Race and Criminal Justice

Reading these articles on criminal justice, I can somewhat see a connection to what we discussed earlier in the semester about how the preoccupation with race basically evolved to take the attention off of social status or SES. Based on the statistics presented in the articles it does seem that the criminal justice system is racially discriminatory when it is actually the social statuses that are being divided. The majority of the people committing crimes are not the one’s being caught and convicted. This is majorly because they are of a higher SES.
It’s not purely the SES though, it all comes down to the environments that people of different socioeconomic statuses live in and the different privileges they may or may not have. People of high SES can afford to live in more rural areas where they are less likely to get caught committing crimes. In these types of environments crimes such as drug use are committed behind closed doors, and therefore nobody sees them and they don’t get caught, and nobody expects it so nobody looks for it. On the other hand, those who live in the poor environments are constantly getting arrested and convicted, why? because the majority of the people in these environments commit the crimes out in the open and therefore are more likely to get caught.
Due to these disparities, there is much inequality between the races that are caught and convicted of certain crimes. The majority of the people in the middle and upper classes are white while the majority of the poor people are minorities, such as Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans. So, there you have the reason for the disparity, but to me that still doesn’t really answer why. Why is it that poor minorities get more severe convictions than middle class whites for the same offenses? Why is it that crime is always looked for in poor urban areas, yet not really thought to happen in rich or semi-rich suburban areas? It all comes back to race. As much as people try to say that discrimination and racism are disappearing ,and people try to say that they don’t see color; I just don’t believe it. One is always going to see color whether it is conscious or subconscious, and one is always going to make judgments based on race, and because of this you get these huge inequalities in the educational system, the criminal justice system, and the job force.
Going back to the criminal justice system, one way to fix these inequalities can be to first get rid of the 3 strikes system. To me, this system isn’t fair for anybody because all the weight of one’s sentence is purely based on if one commits a third offence regardless of what it is. I remember reading in one of the articles that a man was sentenced to 20-25 years because he stole a slice of pizza, but it was his third offence. This system doesn’t use the severity of the crimes as the basis for the sentence and that’s where I think the problem is. The three strike system should not be used at all and all sentences should be based on the crime itself regardless of race, SES, or residence. Getting rid of this system would bring us one step closer to a more equal criminal justice system, but in the end, I don’t think there is ever going to be perfect equality between races in anything.