One in every three black males born today can expect to go to
prison at some point in their life, compared with one in every six
Latino males, and one in every 17 white males, if current incarceration
trends continue.
These are among the many pieces of evidence cited
by the Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based group that
advocates for prison reform, in a
report on the staggering racial disparities that permeate the American criminal justice system.
The
report was submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Committee this week in
advance of the U.N.’s review of American compliance with the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights later this month.
It argues that racial disparity pervades “every stage of the United
States criminal justice system, from arrest to trial to sentencing.”
“Racial
minorities are more likely than white Americans to be arrested,” the
report explains. “Once arrested, they are more likely to be convicted;
and once convicted, they are more likely to face stiff sentences.”
The
report's findings lead its authors to conclude that the U.S. is
violating the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,
which states that all citizens must be treated equally under the law.
The U.S. ratified the treaty in 1992.
Central to the report’s
argument is the simple fact that African-American and, to a lesser
extent, Hispanic men, are more likely to spend time behind bars than
their white counterparts, according to recent data from the U.S.
government.
The reasons for this discrepancy are widely debated,
but the report discourages readers from blaming either the
higher-than-average crime rate among blacks and Latinos in the U.S. or
the presence of deliberate racism in the criminal justice system.
While those factors may contribute to the problem, the reasons go much deeper, the report contends.
The
problem begins with police activity. According to Justice Department
data cited in the report, police arrested black youth for drug crimes at
more than twice the rate of white youth between 1980 and 2010,
nationwide. Yet a 2012 study from the National Institute on Drug Abuse
found that white high-school students were slightly more likely to have
abused illegal drugs within the past month than black students of the
same age.
Blacks are also far more likely than whites to be
stopped by the police while driving. The Sentencing Project report
largely attributes the racial disparities in both traffic and drug
arrests to “implicit racial bias” on the part of the police.
“Since
the nature of law enforcement frequently requires police officers to
make snap judgments about the danger posed by suspects and the criminal
nature of their activity, subconscious racial associations influence the
way officers perform their jobs,” the report contends.
The
disparities don’t end with arrests. Because blacks and Latinos are
generally poorer than whites, they are more likely to rely on
court-appointed public defenders, who tend to work for agencies that are
underfunded and understaffed. In 2012, according to the U.S. Government
Accountability Office, more than 70 percent of public defender offices
reported that they were struggling to come up with the funding needed to
provide adequate defense services to poor people. By last March, the
problem was so bad that Attorney General Eric Holder declared the public
defense system to be in a "
state of crisis.”
Racial
disparities within the justice system have been exacerbated by the war
on drugs, the report argues. The drug war led the country’s population
of incarcerated drug offenders to soar from 42,000 in 1980 to nearly
half a million in 2007. From 1999 to 2005, African Americans constituted
about 13 percent of drug users, but they made up about 46 percent of
those convicted for drug offenses, the report points out.
Marc
Mauer, director of the Sentencing Project and an author of the report,
said he’s optimistic that the country’s criminal justice policies are
starting to change. “There’s much that needs to be done, but we haven’t
seen this much progress around these issues in quite some time,” he
said.
He mentioned the Justice Department’s
recent decision to scale back the war on drugs and a series of
bipartisan state laws aimed at reducing harsh prison sentences for low-level drug offenders.
The
report offers 10 specific steps that the U.S. could take to cut down on
such disparities, including fully funding the country’s public
defenders, prohibiting law-enforcement officials from engaging in racial
profiling and establishing a commission to develop recommendations for
“systemic reform” of the country’s police bureaus and courts.
Whether
the U.N. review could contribute to these changes isn’t clear. Even if
the U.N. finds the U.S. to be in violation of the treaty, the range of
repercussions is essentially limited to scolding.
Still, Mauer said, “It’s a question of making a moral statement."
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