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Sentencing Disparity
Preventing Sentence Disparity
Ultimately, sentencing disparity is rooted in a combination of how laws are authored and how they are enforced. Such is to say that the approach to sentencing in the United States is not itself racially biased. However, when contextualized by a legal system that is decidedly tilted to the disadvantage of African-Americans, Hispanics and other ethnic minorities, sentencing does take on unequal proportions.
The text by Worrall (2008) points out that the way certain laws are designed seems to suggest that the system is inherently and purposefully designed to produce longer incarcerations for racial minorities. According to Worrall, mandatory minimums are an area in which the strategy of sentencing is especially troubling. Here, the emphasis on using drug sentences in order to produce incarcerations is magnified by the three-strikes format. Here, a third...
This combines with sentencing terms that appear to be a great deal more severe for offenses that more commonly involve minority demographics than those typically committed by white perpetrators.
Worrall reports that "the discrepancy deliberately or accidentally targets the population of young black men. This concern has been highlighted eloquently by one pair of researchers: 'By providing harsher penalties for criminal behavior in which blacks are primarily involved -- such as crack offenses -- compared to those in which whites are primarily involved -- such as powder cocaine offenses -- come have argued that the guidelines actually produce racially disparate sentencing outcomes."
This denotes that at their core, American sentencing laws are designed to target minorities. The only true way of resolving this inequity is to examine…
Works Cited:
Worrall, J. (2008). Crime Control in America: What Works? 2nd ed. Boston: Pearson.
The judge must choose a sentence from within the guideline range unless the court identifies an aggravating or mitigating circumstance that was not adequately considered by the Sentencing Commission. In mandatory minimum drug cases, judges can depart only upon motion from the government stating that a defendant has provided substantial assistance in the investigation or prosecution of another person. All guideline drug sentences are indirectly affected by the mandatory minimums.
"African-Americans now serve virtually as much time in prison for a drug offense (58.7 months) as whites do for a violent offense (61.7 months)" (Compendium 2004, 112).The Commission reported in 2004 that "[r]evising the crack cocaine thresholds would better reduce the [sentencing] gap than any other single policy change, and it would dramatically improve the fairness of the federal sentencing system" (USSC 2004, 132). As a result, the African-American
" (Mustard, 2001) I. Drug Sentencing Policy and the New Washington Administration It is stated in the work entitled: "Aspirations and Realism about Drug Sentencing Reform" that disparities in sentencing "continue to plague [the] Criminal Justice System. African-Americans and Hispanics are more than twice as likely as whites to be searched, arrested, or subdued with force when stopped by police. Disparities in drug sentencing laws, like the differential treatment of crack as
Disparities on the Sentencing of Convicted Children: The recent sentencing of convicted children and the high-contrast prosecution of the cases by the states is a demonstration of how broken the United States juvenile justice system has become in the recent past. Even though the state-to-state variations of the juvenile justice system have been in existence since the system was developed in 1899, the current disparities are so wide to an extent
Sentencing Mandatory minimum sentences A mandatory sentence is a decision setting made by the court where judicial discretion is controlled by law. Persons guilty of some crimes should be punished with at least minimum number of years in prison. Mandatory sentencing is believed to reduce crime rate and is fair to all criminals hence ensuring uniformity in sentencing. This sentencing has been effective since potential criminals and repeat offenders try to avoid
It is a matter of opinion as to whether this is actually accurate, but it does appear to be logical (Payne, 1997). This is an important analogy because of the fact that many individuals who are targeted for a particular reason will often attempt to find a disparity issue that they can use to insist that they have been treated unfairly. In drug use or sale issues, these people are