The Legal Injustices Against African American Women and Minorities in America

While human rights are inborn, the American history is one that has not lived up to such expectations. Implicitly, inalienable human rights are bestowed by God, and should not be subject to political factions and intolerant governments. As men constitute government structures by formulating laws to govern them, they should be true and just to everyone, irrespective of their background, religious affiliation, cultural inclination, gender and so on, as God would have intended it to be.

While Thomas Jefferson is the harbinger of human rights, he lived his life not according to these words. Thomas Jefferson’s hypocrisy becomes evident as informed by the mere fact that he was a slave master. It is a terrible irony that he came up with these statements about equal rights when, in fact, he was a slave-owner. Centuries later, the system that Thomas Jefferson helped create is still infected with this same hypocrisy when it comes to segregation, especially towards women. This paper examines the legal injustices meted against African America women and minorities in America.

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The Legal Injustices Against African American Women and Minorities in America

African American women are often presumed guilty as far as the American criminal justice system is concerned. Few studies have dedicated their efforts to analyzing the links between race, sex, and fairness in the criminal justice system. The system currently features a disproportionate occurrence of arrests, convictions, and incarcerations for African American women as opposed to white women. As such, the incarceration rate for African American women is soaring at a rate that is not proportional to the entire population of women. French illustrates these inequalities particularly the population of women in the American prison system is predominantly African American (French 322).

A study by Crawford investigated the impacts of both race and gender aspects on consistent felonies (Crawford 264). The research assessed the routines of women criminals incarcerated in the Florida Department of Corrections. The author tried to reveal ways in which minorities and women might be disadvantaged in the application of the routine offender law. Crawford concluded that the same contextual indicators, which enhanced sentencing of black men with regards to routine sentencing law, were related to black women.

Moreover, women and minorities were almost twice as likely to be habitualized compared to white females, controlling for lawfully relevant parameters including the seriousness of the crime and previous record. The race sector, as well as its supporters, alleges that discrimination informs the treatment of women and minorities in the criminal justice structure. For example, blacks and whites are arrested and convicted at different rates and obtain diverse sentences for related crimes (Crawford 264). If one does not fully understand crimes, charges of unequal treatment may appear plausible. The most wanted culprits for the increased rate of minorities and women in prison are a subjective legal structure and draconian drug enforcement laws.

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The Legal Injustices Against African American Women and Minorities in America

Crimes related to drugs increased the incarceration rate of black women to about nine times more than whites. Therefore, Crawford alleges that the habitual offender law is being used in a racially unfair way against women and minorities. Russell-Brown also analyzed the inadequate treatment of women in the justice system. Furthermore, Russell-Brown indicated the main issues concerned with the analysis of women and minorities in the justice system. For instance, she alleges that there is no seminal article providing information on women and minorities with regards to crimes (Russell-Brown 3). In fact, the available study on women can be categorized into two; race and felony; gender and felony while in the former they are considered synonymously with black females. The author’s analysis is integrated discussions on main models of women and minorities criminality.

The majority of writers highlight factors associated with race or gender but they fail to investigate the connection between the two factors. To some extent, women and minority crime are regarded to be considerably associated with; gender and other demographic features; economic deficit; status equality between genders; unique socialization trends; sexism and discrimination. Current studies on women and minorities in the criminal justice structure indicates that there are regularly compared to minority males due to race and white females due to gender.

This is a problem especially in the racial. There is scanty research on the issue of justice as far as African American women are concerned. Moreover, women in the justice system have received little attention, particularly because social studies have put so much emphasis on African American male and white females when it comes to gender. What becomes evident, however, is that present day research has failed to take into account special groups of African American women.

Whereas a section of scholars argue that black women highly mistreated and racially profiled based on their cultural orientation, others assert that they are denied economic wellbeing, an aspect that makes their lives unbearable. On the other hand, African American women are not accorded fair judgment by the criminal justice system. The connection between race, sex, and social class has been employed against the plight of African American women. In the end, the system that Thomas Jefferson helped create is still hypocritical more than two centuries later. Law has become a tool for a few powerful individuals, who would use it with partiality. The legal system, for instance, lacks credibility, especially as it applies to minority groups like African Americans. Offenders from minority groups are still treated as objects. In the end, the justice system has metamorphosed into a proponent of bigotry.

Works Cited

Crawford, Charles. Gender, race, and habitual offender sentencing in Florida. Criminology, 3 (1), 2000: 264.
French, Laurence. The incarcerated black female the case of social double jeopardy. Journal of Black Studies, 8(3), 2008: 322
Russell-Brown, Katheryn. Underground Codes. New York: New York University Press. 2004: 3