How The Criminal Justice System Is Racializing Our Democracy

The United States imprisons a higher percentage of its black population than apartheid South Africa did. Black men have a one-in-three chance of being incarcerated at one point in their lives, and receive sentences 20 percent longer than whites on-average when they are.

That this state of affairs is manifestly unfair should be obvious. But the unfairnesses may be deeper and more devastating than you think: the criminal justice system may well be undermining black Americans’ access to political power and life altogether.

At least, that’s what Vesla Weaver believes. A professor of political science at Yale, Weaver and her colleague, philosopher Jason Stanley, argued that the disproportionate targeting of black Americans by police is undermining their faith in the democratic system, turning our nation into a “racial democracy” where only some groups of people feel free to engage in political life. For instance, Weaver’s research finds that Americans who were incarcerated even for a short spell are a whopping 22 percent less likely to vote, even after accounting for the millions of people barred from voting after a felony conviction. The high rate of black incarceration, then, directly undermines the ability of black communities to elect leaders willing to fight for racial equality.

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