Racialized penal practices and their systemic effects

penal practices racialized?

There is much controversy with regard to race and to the role it plays in shaping the way penal laws are interpreted. Some are inclined to believe that the contemporary prison industrial complex reinforces discriminatory attitudes with regard to non-white individuals. Skin color has come to represent one of the principal reasons behind harsh behaviors that the penal system puts across toward particular racial groups. In spite of its apparent transparency, the justice system seems to fail in influencing law enforcement agents to treat everyone equally. Many of these respective individuals gradually come to believe that there would nothing abnormal with treating persons belonging to certain racial groups differently.

With the number of individuals behind bars experiencing a constant increase, it appears to be difficult for the authorities to employ unbiased thinking when it comes to non-white people. "In this era of color-blind racism, there has been a corresponding shift from de jure racism codified explicitly into the law and legal systems to a de facto racism where people of color, especially African-Americans, are subject to unequal protection of the laws, excessive surveillance, extreme segregation, and neo-slave labor via incarceration, all in the name of crime control." (Brewer, 626) Crime control is thus considered to be an important problem today and by discriminating against particular racial groups, law enforcement agencies believe they can improve conditions in society as a whole.

Physical differences have come to be methods used to define the status associated with some individuals and the reason why law enforcement agents resort to using harsh attitudes toward these respective people. The authorities practically guide themselves in accordance with stereotypes when coming across particular types of people. Racial dynamics are being used with the purpose to restructure the social order and redistribute resources along certain racial lines.

The U.S. In particular has had a long history with using racial aspects as a motive to discriminate individuals and to provide non-whites with harsher penalties than the rest of the population. One can go as far as to say that the contemporary justice system has inspired from the slavery and segregation periods in designing attitudes that it currently employs toward non-white persons. "Indeed, this perspective argues that the criminal justice system is inherently racialized as a result of the disproportionate representation of people of color as both victims and perpetuators of crime." (Johnson)

Many tend to ignore the fact that penal practices are racialized by simply considering that non-white individuals are predisposed to committing crimes on account of a series of policies and procedures that provide them with lesser chances to succeed and that are thus influential in getting them to employ criminal lifestyles. Indeed, this is an important factor in determining people's probability to engage in criminal activities. Civil Justice has a tendency to express more supportive thoughts toward powerful individuals, even with the fact that this reflects negatively on underprivileged groups (Brewer, 626).