Jason Shockley
Is the Criminal Justice System Bias
By: David Atkins
Abstract This paper will ask several questions and hopefully answer most of those questions. Questions like is the criminal justice system bias against the poor and is the criminal justice system bias against minorities. We then explore some of the possible solutions to the problems that could cause biases. We then look at a study done on several communities where relations between police and the public had repaired their relationship.
Body It’s easy to understand why people see the criminal justice system as biased. Our of all of our states prisoners forty percent can not even read; and sixty-seven percent did not have full-time employment when they were arrested. So there are more uneducated people in prison then there are 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 compare the wealthy lawbreakers to poor lawbreakers is the wide difference between the amount of wealthy people and poor people we have in our population. “In 1989, the wealthiest one percent of United States households owned nearly forty percent of the nation’s wealth. The wealthiest twenty percent owned more than eighty percent of the nation’s wealth. That leaves precious little for the rest” (Cole, 2000). This isn’t just true with adults, but with children and teenagers too. The number of poor/under-funded schools in America far outweighs the number of wealthy schools in America. That’s probably the main reason our system appears to be unfair against the poor. The reason that any 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 American’s will probably not want to believe that our criminal