Is the Criminal Justice System Bias Essay Example for Free

Is the Criminal Justice System Bias evidenceAbstractThis paper will ask several caputs and hopefully answer most of those questions. Questions like is the iniquitous justice agreement bias against the brusque and is the cruel justice remains bias against minorities. We then research rough of the possible solutions to the problems that could ca theatrical role biases. We then look at a study d iodin on several communities where dealings between law of nature and the earthly concern had repaired their relationship.BodyIts easy to understand why people follow up the criminal justice system as one-sided. Our of either of our states prisoners forty shargon discharge non point read and sixty-seven percent did non ca-ca full-time employment when they were arrested. So thither atomic number 18 more than uneducated people in prison then there be educated people. This seems like then that our system of criminal justice is operated on an unequal system against poor or uneducated people. However, one of the problems we run into when we try to comp are the wet lawbreakers to poor lawbreakers is the wide dissimilarity between the amount of wealthy people and poor people we energize in our commonwealth. In 1989, the wealthiest one percent of United States households owned nearly forty percent of the nations wealth. The wealthiest twenty percent owned more than eighty percent of the nations wealth. That leaves precious little for the rest (Cole, 2000). This isnt just true with adults, but with children and teenagers too.The number of poor/under-funded schools in America distantthermost fall outweighs the number of wealthy schools in America. Thats belike the main reason our system appears to be unfair against the poor. The reason that e real pole or nation wide research will be bias against the poor or lower class is because there is a much larger poor/lower class population than a wealthy/high class population. Most Ameri can buoys will pro bably not want to believe that our criminal justice system is not operated on equality. Afterall our nations peremptory Court even has the saying Equal Justice Under Law written above the entranceway. on that point are several very famous autonomous Courts decisions that uphold equality for the poor. In Gideon v. Wainwright they made it a law that the state must provide a lawyer to all defendants who have been charged with a serious abuse and cannot afford a lawyer. In Miranda v. Arizona the Supreme Court decided that police must provide all suspects with an attorney.These court decisions might be a little misleading since both were decided during the time of Chief Justice Earl Warren, who was strongly liberal and very supportive of economic equality. Since then the principles of equality from both decisions for Gideon v. Wainwright and Miranda v. Arizona have been cheated and twisted so that neither decisions are upheld to the full extent that they were intended (Cole, 2000). T hats enough bashing our court system. in that location are actually umpteen things that police moroseicers do witch can be biased. For example the Fourth Amendment says that we have a right against unlawful searches and seizures. However, police officers all the time and request their consent to search them or their belongings (without ever having any basis for suspicion) without ever informing them of their right to refuse the search. This isnt inescapably a bias against the poor but it makes sense to me that an officer would judge somebody on appearance. in that location is also the pith of passage we have to consider if law enforcement is bias to the poor. Say hypothetically some wealthy person is leading across the country to a birthday party. How are they going to travel? Most wealthy people would probably travel across country like that by means of flying. While flying, people do not come in contact with that many police officers nor are they in many positions where the y would normally break the law. However, say there is a poor person who is travelling the same distance to the same party but does not have the money to fly. The cheapest mode of transportation is definitely by way of buss. While traveling by buss there is definitely a larger chance of contact with the police than when traveling by air. There are also many more opportunities for offence to be charge upted while traveling on a buss. Again we have the situation where its not necessarily that the poor are treated differently but are maybe just in environments where discourtesy is committed more often, which would explain why it seems that the system is biased against them (Rothwax, 1996)So I feel like we could come to anagreement now that the criminal justice system is not necessarily biased against the poor at the law enforcement side of the criminal justice system. However, the court side of the criminal justice system seems indirectly biased against the poor, simply because eac h trial can be different depending on how much money they defense and the prosecution have available to them. instantaneously lets talk about other ways that the criminal justice system could be bias. What about look sharp? Are people treated differently depending on their ethnicity? Most people probably agree that there are some ethnic groups who are treated differently than other ethnic groups in the criminal justice system. Statistically minorities are disproportionately victimized by crime.African Americans are victimized at a rate of 150 percent high than whites (Cole, 2000). Blacks are typically more involved in almost either kind of crime more so than whites. These crimes can include rape, aggravated assault, and fortify robbery. Homicide is actually the number one leading cause of death among young black men. Most crime is interracial and so it could be argued, just as it can with the topic of biases against the poor that the reason for higher crime rates for black is b ecause most poverty stricken areas, or the inner city, have mass black populations. Therefore the criminals would be black, the victims would be black, and all the statistics that came from that area would rate blacks more prone to commit crime than whites. Now lets look at some cases. For instance the videotaped lacing of Rodney King by Los Angeles natural law Department officers was a huge eye-opener for most of America. It was said of that flogging that for many blacks saw that as interposition they expected from the police. They were not surprised by that beating what so ever.Curtis Tucker, a California Assemblyman, was quoted saying at a subsequent hearing on Los Angeles Police Department practices, When black people in Los Angeles see a police car approaching, they dont know whether justice will be meted out or whether judge, jury, and executioner is pulling up behind them. There was even this one officer who get the nickname the Mechanic because he would tune people up which apparently is police slang for beating up people. This Mechanic once testified that the beatings were widespread. When asked the question of weather he beat up people whom he arrested he replied, No. We just beat people up in general. If theyre on the street, pause around drug locations. JustIt was a show of force (Rothwax,1996). The officer even admitted that the majority of the beating victims were either black or Hispanic although he claimed that the attacks were not motivated by racial tension. There have been very disturbing patterns of corruption and brutality in the police force of almost every high-crime area studied.These corrupt acts include stealing from drug dealers, engaging in unlawful searches, seizures, and car stops, even dealing and using drugs. If instances like this is what our police force has come run finished to then our country is far worse off then I ever realized. I do however believe that this is probably a much smaller percentage than what some s tatistics would lead us to believe but it is not a problem that I believe can be overlooked. So what can be do? Can something be done? Are we as a country so far done for(p) that we can come back? I believe we can. I believe that we have become to far separate from the companionship. We have to bridge the gap that has grown between law enforcement/the criminal justice system and the public lower class people. How do we do that? The thing we need most is perspective (Walker, 1980). atomic number 53 thing that could be the answer to our problem is confederacy base policing. In Canada they passed the Police service put to work of 1990 that might be a intimately reference for our current agencies to look back on. What the Police Services Act did was make the Chief of Police responsible for society-oriented policing (Kuck, 2004). companionship based policing is both a philosophy and an organizational strategy that allows the police and community to work together in new ways to illuminate problems of crime, disorder and safety. It really only has two elements changing the methods and practice of the police and taking steps to piece a relationship between the police and the public (Groenewald, 2004). The Philosophy of community based policing is based off of the bringing close together that the public has a right to give their input on policing. It also relies on the idea that to find a solution for community problems both the police and the public must look away individual crimes and incidents, and instead try to find ways of confronting the more important community problems. What does community based policing look like though?Community based police officers need to be much more than mere crime fighters and must be public servants in many ways. Reforming the police alone, however, is not enough. Community support and assistance are also necessary. Community based policing therefore encompasses strategies to reorient the public who, forgood reasons, have been leery and distrustful of the police. Building partnerships between the police and communities is a major challenge that not many people or organizations have every really attempted. The philosophy of community based policing asks both the police and the public to take a leap of faith and a commitment to change. It would be a long process that would require drastic action to be taken at multiple levels import that there would be detailed planning necessary to turn philosophy into reality within the police and among the public.There was a study where Kuotsia Tom Liou from the University of Central Florida and Eugene G. Savage from Florida State University looked at the impact of community policing by looking at three neighborhoods in West Palm Beach, Florida before and after the executing of a community oriented policing program. Lets take a look at what they found. They had 3 communities with the first consisting of mainly white residents, mainly single-family homes, apartme nts, and small businesses. The second community was primarily black consisting of a concentrated public housing project, single family homes, apartments, small businesses, several churches, and a public middle school. The last community consisted of whites, Hispanics, blacks, and Haitians. The community was made up of single family homes, apartments, small businesses, and several churches. It was their goal to find out how community policing affects departure types of communities.The results of their study showed that after the community based policing had been going on sixty-eight percent of passeled citizens felt that crime had decreased. All age groups, race groups, and all three neighborhoods shared the belief that crime had decreased. Even if the crime rates had not gone down in reality it would still really help relations with police officers just that the citizens believe it had. In addition to the feeling like crime had gone down they also asked in their survey how they fe lt about the relationship after six months of the community policing.Among the respondents to the survey eighty-eight percent felt that the relationship between the police and their communities as getting better. We started this paper with the question of is the criminal justice system bias. We talked about the relationship between law enforcement and the public. We talked about one of the possibilities of how we could rebuild that relationship. We then looked at some research where a relationship was made better by use of community policing.Hopefully we can use research like this to help make this world a more perfect world.Reference PageCole, D. (2000). No equal justice, race and class in the American criminal justice system. New York New Press, The.Rothwax, H. (1996). Guilty The collapse of criminal justice. New York Random House.Walker, S. (1980). touristed justice. New York Oxford University Press.Kuck, H. (2004). Racial pride and consciousness trilogy Addressing hate crime a nd racial discord through community policing. Canadian Journal of Police and Security Services. Dec. 2004 243. Criminal Justice Collection. Web. 29 Oct. 2012.Groenewald, H. and Peake, G. (2004). Police Reform through Community-Based Policing. New York.Liou, Kuotsai. and Savage, Eugene. (1996). Citizen perception of community policing impact.