Judicial Bias in the Context of African Americans.
Hello, everyone! As promised, this is my second post for the week. Today, I’d like to continue discussing yesterday’s topic, expanding on how various factors contribute to African Americans experiencing disparate treatment within the criminal justice system. Yesterday, I discussed an important piece of the puzzle, namely how a history of African Americans being regarded as inherently dangerous has continued to influence the creation of policies that merely propagate that belief and perpetuate a vicious cycle of higher incarceration rates for African Americans.
To begin today’s post, I’d like to explain how the bias of key actors in the criminal justice system is influential in creating disparate treatment of African Americans. First of all, there are two types of bias that are important in our current discussion. The first one is explicit bias, where a given person that plays a part in our justice system, whether that be a police person, a prosecutor, a judge, or a member of the jury, has a clear bias against African Americans that actively affects their attitude and actions towards members of that race. The other bias is an implicit one, where those same members of the justice system have an automatic, subconscious positive or negative preference for a certain group, which can inadvertently affect their attitude and/or actions in the context of members of that group. As I mentioned yesterday, I am referencing a Vera Institute of Justice evidence brief, written by Harvard Professor Elizabeth Hinton. Hinton explains how such biases at individual stages of the process can easily accumulate and build up to have a significant effect on the outcome of a black American’s case.
As police are often the beginning point of most criminal cases, their biases are particularly important when considering disparate treatment in the criminal justice system. A large number of studies suggest that many police people hold active biases toward African American people. In fact, Hinton references a 2004 study, which found that police officers chose black faces at much greater rates compared to white faces when asked to point to the photo of the person they found most criminal. Even such a small bias can have staggering effects, especially when combined with the fact that more police are actively deployed in majority-African neighborhoods. The aforementioned combination results in African Americans experiencing a larger number of stops, searches, and arrests, statistics that merely propagate the belief that black people are more dangerous.
A number of different studies show the invalidity of such views. In 2016, a Police Accountability Task Force in Chicago found that police officers searched black and Latino drivers four times as much as white drivers, yet found contraband on white drivers twice as often as on black or Latino drivers. While the study makes it clear that the biases police often hold are invalid, I find the effect of such biases on black drivers much more important. As black drivers are stopped more often, they experience police force and intimidation at much greater rates. When we consider that many African-Americans experience a group consciousness and become aware of the treatment their fellow African-Americans are receiving at the hands of police officers, each member of the African-American community begins to lose trust and faith in the ability of police officers to not only be impartial but also actually crack down on crime as opposed to wasting time by letting racist viewpoints cloud their judgment. When an entire ethnic group loses faith in an institution that is supposed to safeguard their persons and their rights, it becomes clear that a serious issue is at hand.
Ultimately, there also exists rampant bias within prosecutors and judges, both roles that imbue ordinary Americans with tremendous power in deciding the outcomes of a bevy of criminal cases. Studies in both 2013 and 2006 showed that not only are state prosecutors more likely to charge black people than white people with offenses that carry higher mandatory sentences, but they are also more likely to charge black people under habitual offender statutes than similarly situated white people. The ultimate result of many prosecutorial biases is that black people charged with misdemeanors are not only more likely to be convicted but are much more likely to be sentenced to incarceration than white people. Prosecutors play a massive role in the trial process, often greatly influencing pretrial detention and plea bargains. Even a simple decision to detain an African American before their trial while letting a white American charged with the same crime go can greatly warp the jury’s and judge's perception of the African American, influencing them to view the African American as more dangerous and therefore deserving of a greater sentence. Such disparities are extremely dangerous, as not only do they affect a person’s life, but they can also have devastating effects on a person’s family members to the point where a child grows up without their mother/father, an issue that can perpetuate this cycle of incarceration.
As I mentioned yesterday, this is a large issue to unpack. Unfortunately, I will be unable to wrap it up today, as there is still a factor that is majorly influential in ensuring that African Americans continue to experience disparate treatment in the criminal justice system. I will address that issue tomorrow, along with my final thoughts on our current topic. As always, I have linked my source below, so feel free to read it!
https://www.vera.org/downloads/publications/for-the-record-unjust-burden-racial-disparities.pdf
