...Examining the criminal justice system reveals that minorities are over-represented, primarily because of racial prejudices within the system. The well-publicized war on drugs is one of the main causes for this over-representation, for it has primarily targeted poor people of color. As Walker et al (2003) note, despite repeated studies showing there is little difference in the level of drug use between blacks and whites in the United States, three-quarters of the people incarcerated in American prisons for drug trafficking, dealing, or abuse are African-American. In social terms, one of the most troubling problems with America’s war on drugs is that it appears to be motivated at least in part by racism. As Mason (2000) notes, under New Jersey’s Operation Pipeline drug interdiction program, for example, eighty percent of the motorists stopped by police were black and just thirteen percent were white. Sentencing laws also appear to be racist, for they punish minorities more. Getting caught with four-hundred grams of cocaine requires no mandatory prison term, but possessing four-hundred grams of crack can lead to life in prison. One of the most blatant demonstrations of prejudice in the criminal justice system is racial profiling. According to critics, racial profiling is a unfair law enforcement strategy that enables police officers to stop and question African-Americans simply because of their race. According to Malley (2000) racial profiling is a process...
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...Grace Pisarcik Ms. Coulter The Elements of Literature Period 1 Due Date 3/23/2024 Social Justice Essay Just how much longer will the justice system continue to be corrupt? In the novel “Just Mercy,” Bryan Stevenson fights the corrupt system by arguing that the criminal justice system needs reform. Bryan Stevenson is an American Lawyer who is driven and extremely passionate about the corruption within the criminal justice system. Stevenson displays his argument by sharing his experiences with the wrongfully accused Walter McMillian, as well as the time he spent with Death Row prisoners, and even juveniles in the system. Stevenson goes in depth about his fight for justice and provides the darker details that lie within the justice system....
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...Race in the criminal justice In today’s day of age people are always blaming some race on crimes, but is that racist are is it profiling? I will first start by talking about what is profiling. Profiling is used by cities and towns all over the U.S. Profiling has been a problem because people don’t look at the facts but the color of their skin, religion, and national origin of the person (ACLU , 2017). Profiling was used a lot after September 11, 2001 with Muslim, Arab at the airlines, federal law and local police. In an Article published in 2015 named Muslims in prison? I found out that 60% of Muslims were even though Muslims make up about 8% of the population in 2010 (Markind, 2015). Now I will talk about the statics on hate crimes in the...
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...Throughout the decades, studies have been conducted to address the question of whether prisons work. The prison is a system used by the State to punish criminals, which is justified by the concept of retributivism (proportional punishment) and crime reduction (Cavadino & Dignan 2007, p36; Pollock 2005, pp3-4). According to the actuarial perspective (Feeley & Simon 1992), prison works in certain circumstances, as it efficiently minimises risks to society by confining individuals of dangerous population for the purpose of social control. However, this risk-focused view of prison’s functionality is limited, as it lacks understanding of the imprisonment of vulnerable groups, since Actuarialism overlooks the cultural factors outside risk-calculations....
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...According to official statistics, there are significant ethnic differences in the likelihood of being involved in the criminal justice system. Specifically, black people are over-represented in the system. In this essay I will talk about the reasons for these differences. One of the reasons for the differences in crime statistics is put forward but left realists Lea and Young (1993), they argue that the statistics do, in fact, reflect real life differences. Left realists see crime as the product of relative deprivation, subcultures and marginalisation. They argue that racism has led to the marginalisation and economic exclusion of ethnic minorities, who face higher levels of unemployment, poverty and poor housing. This means that these minorities then get things they cannot usually get by illegitimate means. Delinquent subcultures are made especially by young unemployed black males; this produces higher levels of utilitarian crime, such as theft and robbery, as a means of coping with relative deprivation. Furthermore, because these groups are marginalised and have no organisations to represent their interests, their frustration is liable to produce non-utilitarian crime, such as violence and rioting. Lea and Young also acknowledge that the police often act in racist ways and that this results in the unjustified criminalisation of some members of minority groups. However, 90% of crimes are reported by the public, not police, therefore it is unlikely that the police do not...
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...Opinion Essay: Professor Michelle Alexander's speech The New Jim Crow (2010) In its broadest sense, The New Jim Crow (2010) provides a compelling analysis of how and why mass incarceration is happening in America. It offers an appropriate and original framework for understanding mass incarceration, its roots, link to Jim Crow, the modern caste system, and what must be done to eliminate it (Alexander, 2010). Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010) can be said to be a grand wake-up call in the midst of a long slumber of indifference to the poor and vulnerable. It also befits being described as a timely and stunning guide to the labyrinth of discrimination, racism, and propaganda policies cloaked under other names that comprise justice in America....
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...|Department of Law and Criminal Justice Studies |[pic] | | | | |ASSIGNMENT COVER SHEET | | |STUDENT NAME |Nkiruka-Rebecca Elliott |STUDENT No |ELL11053447 | | | |PROGRAMME | |(highlight correct subjects) | |MODULE NAME: | | | |Victims and Victimology | |MARKER’S NAME: |Rashid Aziz...
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...To what extent do the official statistics on crime and ethnicity provide a valid picture of the criminal activities of ethnic minorities? The purpose of official statistics is to provide us with an unbiased, objective and informative look at crime rates within the UK. However, although the statistics themselves may, to a certain extent, be reliable, the way in which they are obtained is not. Police in different areas may deem certain areas of crime a priority and thus report and record these accordingly. Also, biases within the system itself against those from ethnic minorities may affect the resulting statistics to portray an uneven account of criminal activity. The relationship between crime rates and ethnicity is extremely complex due to other factors such as the difficulty of identifying a person’s ethnic origin and the cultural and social differences between ethnic groups. It has been shown on a variety of occasions that male black youths are disproportionately selected by the police to be ‘stopped and searched’; this then results in higher numbers of black youths being charged with offences as they have been caught doing so. However, the same crimes are probably being committed by other subcultures within society, but as both the media and police do not focus on them, they are not being seen. There are many flaws with official statistics and therefore their reliability. For example, there are sections of crime that are...
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...disparity. Kruse reveals how creating the US interstate highway system, to expand economic growth, disrupted black communities and restricted their access to better jobs, healthcare, and education. Furthermore, Alexander’s...
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...|Carleton University |Department of Law and Legal Studies | Course Outline | | | | |Course: | |LAWS 2301T | | | | | |Term: | |Summer 2016 | | | | | |Prerequisites: | |LAWS 1000 | |Class: |Day & Time: |online | | |Room: |N/A - there is no classroom; lectures will be viewable online | | | | ...
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... • Some ethnic minorities appear to be the victims of racism and discrimination in the UK • There have been strict laws to prevent racism and ethnic inequality in the UK. • There are those who believe that the social changes that have come about because of legal controls are more cosmetic than deeply embedded into our social structure. Key questions (AO1) What evidence is there of ethnic inequality in UK? (AO1) How are ethnic inequalities being challenged by government policies? (AO2) To what extent is British culture racist and ethnically unequal? (AO2) What are social implications of racism in our society? Summary of Key Points 1 2 What is racism? Racism is the belief that some ethnic groups are superior and others inferior. This belief is often associated with notions of skin pigmentation or the minor physical differences that are sometimes apparent between different groups of people. However, racism is not always associated with skin colour, but also with culture, ethnicity, with religious belief or language differences. The notion of racism itself is also a very recent idea in our society. In the past, the idea that people from certain ethnic groups were superior to and different from others was so deeply ingrained into much thinking that it was not seriously questioned. There is a long and deep history of racism in European culture. We often ascribe negative characteristics...
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...SEE HOW WE CAN HELP Outline labelling theory and consider its usefulness in understanding youth crime and anti-social behaviour in Britain today. Outline labelling theory and consider its usefulness in understanding youth crime and anti-social behaviour in Britain today. Labelling theory claims that deviance and conformity results not so much from what people do but from how others respond to those actions, it highlights social responses to crime and deviance Macionis and Plummer, (2005).Deviant behaviour is therefore socially constructed. This essay will describe in full the labelling theory and comment on the importance of the theory to the deviant behaviour of the youth and the anti-social behaviour of the youth in Britain today. The labelling theory becomes dominant in the early 1960s and the late 1970s when it was used as a sociological theory of crime influential in challenging orthodox positivity criminology. The key people to this theory were Becker and Lement.The foundations of this view of deviance are said to have been first established by Lement, (1951) and were subsequently developed by Becker, (1963).As a matter of fact the labelling theory has subsequently become a dominant paradigm in the explanation of devience.The symbolic interaction perspective was extremely active in the early foundations of the labelling theory. The labelling theory is constituted by the assumption that deviant behaviour is to be seen not simply as the violation of a norm but...
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...Outline labelling theory and consider its usefulness in understanding youth crime and anti-social behaviour in Britain today. Labelling theory claims that deviance and conformity results not so much from what people do but from how others respond to those actions, it highlights social responses to crime and deviance Macionis and Plummer, (2005).Deviant behaviour is therefore socially constructed. This essay will describe in full the labelling theory and comment on the importance of the theory to the deviant behaviour of the youth and the anti-social behaviour of the youth in Britain today. The labelling theory becomes dominant in the early 1960s and the late 1970s when it was used as a sociological theory of crime influential in challenging orthodox positivity criminology. The key people to this theory were Becker and Lement.The foundations of this view of deviance are said to have been first established by Lement, (1951) and were subsequently developed by Becker, (1963).As a matter of fact the labelling theory has subsequently become a dominant paradigm in the explanation of devience.The symbolic interaction perspective was extremely active in the early foundations of the labelling theory. The labelling theory is constituted by the assumption that deviant behaviour is to be seen not simply as the violation of a norm but as any behaviour which is successfully defined or labelled as deviant. Deviance is not the act itself but the response others give to that act which means deviance...
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...by police in Cleveland, Ohio. He was 12 years old and playing with a toy pistol. On April 4, 2015, Walter L. Scott was shot by a police officer after a routine traffic stop in North Charleston, S.C. The same month, Freddie Gray died while in police custody in Baltimore, setting off widespread unrest. The policeman in the South Carolina case, Michael T. Slager, was charged with murder based on a cellphone video. In Baltimore, the driver of the police van in which Gray died, Caesar Goodson, was charged with second-degree murder, with lesser charges for five other officers. There have been no indictments in the earlier cases. These follow other recent incidents and controversies, including an April 2014 finding by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), following a two-year investigation, that the Albuquerque, N.M., police department “engages in a pattern or practice of use of excessive force, including deadly force, in violation of the Fourth Amendment,” and a similar DOJ finding in December 2014 with regard to the Cleveland police department. In March 2015, the DOJ also issued a report detailing a pattern of “clear racial disparities” and “discriminatory intent” on the part of the Ferguson, Mo., police department. As the Washington Post reported in July 2015, a...
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...as a ‘Rendezvous’ discipline; discuss the meaning and validity of this label The purpose of this essay is to discuss the meaning and validity of the label criminology has as a ‘rendezvous discipline’. To do this, this essay illuminates where criminology originates from and what its primary focus is. The Chicago School, Lombrosian Theory, Positivist and Classical criminology, are discussed. Other disciplines namely Sociology, Psychology, and the Criminal Justice Sector are examined and applied to the broad subject of criminology, to show the network of how this subject came to be recognised as such a discipline. Exposed are main issues that occur for the likes of criminologists and other social scientists when challenged with defining criminology; and the problems that definition’s carry with themselves. This essay will look in to the birth of criminology as a new discipline and how it has evolved in what it is known today as an applied social science. Explanation of what an ‘applied social science’ will be detailed and collectively the answer to the meaning and validity of the label of ‘rendezvous discipline’ will be provided. Topics that criminology is weaved into for instance are Globalisation, Capital Punishment, Serial Killing, Media, and Genocide. Used to demonstrate the importance that this discipline provides, in a range of contexts Media is the focus later in the essay. Criminology can be studied on its own as a subject, and also applied and used in determining why...
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