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Originally Posted by exterminator
It's the white man's fault because they're in prison?
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Specifically, the judge and prosecutor, who, statistically, are likely to be white.
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A new academic study of 58,000 federal criminal cases has found significant disparities in sentencing for blacks and whites arrested for the same crimes. The research led to the conclusion that African-Americans’ jail time was almost 60% longer than white sentences.
According to M. Marit Rehavi of the University of British Columbia and Sonja B. Starr, who teaches criminal law at the University of Michigan Law School, the racial disparities can be explained “in a single prosecutorial decision: whether to file a charge carrying a mandatory minimum sentence….Black men were on average more than twice as likely to face a mandatory minimum charge as white men were, holding arrest offense as well as age and location constant.” Prosecutors are about twice as likely to impose mandatory minimums on black defendants as on white defendants.
In federal cases, black defendants faced average sentences of 60 months, while the average for white defendants was only 38 months.
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http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stori...es?news=843984