Today, African Americans and other minorities are over-represented in the criminal justice system, but under-represented politically in the United States of America. Since well before its inception in 1776, the United States of America has been a nation characterized by white supremacy. In fact, modern day America may not exist if not for the taking of land from the Indigenous Peoples on this very premise. Today, many Americans believe they reside in a post-racial nation, citing the abolition of slavery in the 1860s. While racism has certainly been reduced in modern America, it is still ever-present in society, and more alarmingly, the criminal justice system.

Today, the American criminal justice system is used as a front for state racism, …show more content…
The strong racial divide can be seen in the administration of the death penalty in the southern state of Georgia. The now famous Baldus Study empirically considers over 2000 homicide cases, and found that cases concerning a white victim were 11 times as likely to result in a death sentence than those where the victim was black. Furthermore, it was concluded that the combination of black perpetrator and white victim was most likely to result in a death sentence. This study shows the disparity in the treatment of white and coloured criminals in the American Justice system. “The retributive maxim, “Let the punishment fir the crime,” is ignored. Preferred is the surrogate slogan: “Let the punishment fit the criminal.”” . In this case, it is clear that for similar crimes, black and white offenders are consistently being handed differing punishments. Studies on imprisonment in general have not been conducted specifically on racial comparisons. However, the fact that approximately 50% of all prisoners are black , while this demographic represents only 13% of the population seems to illustrate that the same racial bias permeates all sectors of the American Justice …show more content…
This causes exacerbates the perceived injustice for African Americans in the justice system. It is true that this disenfranchisement applies to felons regardless of race. However, the sheer volume of minorities in the criminal justice system makes this an issue of racial representation in American politics. In fact, as George Fletcher argues, the very fact that this policy has such discriminatory effects may be grounds for the suspension of all state laws disenfranchising felons. He states, “The Fifteenth Amendment prohibits the states from denying the right to vote on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”…It might be possible…to declare the disenfranchisement unconstitutional in those states where its application had a discriminatory effect on black voting rights.”(Fletcher 1902) Though the constitutionality of denying felons to vote hotly debated, it is not inherently a racial issue. Nonetheless, factoring in the gross overrepresentation of minorities among those convicted felons, it becomes apparent that this practice restricts the voting rights of certain minorities. Nation wide, 14% of voting aged black men are barred from voting due to felony convictions, in southern states, these numbers can rise as high as 29%. In disenfranchising minorities, the American justice system creates an undemocratic political system, as it