View the entire video at: http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/
Activist Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, argues at Zócalo that legal discrimination against felons is little different from the racial caste system of old.
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
Is There Racial Bias In Our Criminal Justice System?
Michelle Alexander, associate professor of law at the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University, talks about how U.S. law enforcement targets people of color, why it's difficult to prove racial discrimination and what it will take to end racial bias in our criminal justice system.
Is There Racial Bias In Our Criminal Justice System?
Michelle Alexander, associate professor of law at the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University, talks about how U.S. law enforcement targets people of color, why it's difficult to prove racial discrimination and what it will take to end racial bias in our criminal justice system.
Racial Inequality in the Criminal Justice System
Fewer than 1 out of 100 Americans are imprisoned in the United States. But nearly one fourth of young black men are incarcerated in U.S. state and federal prisons. In fact, a young black man is more likely to be in jail than to get married or go to college.
Minorities are grossly overrepresented in U.S. prisons, and Prof. Daniel D'Amico argues that the root of the problem may lie with the criminal justice system itself. Laws about drug prohibition, for example, are supposed to be color blind. But people with different levels of wealth face different costs and benefits to participating in the drug trade. Prof. D'Amico says it's time to admit that radical changes to the criminal justice system might be necessary and preferable to the status quo.
Learn More!
A series of charts about the implications of racial inequality in America's justice system:
Political cartoon comparing slavery to the prison industrial complex: http://sfbayview.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/War-on-Drugs-cartoon-by-Khalil-Bendib.jpg
Econtalk podcast episode about how the racial disparity we see in prison statistics might be even worse than D'Amico suggests: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/12/pettit_on_the_p.html
Huffington Post piece on "the racism and hypocrisy in our nation's war on drugs": http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-boyce-watkins/jesse-jackson-black-leade_b_883721.html
Sir Richard Branson argues that the War on Drugs "represents racial discrimination and targeting disguised as drug policy": http://edition.cnn.com/2012/12/06/opinion/branson-end-war-on-drugs/index.html
A social justice perspective on the racist character of the war on drugs: http://reimaginerpe.org/20years/alexander
US prison system 'racist in nature from beginning to end': Analyst
The prison system in the United States is "horrific" and "racist in nature from beginning to end," says Daniel Patrick Welch, a political commentator.
"It's a horrific thing and it is hidden even from most members of the US citizenry that there is not only the highest percentage in the world but the highest absolute number of the incarcerated people in the world," Welch told Press TV on Tuesday.
He made the remarks when asked about a report, which shows thousands of prisons across the US are struggling to cope with mentally ill inmates. According to the report, many of the 3,300 jails across the country have seen a rise in the number of inmates with serious mental illnesses, most arrested for non-violent crimes.
Welch said the report highlights only a part of the US prison system and that "the larger issue is quite frightening."
He said the report shows "the incidents of mentally ill inmates crowding into jails increased sharply in the 70s," but he added, "the other unspoken part of that is the inherent racist nature of the US prison system from beginning to end and the incarceration of black citizens specially black men increased also precipitously after the 70s after the end of the American apartheid in legal terms."
He went on to say that there is no way to talk about the American prison system unless there is a full awareness of how it works.
"It's absolutely impossible to have a full discussion about this without looking at how the prison system treats these people. And usually when Americans talk about it, they speak about it from a kind of an apartheid-based knowledge, if you haven't been on the wrong side of the law in the United States or the wrong side of the state power, you have no idea how it treats people ... you don't really have much of an idea of what the American democracy or so-called freedom really is," he added.
The report shows the number of inmates with serious mental illnesses surpasses 20 percent in some jails.
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