TWO NATIONS DIVIDED BLACKS, WHITES, AND CRIMINAL DISCRIMINATION EXECUTIVE STATEMENT The problem is that the African-American male is an endangered species. The African-American people make up approximately 12% of the United State’s population, but them make up 63% of its prison population. This web site is intended to show that the United States openly practices Judicial Discrimination. That the police and other law enforcement officials casually carry out this policy openly and blatantly right under the noses of millions of tax paying citizens everyday. The cost to practice this discrimination, which is in the billions of tax payer dollars, could be better spent on education and relieving today’s fragile economy. THE PROBLEM TODAY Annual expenditures on police have increased from $5 billion to $27 billion over the past two decades. There is a huge difference between the public’s perception and the reality of crime. Crime has not gotten worse or better over the years simply the demographics have changed. People should know that the average cost of building a new cell is $54,000 dollars, but because states usually borrowed money to pay for prisons, the real average cost of building a new cell is somewhere around $100,000, yet we continue to build more prisons than schools. African-Americans somehow are overwhelmingly represented in this prison community. THE IMPLICATION First, arrest records indicate that African-Americans commit more crime than whites relative to the population. Second, there are so many more African-Americans than whites in our prisons that the difference cannot be explained by higher crimes among African-Americans--- Racial discrimination is also at work, and it penalizes African-Americans at almost every juncture in the criminal justice system. Third, whether the cause is higher crime or discrimination or both, this country is on the verge of a social catastrophe because of the sheer numbers of African-Americans behind bars---numbers that continue to rise with breathtaking speed and frightening implications. BLACKS ARE STILL OVER-CROWDING OUR PRISONS. The United States imprisons African American men at a rate six times that of white men. African Americans are incarcerated at a rate of 1,947 per 100,000 African-American citizens compared to a rate of 306 per 100,000 for white citizens. African-American males make up less than 7 percent of the U.S. population, yet they comprise almost half of the prison and jail population. One out of three African-American men between the ages of 20 and 29 in the entire country, including suburban and rural areas, was under some form of criminal justice supervision in 1994. One in three, that just seems odd to me. Ninety percent of prison admissions for drug offences are African- American or Hispanic. It hardly seems possible that discrimination doesn't play a heavy factor in these statistics. A African-American man is more likely to go to prison than to college. WHAT DO POLICE THINK Most studies reveal what most police officers will casually admit: that race is used as a factor when the police decide to follow, detain, search, or arrest. Some police officers believe that race provides a legitimate and significant basis to suspect a person of criminal behavior. To justify the use of race in forming this suspicion, these officers might point to racial disparities in arrest patterns: if minorities get arrested more often, they argue, that minorities must be committing more crime. Racial stereotypes influence police to arrest minorities, thereby, creating the arrest statistics needed to justify the racial stereotype. A California study found that police make unfounded (where the suspect was innocent, or there was inadequate evidence, or there was an illegal search or seizure0 arrests of African-Americans and Hispanics at sharply higher rates than those of whites. The disparity was even worse in some urban areas. SOURCES All information contained on this web site was taken from the books: TWO NATIONS: BLACK AND WHITE. SEPARATE, HOSTILE, UNEQUAL BY Andrew Hacker, Ballantine Books, New York, 1995 and THE REAL WAR ON CRIME: THE REPORT OF THE NATIONAL CRIMINAL JUSTICE COMMISSION by Steve R. Donziger, Editor, HarperCollins publishing, Inc. New York, NY 1996
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