Racial and Class Inequality

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Racial and Class Inequality
The African American men have in recent days faced the greatest augment in criminal justice supervision. Racial disparity is evident when one tallies the number of Blacks and the Whites who have ever been confined as opposed to just being in prison on a given day (Western and Pettit 38). Historical accounts reveal that thirteen percent of black men compared to two percent of white men in their early thirties were in prison during the late 1980s. A decade later the rates had increased by a half and the risk of being incarcerated among high school dropouts tripled. Further, at the end of the 1990s, fourteen percent of white and about sixty percent of black male high school dropouts in their early thirties had been incarcerated at one point in time (Western and Pettit 41). In this sense, elevated rates of incarceration among African-American men are on many occasions explained through the variations in the sequences of detention and felonious conduct. Moreover, African Americans are 8-times more probable to be imprisoned as compared to white Americans. African Americans are overrepresented among incarcerated inmates based on racial differences in crime and arrest statistics, and in the early 1990s, they accounted for more than 50 percent of all homicide arrests and about 47 percent of homicide inmates (Western and Pettit 38).
In several ways, there have been mechanisms by which the institutions of crime and law have reproduced racial and class inequalities among Americans. One of the primary mechanisms is through concealing of inequalities where the effects of incarceration on inequality are huge. For instance, in the 1990s there was a period of economic prosperity presented by improved job openings for many African American men; however, incarceration outweighed this elem...