Racial Prejudice In The Justice System In To Kill A Mockingbird

My results did show that there was differences in the way black and white students in American society view the criminal justice system. Because race can be compared to SES non-whites have a more negative view of how often police discriminate. On the other hand whites are not ignorant to the negative police discrimination non-whites face; nevertheless they feel it happens much less than it actually does, or almost never. Similar, in the courts, more non- whites feel their is discrimination. My answer to this could be that non-whites are being convicted, going to jail and receiving the death penalty, while white are the ones suing, and are not getting convicted for crimes when they are arrested.

This proved that the whites thought that they were better than any black man. Finally, the jury was all white. Since a white man would never believe a black man word over a white women’s word, Tom Robinson just like the Scottsboro Boys, were doomed from the start. Work Cited Kelly, Robin. "The Case of The "Scottsboro Boys"."

As it can be seen, over the years the justice system does not follow that amendment in a lot of cases. In many circumstances the judicial system has been corrupt, the system more times than not punishes the minorities harsher than they do the whites. The courtrooms in the United States are filled with prejudice judges and prosecutors who do everything but serve blacks justice. In many case blacks often get unfair sentences while the whites get light sentences and sometimes not even face imprisonment. In recent news most of the Police officers that killed innocent blacks have not even faced punishments for the innocent lives they’ve taken.

For so long, it has been difficult for society to decide whether juveniles are criminal or children when accuse of violating the law. In the United States, racial inequality in the criminal justice system gets ignored because it doesn’t affect most people. Low-income minorities are extremely over-represented in the juvenile justice systems. Minorities make up more than half of the population in the juvenile justice system. The arrest rate of white youth has continued to decrease while black youth continue to increase.

This is still not saying much. When the trial took place after Bob Ewell accused Tom Robinson of rape, people didn’t really seem to care about Bob winning. He only won because no one was going to take the word of a black man over the word of a white man. Even after he won, no one seemed to care. He gained very little from it, and no one respected him any more than they did before.

Now, if a black family is poor and does not have much money, the suspect may then be issued a racist attorney. Many cases have been recorded of this happening, both of innocent and guilty men. Innocent men again were put to death, this time due to their skin color. This is just another reason leading to how poor our justice system is, and why it should not be in effect. There are few oppositions to not having the death penalty in effect.

Once convicted a poor person can face years in prison, or even be executed without ever having a lawyer present. The concepts of crime can be defined differently in different societies and can be classified according to race ethnic, gender, sexuality class, and religious identifications (Bright 6). Common targets of this “poverty-to-prison” cycle can be seen in When a Heart Turns Solid Rock by Timothy Black. The book shows how schools, jobs, the streets, and prisons have shaped the lives and choices of poor Puerto Rican boys at the turn of the twenty- first century. Rather than using a model of urban poverty that blame the poor for their poverty, Black instead focuses, through ethnography, on the social forces that affect the individual lives of three urban Puerto Rican brothers: Julio, Fausto, and Sammy.

The prison system exists as a form of formal punishment for persons of wrongdoing and serves as a secure dwelling to protect the public from persons who engage in illegal and or violent behavior. Minorities are the majority of the prison population. Because of possible ingrained stereotypes regarding racial groups and drug related criminal offenses there are an elevated number of minorities in United States prisons (Tamborini, Huang, Mastro, & Nabashi-Nakahara, 2007, p. 342). Legal authorities and juries may show bias towards minority groups resulting in a disadvantage when it comes to charging those of the African-American race. African-Americans are generally more frequently targeted than Caucasians regarding drug related crimes.

This cycle could be part of the reason African-Americans are poorer nationally than caucasians. This cycle truly began with slavery and then Jim Crow laws, African-Americans were oppressed and treated as less so they never got the chance to start on the same level as whites. We personally have family members that lived in a time when it was regular for and African American man to get lynched, tortured and killed for simply looking at a white girl wrong. We as a culture often forget how recent this really was, and that many social institutions have not fully adjusted. One of those institutions is our criminal justice system that is not as color blind as it claims to be.

This punishment is emotionally and mentally far worse than the death penalty. There are many other reasons why death penalty is shown to not be a good solution to crime. One of the problems is racial disparity. Jason Kotowski’s article in The (CA) Bakersfield California reports that, “Some thought Brothers was getting what he deserved (death sentence), while others argued that the jury was racially biased and Brothers didn’t receive a fair trial.” Many people believe that the death penalty is handed out unfairly to minorities. Statistics claim that African Americans make up only 13% of the US population, but nearly 50% ofthe people currently on death row are African American.