Racial Discrimination in the Justice System in America:
Until this society can look itself in the mirror and not only accept responsibility for its moral short-comings, but reverse the process which has made it acceptable to murder, incarcerate and otherwise repress the rights of those other-than-white, everything else will continue to be an exercise in futility.
I know most people are not familiar with these cases and some might even be shocked that it happens in the American justice system, but I assure you, this is not only a regular occurrence, in the "land of the free and home of the brave", but a daily thing in our world. When we cry out against the treatment of Blacks in particular and people of color/minorities in general in the U.S. we are not just blowing hot air.
It is a cancer that has been allowed to fester for centuries and keeps growing, paralyzing the body-politic as well as destroying everything in its path. This is 2017, but one can make the argument that is it 1717.
A "double standard" is not a legal term, but an ethical one. Double standard is the application of different ethical criteria of action to situations that are basically the same, based on factors other than the situation itself. The expression is often used with a negative connotation, to imply that a person with a duty to act morally will not always do so.
Since the definition of double standard is an ethical one, finding a double standard intrinsically in a law would be difficult at best. This is because most, if not all, laws in the Western world have to be drafted respecting Constitutional and international commitments to equality under the law.
Instead, you'd have to refer to the standard with which a law was applied to a given case. For instance, is a white person openly bearing a gun treated the same as a racial minority doing the same?
During the Democratic presidential debate on NBC, party front-runner Hillary Clinton was asked by co-moderator Lester Holt, anchor of NBC’s “Nightly News,” about the value of black lives.
Clinton pointed to incarceration rates of African-Americans and whites and questioned that if one of three white men were going to prison, would there be a different reaction. Let's forget, for a moment, the irony of that her husband enacted the "3- Strikes Law" which saw a massive increase in the number of Black people thrown in jail.
Politically self-serving, Clinton said, “Sadly it’s reality....and it has been heartbreaking and incredibly outraging to see the constant stories of young men, like Walter Scott who have been killed by police officers. There needs to be a concerted effort to address the systemic racism in our criminal justice system. And that requires a very clear agenda for retraining police officers, looking at ways to end racial profiling. One out of three African-American men end up going to prison. That’s the statistic. I want people here to think what we would be doing if it was one out of three white men. And very often the black men are arrested, convicted and incarcerated for offenses that do not lead to the same results for white men. So we have a very serious problem that we can no longer ignore.”
With the billions in annual profits generate by the privatized prison system, the Correctional Corporation of American is one of the most visible on the Stock Exchange and the tax-incentivized, free labor generated by the tens of millions of prisoners, a boon to their productivity. America has more people in jail than any other country on earth, including China. We make up only 5% of the world's population, but have 26% of the world's prison population, mostly disproportionally African-American and Latino.
51% of African-Americans languish in jail while overall they make up only 13% of the total population. Millions of Black people have police records for possessing marijuana when the CEO’s of Wall Street companies who destroyed our economy have no police record.”
Research the term "Affluenza" if you really want to be shocked. That is the quasi-legal, faux-lingual term concocted by a Judge to explain why white people like the Du Pont heir Richards who raped his own 3-year old and 5-year old daughters repeatedly, "wouldn't fare well in prison", so gave him probation. Or why Eric Couch, who, high on cocaine, was given a spa-treatment facility sentence after he killed four people while high on cocaine. That is the America we labor under daily.
Despite a veneer of neutrality, race-based and class-based double standards operate in virtually every criminal justice setting, including police behavior, jury selection, and sentencing. Such disparities allow privileged whites to enjoy constitutional protections from repressive police practices without paying the costs associated with extending these protections across the board to the poor and minorities. The double standards themselves inflict even greater costs on society by compromising the legitimacy of the criminal justice system and by exacerbating racial divisions nationally. The most potent force in the war against crime is the perceived legitimacy of criminal law. If large segments of the population lack faith in the criminal justice system's fairness, the system is bound to fail.
We all understand the kind of racist society we live in. It is time to stop the tomfoolery, stop being acquiescent in our own destruction, stop letting them divide us, and start banding together.
United we stand, divided we fall.
黒人浪人
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