Structural Racism in the American Justice System

The Criminal Justice system is rooted deeply in America’s racist past. The years after the war on crime and the war on drugs, our criminal justice system has led to a system where we have 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prison population. The system also is profoundly racist, with massive disparities. Black individuals are 700% more likely to go to prison than their white counterparts. We must identify the shortcomings of the system and look for ways to rehabilitate it constructively. Part of fixing our criminal justice system is basing our approaches on empirical research. It is important that we base both our critiques and our solutions on sound, informed evidence. 

My current research interests are largely two-fold. The first area focuses on state-level sentencing reforms and the effect they have on various components of imprisonment, most notably racial disparities (both among the general population and among women) and differences in the rates of male and female incarceration. The second area revolves around racial disparities in justice outcomes at a more local level. The latter is what my presentation will be on.

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