If Someone Disputes Racism in the Criminal Justice System, Show Them This

At his Washington Post blog, Cato alumnus Radley Balko has cultivated a running list of data-driven reports that show persistent, measurable, widespread, and common racial disparities in criminal justice enforcement. In police stops, sentencing, pretrial detention, the death penalty, and a host of other areas, enforcement disproportionately affects African Americans and Latinos. For those who study or work in criminal justice for a living, the racial disparities are glaring and the quantitative research supports our policy prescriptions. But most people aren’t criminal justice wonks, and what Radley has created is a great public education resource about what our system is doing all around the nation. 

The abundance of evidence Radley collected shows that our criminal justice system harasses and punishes racial minorities more harshly than whites. These findings are important because so many critics of justice reform and of activist groups like Black Lives Matter deny that many of these disparities exist. The denial of these problems—which have been well-known or, at least, strongly suspected in many American minority communities for all of living memory—precludes the identification of any potential remedies. This clearinghouse of peer-reviewed academic papers, government reports, and books that measure racial disparities marks a new starting point for individuals who want to understand our criminal justice system.

Read the whole thing here.

Thank you, Radley.