Racism In The Criminal Justice System Essay

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Throughout time, it has been proven that equality is both a challenging and elusive goal. In our nation, it has been the cause of a civil war, powerful political movements, and countless violent uprisings. The consequences of the country’s race and class divisions are felt more intensely in the criminal justice system of the United States. The disproportionate involvement of blacks or other people of color in the criminal justice system is a legacy of racism and slavery. As movements for abolition and civil rights end the institutions of slavery, lynching, and legalized segregation, “new and more indirect mechanisms for perpetuating systemic racism and its economic underpinnings have emerged” (Cole 2002, p. 3). African Americans are subject to unequal “protection of the laws, excessive surveillance, extreme segregation, and neo-slave labor via incarceration, all in the name of crime control” (Rose and Heitzeg 2008, pg. 625-626). The “imputation of crime to color” continues to the present as racial profiling and creates a new kind of plantation – the prison industrial complex (Rose and Heitzeg 2008, pg. 626).
Thesis: Analyzing the racism disparities that are instilled within the U.S. …show more content…
One of the most well-known Supreme Court decisions on criminal justice stand for equality before the law is Gideon v. Wainwright, where the Court held that “states must provide a lawyer at state expense to all defendants charged with a serious crime who cannot afford to hire their own lawyer” (First Citation). The importance of this decision was, however, misleading given that it was decided by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren back when the Court was firmly liberal and strongly devoted to racial and economic

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