Racial Disparities

1 Racial Disparities The US has the highest incarceration rates that any developing or developed country. The country accounts for about 5% of the global population but accounts for about 25% of the world prison population (ACLU, 2020). High incarceration rates in the US are driven by various factors, some of which are unique to the country's history and racial culture. High incarcerations in the US are influenced by racial and laws that are slightly different from the rest of the countries.

Racism is a major problem in the administration of security and justice in the US because of the legacy of slavery in the country. Slavery in the US treated black people as fewer humans who required stringent measures to control. Upon ending slavery and the slave trade, the white majority has not fully accepted to live with the African Americans as their equals. Blacks are 20 times more likely to be stopped and searched than white, a factor that explains why most African Americans are arrested by police (ACLU, 2020). The security and justice system is affected by racism, which explains why African Americans are arrested and sentenced at a higher rate than any other groups, although they only account for about 11% of the country's total population (The Sentencing Project, 2020).

Structural racism in the US has made sure that the majority of African Americans occupy the lowest economic class, exposing them to challenges that drive some of them into drug abuse and crime. Black people occupy ghettoes, which are synonymous with drug abuse and crime.

Although blacks are also found in ghettoes of England and other developed countries, they are not as marginalized and racially discriminated as it is in the US (The Sentencing Project, 2020).

The legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws is still alive in the contemporary US. Crime rates are often high among the low economic class. However, the rise in incarcerations in the US has

2 nothing to not with the increase in crimes such as burglary, robbery, murder, rape, or assault, underscoring the impact of racial factors and drug abuse in high incarceration rates in the US. In other countries such as the UK, incarcerations are driven by burglary, robbery, theft, assault, and other serious crimes. One in every three young black is likely to be imprisoned, while among the whites, it is one in every seventeen young people and one in every six Latinos, underscoring the place of racism in incarcerations (The Sentencing Project, 2020). Consequently, the US criminal justice system suffers from the strong influence of racism in those other countries, accounting for unusually high numbers of the prison population.

Moreover, the enactment of anti-drug laws targeting drug traffickers and users in the 1970s saw a rapid growth in the number of people in incarceration. President Reagan's war on drugs led to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) establishment, which has been responsible for sting operations targeting drug abusers and traffickers. Unfortunately, a strong number of drug abusers are African Americans, and the DEA and police often target African Americans in trying to combat the use of illegal drugs (The Sentencing Project, 2020). Most of the other countries do not have stringent laws on narcotics, and even if they have such laws, they do not often use them to target members of a particular ethnic group as it is in the US. In conclusion, high rates of racial disparities in the US than in any other country explain why minority groups account for the highest percentage of incarcerations than in any other country. Racism and stringent anti-drug laws are contributory factors to the high rates of the prison population in the US. Other countries do not suffer from the strong effects of these factors, hence their relatively lower incarceration rates.

3 References ACLU(2020). Mass Incarceration. ACLU. .https://www.aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/massincarceration?redirect=issues/mass-incarceration.

The Sentencing Project (2020). Criminal Justice Facts. The Sentencing Project. https://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/.