{"id":85809,"date":"2018-03-14T08:00:30","date_gmt":"2018-03-14T12:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sentencing.net\/?p=85809"},"modified":"2019-11-06T11:03:33","modified_gmt":"2019-11-06T16:03:33","slug":"sentencing-bias","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sentencing.net\/sentencing\/sentencing-bias","title":{"rendered":"Sentencing Bias in the U.S. | Why Justice Isn’t Blind"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t

President Obama, in a speech at Howard University in 2016, provided some thoughtful insight on the existence of implicit bias in our criminal justice system, stating, \u201cAnd we knew . . . that even the good cops with the best of intentions \u2013 including, by the way, African-American police officers \u2013 might have unconscious biases, as we all do.\u201d Justice Anthony Kennedy recently opined in a Court opinion that \u201cBias is easy to attribute to others and difficult to discern in oneself.\u201d But what about sentencing bias? Bias, implicit and explicit, is something that has been, and continues to be, a major challenge to our criminal justice system. Justice should be blind, and we should strive for those words etched on the front of the U.S. Supreme Court \u2013 \u201cEqual Justice Under Law.\u201d Yet, time and again our criminal justice seems to fall far short of the mark.<\/p>\n

One in every 10 black men in his 30s is incarcerated on any given day. More than 60% of people in prison in the U.S. are people of color. Hispanic men are close to two times more likely than white men to be incarcerated. These statistics seem to suggest that sentencing bias against minorities still plays a big role in sentencing decisions today.<\/p>\n

The Color of Justice \u2013 a Recent Report Revealing Continuing Bias in Sentencing<\/h2>\n

The Sentencing Project, a national non-profit organization focused on U.S. criminal justice issues, recently put out a report on sentencing bias in state courts, titled \u201cThe Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons.\u201d Focused on state criminal sentencing, this report reinforces\"sentencingwhat we generally believe about our current criminal justice system:\u00a0 it is not entirely blind, but rather disfavors people of color.<\/p>\n

America remains the world leader in incarcerating its own citizens. More than 1.3 million people are held in state prisons around the country. Just like the first step to solving a problem is acknowledging there is a problem to begin with, meaningful reform to our criminal justice system will not occur without acknowledging the disparities of prison inmates based on race and ethnicity. Sentencing bias is a problem.<\/p>\n

The \u201cColor of Justice\u201d report focuses on state prisoners because the majority of prisoners are sentenced at the state level rather than the federal level. Some of the key findings of the report are as follows.<\/p>\n