Racial Disparities in the Judicial System

Racial Disparities in the Judicial Systems

Carlos Summons

ENG122: English Composition II

Instructor First Name Last Name

August 5, 2013

Racial Disparities in the Judicial Systems

Every year the people of the United States of America celebrate the Selma to Montgomery marches for voting rights, also known as Bloody Sunday, which occurred on March 7, 1965 in Alabama. Let’s not forget the individuals who stood up for civil rights like Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Gandhi, Thurgood Marshall, Mother Teresa, Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, Emmett Till, and Stokely Carmichael; all of whom have paved the way for where we are today. These celebrations are meant to for us to remember our history of the civil rights movement and our supposed progress with racial equality in our nation. Yet, still today in the twentieth century, we have what is called, “a broken criminal-justice system”, which has proven that we still have a long way to go to achieve civil rights equality. Why are minorities targeted or likely to be incarcerated? Is it because they are more likely to live in poverty or less likely to get a good education or have parental support in the home which contributes to challenges in behavior at an early age? A justice system which tolerates injustice is doomed. (The Sentencing Project, 2008)

Why are people of color today continuously out of proportion when incarcerated, policed, and when put on death row at much higher rate than Caucasian individuals? There have been studies of other racial differences in the criminal judicial system that threaten our communities of color and leaving thousands without voting rights and then also taking away their equal rights to employment, higher education, housing, and public benefits in which millions of others races have the right to access. These major disparities make it imperative that our American criminal-justice system gets to where it exhibits the rights of every race and make it a priority of...