Crime and Punishment

         In my psychology class, we had discussed the importance of presentation in the sentencing of youth. If the youth is more attractive, the study finds that his or her sentence is less severe than an unattractive youth who has committed a similar crime. This worried me a little bit because I began to wonder if this discrimination could be applicable to different races and ethnicities as well.

So, I decided to investigate this, and I came across an incident that had occurred in Jena, La, which had been the home to some of the largest civil rights protests in previous times. The school that this incident had occurred in was well-known for its racial tensions since the school consisted of an overwhelmingly 85% of Caucasians. In addition, the school had gained publicity in recent years because of various insensitive pranks, such as tying nooses onto trees. Various parents had complained, and the FBI had decided to take a look at it. However, no hate-crime charges were brought to court. 

Within the next few months, an officer had seen six African-American youths beating a Caucasian peer. Thus, the six African-American students were charged with attempted murder for the battery of a young Caucasian peer. However, the punishment of these youths was a disproportionate response, and it highlighted the racial tensions that were still present in the South. The students were arrested, and five were tried as adults not on assault charges but on attempted murder charges. Later on, these charges were reduced. This case had brought about numerous questions concerning how race affected the judiciary systems in the more conservative areas of the South.

Furthermore, I found that just a few years ago, the Supreme Court decided to enact stricter consequences for drug crimes that involved crack as opposed to powdered cocaine. I didn’t really see this as a racial issue until I read a New York Times article (Glater, 2007) that posited that this was in fact a racial issue since African-American cocaine users tended to use crack, which was the less expensive form of cocaine.

This issue of racial discrimination in the practice of law has been ardently protested in the past. The Supreme Court has constantly rejected this notion of biases and refuses to acknowledge the disparities in the criminal justice system. There have been numerous statistical studies that have been conducted that have quantified the biases displayed in court hearings. For example, in 1987, the defendant Warren McCleskey, an African-American male, was convicted of armed robbery and the murder of a Caucasian police officer. The jury had suggested the death penalty, and the court had ruled in favor of the jury.

This decision had been appealed because the sentence seemed to reek of racial discrimination. The appeal was supported by Baldus (1983) who found after looking through 2500 murder cases in Georgia that minorities convicted of murdering Caucasians tended to bear heavier and more severe sentences, such as the death penalty. Even after controlling for confounding variables, Baldus (1983) found that criminals who were found guilty of murdering Caucasians were 4.3% more likely to receive the death penalty than when criminals murdered African-Americans. This finding sets a dangerous precedent because it hints at the racial discrimination that occurs in the sentencing of the death penalty.

Baldus’ finding has been replicated in recent times. In 2005, the Justice Department found that when minorities, specifically Hispanic and African-Americans, and Caucasians were stopped, Hispanic and African-American drivers were searched significantly higher (11.4% and 10.2% respectively) than Caucasian drivers (3.5%) (Glater, 2007). Furthermore, it has been found that there are higher percentages of African Americans than Caucasians in prisons, which showed that African-Americans not only were charged with all offenses but their sentences were longer than that of Caucasians.
Many scholars have expounded on this phenomenon. For example, Dr. Davis, who was a law professor at the prestigious American University, asserted that the judges and prosecutors do not racially discriminate deliberately. Because of the lack of time and information concerning the defendant, many law officials tend to stereotype unintentionally. Dr. Davis stated that she felt as if it were an unconscious behavior, which does not make the court’s decision concerning an African-American defendant any less difficult or fair. However, Dr. Davis found that perhaps the fact that the discrimination is unintentional could be a small consolation.
I find the idea of unconscious racism even more frustrating that much of these discriminations are unconscious because then it seems as if there is no remedy to the years of discrimination that African-Americans have faced. From a scientific basis, we are all H. Sapiens, the same species. This idea of race is a constricting social construct used to perpetuate economically vitality for the Caucasians in the past. How do we combat unconscious racial discrimination in sentencing?