This rings true for all races, because most Americans have a bias concerning other ethnic groups and nationalities. William Ide, who writes for the American Bar Association journal, said that at a Summit on Crime and Violence, “many reported that racial and ethnic bias is a strong contributor to disorder in this country.” It is hard for many Americans, especially whites, to understand this problem because it is rare for a white to experience true racism or be selected by their skin to be arrested. The ABA Council on Racial and Ethnic Justice, created after the Rodney King incident and ensuing riots, believes that, “…the elimination of bias in the justice system is perhaps the most important and difficult challenge facing the country and the legal profession.” The challenge must be tackled in a very serious manner, for the very fabric of our nation relies upon it. Police officers must be educated about racial profiling and selective enforcement, because they may not even realize that they have participated in the act.

Jerome Miller points out that, “The country is already at a point where three out of every four black males will be arrested, jailed, and acquire a criminal record by age 35” (215). There is no comparable statistics for white men, and therein lies our nation’s problem. Since the 1980s, the African American population has risen slightly, while the number of African Americans incarcerated, especially men, has jumped through the roof. The most significant cause of this increase has been the war on drugs, which numerous criminologists and sociologists see as a major issue that needs to be addressed. When the war on drugs began in the mid 1980s, African American inmates arrested on drug charges composed about 7 percent. By 1991 it had risen to 25 percent, an increase of about 447 percent. The increase of whites jailed for drug use was only about 115 percent. The war on drugs obviously targets African American communities, and the evidence to support the facts is endless. Michael Tonry, author of Malign Neglect: Race, Crime and Punishment in America, argues that there was no need for the war on drugs to begin with, as drug use was steadily declining. He also makes a case that any police officer at the time the war on drugs began knew that it would target “young blacks and Hispanics” (91). The most controversial argument made relating the war on drugs to imbalanced black arrests concerns the discrepancy between sentencing for crack-cocaine and cocaine powder. Crack-cocaine, a drug that is usually associated with black communities, has a much harsher sentencing structure than cocaine powder, a drug associated with movie stars. The Federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 made the sentencing structure for possession of five grams of powder cocaine earn a maximum sentence of one year, while the same amount of crack-cocaine comes with a five year mandatory minimum sentence. This harsh differential screams inequality. The only difference between the two drugs is the social and racial differences between the users. Blacks are being arrested more often and held longer than whites for identical offenses. Such blatant divergences cannot be ignored any longer.

The land of the free must be colorblind; if it is not, none of us will ever truly be free. Socio-cultural racism has injected itself into the veins of our country. Everyday people experience racism in a country that has always prided itself on equality. Unless equality means singling out a race and sending lopsided amounts of them to jail, we have yet to reach that goal. Racial disparities exist at every step of the criminal justice system. From detention and arrest to incarceration, blacks are excessively represented compared to their population size. People inherently do not believe they discriminate, but this is a lie. Discriminatory beliefs are built into the children of this country, and some of those children will grow and become law enforcement officers. Racism and discrimination has also rooted itself in the woodwork of our nation’s justice system so badly that the more research done, the easier it becomes to believe justice does not exist. The overwhelming majority of government officials are white men, as goes with lawyers, judges and police department officials. These men mostly grow up in a white majority, and care little about black communities unless it has to do with how to make them weaker.

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