Disparity Discrimination Disparity and Discrimination

Disparity Discrimination

Disparity and Discrimination

The United States criminal justice system came into existence with a racial discrimination as an inherency. The institution of slavery and the many incarnations of racial inequality that persisted during America's infancy and maturation would give way to a sustained condition of racial disparity that results in a wide variance of racially-bound socio-cultural experiences. This is to argue that the primary distinction between racial discrimination and racial disparity is that the former is an intentional social construct whereas the latter is a consequence thereof. This cause and effect relationship has largely defined the experience of minority groups such as African-Americans and Latinos living in the United States.

Perhaps the most salient example of racial discrimination as channeled through the American criminal justice system is the set of segregation laws that emerged in the era following emancipation. The Constitutional status of African-Americans had changed considerably with the abolition of slavery. Still, Banks (2004) reports, "despite these legal statements of freedom, patterns of discrimination persisted after the war because many states passed Jim Crow laws, which had the effect of maintaining forms of discrimination in legal, social, and economic forums. For example, African-Americans were denied the right to vote or to enter into con- tracts, and the doctrine of separate but equal was applied to keep the races separate." (Banks, p. 58)

This demonstrates a sustained ambition on the part of many appendages of the legal system to engage in explicitly discriminatory policy development in order to prevent the advancement of ethnic minorities. Quite in fact, Banks indicates, the mere employment of race as a factor for decision-making in the criminal justice system qualifies as an act of discrimination. Banks expresses the idea that racial identity is socially constructed and typically employed to define and magnify differences between ethnic groups as a way of determining power dynamics. This suggests that where racial characteristics are invoked during the process of administering criminal justice, it has been done in order to intentionally subject the minority race to some form of unequal treatment based on his or her race.

It is this orientation that produces the sociological condition called disparity, particularly legislated policy acts unwittingly on underlying biases. So is this noted by Williams (2009), who points to the disparities created inadvertently but owing to core racial prejudices. Williams reports that "a common example of a disparity in the criminal justice system is found in sentencing guidelines. In the 1990s the Sentencing Guidelines and Policy Statements of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 that applies to all federal offenses committed after November 1, 1987 created many disparities (Mustard, 2001)" (Williams, p. 2) Williams points out that the sentencing guidelines, for instance, called for harsher penalties for those guilty of crack/cocaine dealing or possession than for those guilty of cocaine offenses. The price differential between the two would create a clear socioeconomic disparity as a function of the drug policy. The result would be a far greater chance for long-term incarceration for African-Americans -- more often prone to socioeconomic struggles -- than for whites.