African American Criminal Justice System

The criminal justice system today is just a redesigned way to limit the freedom of African Americans. Today, even though African American men only make up a little over 6% of the population, they make up over 40% of the people that are incarcerated. Part of the reason this stat is so disproportional is because of history. Historically African Americans have been oppressed first through slavery, and then through the Jim Crow laws and segregation, and now through the criminal justice system. The criminal justice system today targets African Americans through movements like the war on drugs and through laws like “stand your ground”. The war on drugs is just one example of issues in America have been criminalized to oppress African Americans. The war on drugs turned drug use and addiction into a
The war on drugs movement targets African Americans and incarcerates them for very minor crimes. Then there are laws like “stand your ground”. This law states that as long as the person that committed the crime claims that they felt threatened, even if the situation may not support that claim, then the whatever action they took to defend themselves is no longer considered a crime. The reason that this law is such a problem is because it is up to a judge and jury, which in many states will be predominately white, to decide whether the actions taken by the person that felt threatened were justified. White judges and juries are going to side with and not convict White people a lot more than they will African Americans. In the example given in the film it was a White man that killed an African American teenager. If the roles had been reversed, and it was an African American man that had killed a White teenager, the jury probably would have found the White man