hidden bias manifests in a structural disadvantage that is hard to eradicate at the source, hence why I suggest at least attempting to challenge it at the institutional level. Like bullying ought to be to ostracization -- where the focus ought to shift from principles of passiveness to stringent non-exclusion and defence of the excluded -- people ought to be taught strict principles concerning not passivity to racism but strict anti-racism.
blind juries where feasible, and where they aren't feasible
Interesting idea. I might be on board, but would have to consider it further.
make effort to select juries that proportionally represent the race distribution of the country as a whole
This is not feasible, nor does it make a lot of sense. The alteration of the jury selection process on a local level to conform to the demographics of the nation in the hopes of altering national level statistics that may or may not represent the local situation is going to lead to a miscarriage of justice. If an Eskimo is on trial, would we ship in some black people and Asian people, leaving the jury mostly white, despite the village population being half white and half Eskimo? I think you see the issue. This is the type of issue that comes from applying broad statistics to individual localities. What if most of the country is perfectly unbiased except for the 4 largest cities? Should we all change? Of course not. (That's an overblown example to illustrate the point.)
for instance the legislation of a rule of consistency for judges and prosecutors
This would remove the Judges ability to consider key factors specific to the individual case. The world is too dynamic to hold each case to the letter of the law and expect justice. As it is right now, if a teenager sends a naked image of herself, she may be convicted of distributing child pornography and end up on the sex offender registry. Now imagine if a judge gets five cases of little white girls being stupid with their phones and he lets them all go, and then he has a 40 year old black man who is truly committing the crime. It is the same crime on the books. If he does not let that sicko go, his numbers will say he is a racist judge. The ability of the judge to use his or her own discretion with each case is as crucial to justice as it can be detrimental.
National statistics could show a 10% difference in sentences by race without any given judge holding biases against black people. If all judges are individually consistent and fair, but judges in black areas are about 10% more punitive on average, then you would have the same statistical outcome. Considering that black areas are areas of statistically higher and more violent crime, a judge being more strict in these areas is more understandable than simple racial bias.
As for cultural biases and natural inborn aversion to the "other", that's a more difficult problem. I would suppose that altering the content of early-years schooling is the most effective means of achieving some level of reduction in subconscious biases.
This is a large step to take for a relatively young and dubious social theory. There needs to be some serious substantiation. There currently isn’t.
If every person comes out of high school feeling completely the same about any given stranger of any given color, their biases will still change to the detriment of black people so long as 13% of the population continues to account for 50% of the murders in the US. In some neighborhoods, even black people are more biased against blacks than whites. Our biases are formed by more than just our upbringing and the media.
people ought to be taught strict principles concerning not passivity to racism but strict anti-racism
I would generally agree. Except that we now live in a world where anyone that someone doesn’t like is called a racist. When racism has such a broad popular application, being ant-racist becomes a hindrance to reasonable discourse.
Care to elaborate on this? I was told by a social worker once that mothers are actually (not just apparently) favored in custody disputes. But it seems you are talking about something else.
I have heard that women are given lighter sentences for the same crimes. For instance, women are less likely to register as sex offenders for statutory rape cases or even let off with a warning.
I also heard that a judge said he had to imagine the woman was a man in order to give the proper sentence.
Here is SouthPark speaking -"I have heard that women are given lighter sentences for the same crimes. For instance, women are less likely to register as sex offenders for statutory rape cases or even let off with a warning.
I also heard that a judge said he had to imagine the woman was a man in order to give the proper sentence."
"I have heard that women are given lighter sentences for the same crimes. For instance, women are less likely to register as sex offenders for statutory rape cases or even let off with a warning.
I also heard that a judge said he had to imagine the woman was a man in order to give the proper sentence."
Your off topic SouthPark so what you heard makes the above statement of yours true or false ?
There is definitely a difference how popular culture treats pedo female teachers as opposed to pedo male teachers. I imagine this cultural difference translates to the courtroom as well. But good on the judge for imagining a man did the crime. He is setting aside his personal feelings on the matter and trying to maintain equality before the law.
Everyone has personal feelings about things. It is not uncommon for a person to understand that their own bias is not correct. More often the problems arise when a person fails to recognize that they have biases. But by recognizing it, we can engage an issue intellectually rather than emotionally. I would expect all judges to approach the matter this way.
Let's take the case of rock cocaine v powder cocaine. They're absolutely no different except which demographic group prefers which. Clearly rock cocaine is preferred by black people and powder cocaine is preferred by whites.. And, that's where the similarity ends..
The SENTENCES one receives for them is FAR from equal.. For possession of the SAME amount of rock cocaine, you could receive 100 times the sentence for the same amount of powder cocaine. Think about that for a minute..
Congress realized their mistake and thought they fixed it, when they reduced the disparity from 100 to 1, down to 18 to 1..
If that's NOT systemic, built in racism, I'll eat your hat..
While cocaine in powder form (hydrochloride salt) is the same chemical compound as cocaine in rock form (base), there are important differences that are often ignored for political rhetoric. After cocaine is further processed to produce crack, thus creating the base form, it can no longer be absorbed through the nasal membranes. However, because crack melts at a much lower temperature than coke, it can be smoked. Contrast this with coke, which can be absorbed through the nasal membranes but not smoked due to a higher melting point.
The difference in the method of consumption, necessitated by the form of the drug in question (coke or crack), makes for an important difference in the biological effect. Absorption through the nasal membranes brings about a high at a slower rate that lasts longer. By contrast, smoking crack brings about a high that is more immediate, more intense, but for a shorter duration. The difference in duration and intensity causes a difference in addictive qualities. In other words, though crack and coke are chemically the same, crack is more addictive.
Since crack is further processed into less expensive form that is simultaneously more expensive a person must take specific extra measures in order to reach the poorer target market with a substance that is more addictive. For this reason, crack is treated more severely than coke.
The system is racist against white men. That's why more white men are killed by cops than any other demographic group, and the stats aren't close. It's also why they are in an all out effort to replace whites with other races per open borders, mindless immigration policies, and are ignoring Islamic terrorism. The globalists want to exterminate all.of the white people, so they can own the pie.
Most of your post isn't relevant to the criminal justice system of the US. However, if you will provide the statistics on cop shootings I will explain why your conclusion derived therefrom is baseless.