{"slice_names":["facebook_like","facebook","twitter","linkedin","email","comments"],"slice_params":{"facebook_like":[],"facebook":{"share_amount":"2288"},"twitter":{"short_url":"http:\/\/huff.to\/1gbmSo8","tweet_text":"1 In 3 Black Males Will Go To Prison In Their Lifetime, Report Warns","views_amount":"442"},"linkedin":{"linkedin_amount":"0"},"email":{"emails_amount":"277","emails_title":"1 In 3 Black Males Will Go To Prison In Their Lifetime, Report Warns","emails_text":"One in every three black males born today can expect to go to prison at some point in their life, compared with one in every six Latino males, and one in every 17 white males, if current incarceration trends continue.\r\n\r\nThese are among the many pieces of evidence cited by the Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based group that advocates for prison reform, in a report on the staggering racial disparities<\/a> that permeate the American criminal justice system.\r\n\r\nThe report was submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Committee this week in advance of the U.N.\u2019s review of American compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights later this month. It argues that racial disparity pervades \u201cevery stage of the United States criminal justice system, from arrest to trial to sentencing.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cRacial minorities are more likely than white Americans to be arrested,\u201d the report explains. \u201cOnce arrested, they are more likely to be convicted; and once convicted, they are more likely to face stiff sentences.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe report's findings lead its authors to conclude that the U.S. is violating the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which states that all citizens must be treated equally under the law. The U.S. ratified the treaty in 1992.\r\n\r\nCentral to the report\u2019s argument is the simple fact that African-American and, to a lesser extent, Hispanic men, are more likely to spend time behind bars than their white counterparts, according to recent data from the U.S. government.\r\n\r\nThe reasons for this discrepancy are widely debated, but the report discourages readers from blaming either the higher-than-average crime rate among blacks and Latinos in the U.S. or the presence of deliberate racism in the criminal justice system. \r\n\r\nWhile those factors may contribute to the problem, the reasons go much deeper, the report contends.\r\n\r\nThe problem begins with police activity. According to Justice Department data cited in the report, police arrested black youth for drug crimes at more than twice the rate of white youth between 1980 and 2010, nationwide. Yet a 2012 study from the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that white high-school students were slightly more likely to have abused illegal drugs within the past month than black students of the same age.\r\n\r\nBlacks are also far more likely than whites to be stopped by the police while driving. The Sentencing Project report largely attributes the racial disparities in both traffic and drug arrests to \u201cimplicit racial bias\u201d on the part of the police.\r\n\r\n\u201cSince the nature of law enforcement frequently requires police officers to make snap judgments about the danger posed by suspects and the criminal nature of their activity, subconscious racial associations influence the way officers perform their jobs,\u201d the report contends.\r\n\r\nThe disparities don\u2019t end with arrests. Because blacks and Latinos are generally poorer than whites, they are more likely to rely on court-appointed public defenders, who tend to work for agencies that are underfunded and understaffed. In 2012, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, more than 70 percent of public defender offices reported that they were struggling to come up with the funding needed to provide adequate defense services to poor people. By last March, the problem was so bad that Attorney General Eric Holder declared the public defense system to be in a \"state of crisis<\/a>.\u201d\r\n\r\nRacial disparities within the justice system have been exacerbated by the war on drugs, the report argues. The drug war led the country\u2019s population of incarcerated drug offenders to soar from 42,000 in 1980 to nearly half a million in 2007. From 1999 to 2005, African Americans constituted about 13 percent of drug users, but they made up about 46 percent of those convicted for drug offenses, the report points out. \r\n\r\nMarc Mauer, director of the Sentencing Project and an author of the report, said he\u2019s optimistic that the country\u2019s criminal justice policies are starting to change. \u201cThere\u2019s much that needs to be done, but we haven\u2019t seen this much progress around these issues in quite some time,\u201d he said.\r\n\r\nHe mentioned the Justice Department\u2019s recent decision<\/a> to scale back the war on drugs and a series of bipartisan state laws <\/a>aimed at reducing harsh prison sentences for low-level drug offenders.\r\n\r\nThe report offers 10 specific steps that the U.S. could take to cut down on such disparities, including fully funding the country\u2019s public defenders, prohibiting law-enforcement officials from engaging in racial profiling and establishing a commission to develop recommendations for \u201csystemic reform\u201d of the country\u2019s police bureaus and courts.\r\n\r\nWhether the U.N. review could contribute to these changes isn\u2019t clear. Even if the U.N. finds the U.S. to be in violation of the treaty, the range of repercussions is essentially limited to scolding.\r\n\r\nStill, Mauer said, \u201cIt\u2019s a question of making a moral statement.\""},"comments":{"comments_amount":"2399"}}}