Race and the Criminal Justice System

The papers in this special issue examine different aspects of the racial disproportionality in the various stages of the criminal justice system. Authors attribute the differences to different socioeconomic factors contributing to involvement in crime, different rates of arrest, more intensive police patrol patterns in minority neighborhoods, labeling as a result of early encounters with police, and inevitably racial discrimination. But that discrimination cannot account for more than a fraction of the disproportionality. Any such discrimination should be purged wherever possible, but major changes in the disproportionality will require larger changes in the general society outside the criminal justice system.