A newly published study in which researchers reviewed nearly 20 years of previous scholarly work concluded there is no evidence that minorities are treated differently by the criminal justice system than white Americans.
“In recent years it has become common belief within the scholarly community as well as the general public that the criminal justice system is biased due to race and class issues,” professors Christopher J. Ferguson and Sven Smith of Stetson University wrote in the introduction to the paper appearing in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior.
“We sought to examine this with meta-analysis. Our results suggest that for most crimes, criminal adjudication in the US is not substantially biased on race or class lines,” they said.
The academics reviewed 51 studies conducted from 2005 to 2022.
What they found is that different ethnicities commit crimes at different rates, bringing them in contact with the criminal justice system more or less often. Once in the system, they are treated essentially the same.
Ferguson and Smith concluded that “overrepresentation among perpetrators of crime explains incarceration disparities to a greater degree than does racism in the criminal justice system,” The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley highlighted.
“In other words, blacks are incarcerated at higher rates than other groups because they commit crimes at higher rates, not due to systemic bias,” he further explained.
In fact, according to Ferguson and Smith, “some studies, converse to expectations, find that Black defendants receive more lenient sentences than Whites.”
They argued that political narratives such as critical race theory often drive people’s misguided views on the issue.
“CRT is a controversial theory emanating from law schools that suggests, despite the … civil rights movement in the 1960s ending racial segregation, the US legal system remains de facto racist and White supremacist,” they explained.
The sociologists said researchers sometimes take this bias into the work they conduct “with the presumption of disparities.”
For example, Ferguson and Smith found some researchers did not lay out what criteria they would use to prove their hypotheses true.
“Put simply: it is helpful to know what data we’d expect to see if the theory is wrong and what the threshold for rejecting the theory might be. Without such clear guidelines, theories may persist endlessly despite having weak evidence.”
“That may be particularly true for theories with significant moral and emotional valence, which certainly is the case for questions of race and class disparities in criminal adjudication,” they added.
When Ferguson and Smith combined the data from the 51 studies, the numbers “did not reach evidentiary standards to support the hypothesis that race or class are predictive of criminal adjudication” when it comes to all types of crime across the board, The Daily Wire reported.
When drug crimes were examined, “small disparities were found … suggesting that race/ethnicity is associated with between 1.6 to 1.8% of the variance in criminal adjudication” among blacks and Hispanics versus whites.
Ferguson and Smith found that the civil rights movement, which set out to establish equality under the law, has largely succeeded.
The researchers concluded, “Overall, the criminal justice system appears to be remarkably neutral … either when compared to the historical US criminal justice system, or historical systems throughout history.”
