The United States criminal justice system discriminates against minorities in many ways. Racial discrimination is present in numerous ways including mass incarceration, attacks on minority groups, traffic stops, post-conviction living, the “war on drugs”, biased jury selection, and over-policing in majority black neighborhoods – the criminal justice system’s violence and inequality toward minorities is fueled by a long history of racism.
In 2011, black women were incarcerated at 2.5 times the rate of white women, and Hispanic women were incarcerated at 1.4 times the rate of white women.
Blacks and Hispanics account for approximately 25 percent of the U.S. population but 58 percent of all prisoners. Hispanic men are three times – and black men nearly eight times – more likely than white men to be in prison. If African Americans and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rate as that of whites, America’s prison and jail population would be cut in half. One in six black men has been incarcerated as of 2011.
One study found that whites are six times less likely than blacks and four times less likely than Hispanics to be stopped by the police. African Americans have grown so used to being pulled over by the police that many speak of being stopped on account of DWB: “driving while black”. Perhaps more disconcerting is the fact that once pulled over, black and Hispanic drivers are more likely to be searched, fined, and arrested than those that are white.
Undocumented immigrants detained close to the border are legally deported, so anyone who enters the United States without authorization would be officially marked as a criminal. Between 2000 and 2010, immigration raids, detentions, and deportations increased. In some extreme immigration raids, hundreds of people – sometimes American citizens included – are detained without warning. As more undocumented immigrants have been swept into the criminal justice systems, punishments for violating immigration law are getting more severe. The 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act broadened the list of criminal acts that warranted deportation for noncitizens; the 1996 Welfare Reform Act denied even legal immigrants many public benefits; and the 2001 PATRIOT Act, denied noncitizens many basic civil rights. Today, those who reenter the United States after being deported are subject to two years’ imprisonment, those who reenter after being deported for breaking the law are subject to ten years in prison, and those who have been convicted of an aggravated felony who reenter after being deported can be imprisoned for twenty years.
Many of these policy shifts have been driven by the fear that immigrants documented and undocumented, increase America’s crime rate. However, social-scientific research has arrived at the opposite conclusion, finding that immigrants make America safer. Criminologist, Ramiro Martinez searched through homicide records in cities with large immigrant populations and found that border cities are some of the safest metropolitan areas in the country. Despite their high levels of poverty, many immigrant communities in large cities have strikingly low crime rates. Other studies have found that cities that experienced the largest increases in immigration, experienced the largest decreases in violent crime. To explain why immigrants commit so little crime, sociologists have pointed to their high rates of marriage and the presence of professionals in immigrant neighborhoods, as both factors are negatively associated with crime. They also have observed that immigrant neighborhoods often operate under a code of “informal social control”, which encourages neighbors to watch out for one another and to be mindful of criminal activity.
Since research and evidence points to the conclusion that immigrants, documented and undocumented, make America safer, you must wonder why so many Americans fear an “immigrant invasion” and why politicians continue to draft laws designed to make immigrants’ lives harder. Like blackness, foreignness has become intertwined with our notions of criminality, so much that immigration itself is conceived as a criminal act, as something that offends the American consciousness.