Running head: RACIAL DISPARITIES IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM1

Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System: A Psychological Analysis

Jasmyn M. Stevens

Africana Studies – Fall 2019

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Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System: A Psychological Analysis

Over the course of this semester in Africana Studies, it has been impressed upon

us to delve deeper into issues that directly and indirectly affect the black community. We

have discussed topics ranging from the school-to-prison pipeline to racial disparities

within the criminal justice system. The latter topic is the focus of this paper. For this

paper, I have been tasked with explaining how an issue discussed in this class, racial

disparity, relates to my major of psychology. Luckily, the discipline of psychological

science has much to say about racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

Reforming the United States criminal justice system has been a contentious area of

debate for decades. In particular, activists have been pushing for reform within the prison

system. As of 2019, the United States prison system currently incarcerates approximately

2.3 million individuals (Sawyer & Wagner, 2019). That number becomes even more

astounding when you put it into global terms. America contains less than ten percent of

the world’s population, yet it contains roughly twenty-five percent of the world’s

prisoners. This disparity is caused by a multitude of factors, the main one being mass

incarceration due to the War on Drugs. This “war” that targeted minorities within the

U.S., namely African Americans, led to the exponential increase in the prison population

and the disparities that persist to this day. However, to get a more complete look at these

disparities, you must take a step back and look at the criminal justice system as a whole.

Racial disparities in the criminal justice don’t just appear, rather they compound upon one

another at each step in the process, from arrest to sentencing to jury selection. An article

by psychology professor Margaret Kovera, around which I am basing this paper, (2019)
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analyzes these steps and identifies the three main areas where disparities exist: policing,

prison populations, and participation on juries.

Kovera further divides policing into four the categories of stops, searches, force,

and arrests. These are areas where research has shown that disparities are prevalent. This

starts to make more sense when the topic of police officer discretion is considered.

Paradoxically, the lowest level officer, the patrol officer, has the most discretion. They

have the ability to choose who to search, who to stop-and-frisk, and whether or not to

arrest someone. In theory, this system would allow officers to use their judgement to

determine whether or not a situation genuinely requires police intervention. In reality,

however, this abundant discretion often leaves the door open for implicit racial bias.

Research has shown that African Americans are more likely to be the target of a

traffic stop than Whites or Hispanics (Langton & Durose, 2013). For example, in 2018,

an analysis was done of the traffic stops in North Carolina since 1999. The findings

showed that “the odds of a Black driver appearing in the NC traffic stop data were 60–

70% higher than the odds of a Black driver in the population in which the traffic stop

occurred” (Kovera, 2019). Just as with traffic stops, Blacks are more likely to be searched

than Whites or Hispanics. Moreover, psychologists found this to be true even in cases

when the search was less likely to yield any contraband (Goff,

Lloyd, Geller, Raphael, & Glaser, 2016). Force was another area in which disparities

were present. In addition to African Americans being 3.5 times more likely to be shot by

police, a 2002 psychological study discovered that black men are more likely than white

men to be shot by mistake, an occurrence known as shooter bias (Correll, Park, Judd, &
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Wittenbrink, 2002; Ross, 2015). Finally, the racial disparities in police arrests should

come as no surprise. Law enforcement officers arrest members of certain races

significantly more than other races for the same offense (Brame, Bushway, Paternoster, &

Turner, 2014; Piquero, 2015). This is partly explained by legislative decisions (i.e. crack

vs. cocaine).

The next area of disparity Kovera critiques is that of prison populations.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2019), African Americans represent 13% of the

American population but over 30% of the American prison system (Bronson & Carson,

2019). Racial bias during arrests accounts for most of the disparity, but things like pretrial

processing, charging decisions, pretrial detention, plea deals, and sentencing also play a

significant role (Beck & Blumenstein, 2018).

When it comes to pretrial processing, prosecutors have a significant amount of

discretion in terms of the severeness of the charges brought against the defendant, as well

as the acceptance or denial of the defendant’s plea deal (Kovera, 2019). This discretion,

that often leads to racial bias, becomes even more apparent when you realize that

prosecutors are more likely to charge a black defendant than a white defendant with

something that carries a longer sentence. These types of charging decisions lead to the

racial disparities that are present today. Pretrial detention is another area in which

disparities are evident. Black people are more likely to be denied bail that white people,

even for similar crimes. This leads to a disproportionate number of African Americans

being held in jails across the country. Currently, our system is consistently detaining

individuals who have not been convicted of any crime whatsoever, which is something
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that has been shown to increase the likelihood of conviction. It is astounding that the

overwhelming majority of people held before their trial are there simply because they

cannot afford bail, not because they are a flight risk or a danger to society. I believe that

this is a glaring flaw in our criminal justice. The purpose of prison or jail time is to punish

an offender who has committed a crime, not to punish an individual for being poor.

Additionally, plea deals are another potential area for bias. While not much research has

been done on this particular area, what has been done shows that African Americans are

at a slight disadvantage. Black defendants are less likely to be offered plea deals that

require community service or other lenient alternatives to being incarcerated; instead their

deals consist mainly of actual prison time and parole (Kutateladze et al., 2014). Finally,

sentencing is the last area in this category that is, statistically speaking, plagued with

racial disparities. This is also the area in which the majority of research has been

conducted. For example, California’s population is only 7% black, yet African Americans

make up a full quarter of the state’s prison population (Ehlers, Schiraldi, & Ziedenberg,

2004). One study analyzing data from Georgia found that, even after controlling for

outside factors like crime severity, black people were still more likely than any other race

to receive longer prison sentences (Burch, 2015).

The last area that Kovera discusses is racial disparities in jury participation. It is

suggested that the lack of diversity of juries is a factor in prison population disparities.

This is for a variety of reasons. According to the data, one in thirteen black people are

disenfranchised, a rate much higher than that of white people (Chung, 2018). In practice,

this means that a significant number of African Americans are not eligible for jury duty.
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Moreover, those that are selected are usually dismissed by attorneys for various reasons.

This area of jury participation has not been the subject of research as the other two, but

the studies that have been conducted are significant. The presence of even one black

person in the jury pool “effectively eliminated the racial disparity in convictions”

(Kovera, 2019). This finding is startling when you really consider it. The fact that the

presence of even one African American has the potential power to fix the disparities in

this section of the criminal justice system should provide an enormous amount of

encouragement to those who seek to enact criminal justice reform.

With all of this information, it is impossible to ignore the importance of a

psychological analysis when considering racial disparities. In this paper I have given

facts and critiques, but that is just the first step. Using this information, and other

available resources, is one of the most important steps to enacting policy and fixing these

glaring disparities in our criminal justice system.

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References

Beck, A. J., & Blumenstein, A. (2018). Racial disproportionality in U.S. state prisons:

Accounting for the effects of racial and ethnic difference in criminal involvement,

arrests, sentencing, and time served. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 34,

853–883.

Brame, R., Bushway, S. D., Paternoster, R., & Turner, M. G. (2014). Demographic

patterns of cumulative arrest prevalence by ages 18 and 23. Crime and

Delinquency, 60, 471–486.

Bronson, J., & Carson, E. A. (2019). Prisoners in 2017. Washington, DC: Bureau of

Justice Statistics.

Burch, T. (2015). Skin color and the criminal justice system: Beyond Black-White

disparities in

sentencing. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 12, 395–420.

Chung, J. (2018). Felony disenfranchisement: A primer. Washington, DC: The Sentencing

Project.

Correll, J., Park, B., Judd, C. M., & Wittenbrink, B. (2002). The police officer’s dilemma:

Using

ethnicity to disambiguate potentially threatening individuals. Journal of

Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 1314–1329.

Ehlers, S., Schiraldi, V., & Ziedenberg, J. (2004). Still striking out: Ten years of

California’s three strikes. Washington, DC: Justice Policy Institute.

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Goff, P. A., Lloyd, T., Geller, A., Raphael, S., & Glaser, J. (2016). The science of justice:

Race, arrests, and police use of force. Los Angeles, CA: Center for Policing

Equity.

Kovera, M.B. (2019). Racial disparities in the criminal justice system: prevalence,

causes, and a search for solutions. Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 00, No. 00, 2019,

pp. 1--26

doi: 10.1111/josi.12355

Kutateladze, B. L., Andiloro, N. R., Johnson, B. D., & Spohn, C. C. (2014). Cumulative

disadvantage: Examining racial and ethnic disparity in prosecution and sentencing,

Criminology, 52, 514–551.

Langton, L., & Durose, M. (2013). Police behavior during traffic and street stops, 2011.

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Ross, C. T. (2015). A multi-level Bayesian analysis of racial bias in police shootings at

the county-level in the United States, 2011–14. PLOS One, 10(11), e0141854.

Sawyer, W., & Wagner, P. (2019). Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019. Retrieved

from https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html.
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