Racial Discrimination Correctional Facilities

Racial Discrimination in Correctional Facilities (Article Review)

Tammy Cagle

EDU 6499 Cultural Diversity & Individual Differences

Instructor Bosier

December 15, 2014

Racial Discrimination in Correctional Facilities (Article Review)

The name of the article is Prison Discrimination Law Sought, from the Tribune Business News (Washington) retrieved from the student library. The article talks about how there are a number of discrimination claims coming out of state prisons, local jails, and residential correctional facilities in the state of Washington. According to a ruling of the Vermont Supreme Court in 2007 state correctional facilities are considered “public accommodations.” This ruling means that Iowa Civil Rights Commission has to investigate complaints of racial, sexual orientation or other allegations of discrimination by inmates of Iowa correctional facilities, including county and city jails (Boshart, 2008).

Further the article says that even though the Civil Rights Commission is supposed to investigate complaints such as this, the number of complaints coming out this correctional facilities is so numerous that “it would have a major financial impact on the agency and require it to hire more staff to deal with an influx of complaints at a time when the panel has substantially cut its backlog of cases” (Boshart, 2008).

A state lobbyist named Susan Cameron, who represented county law enforcement interests says that “the public accommodation definition should not apply to jails because they do not offer a service and the patrons earned their way into the facility by omitting a crime” (Boshart, 2008).

The article points out that about twenty five percent of the complaints to her agency come from five thousand yearly contacts from inmates, it is unclear how many of these are due to discrimination (Boshart, 2008).

My reaction to this article is that it was ruled that these correctional facilities were considered public...