MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

BY ARYE RATTNER AND GIDEON FISHMAN

"Justice for All? Jews and Arabs in the Israeli Criminal Justice System" provides a comprehensive examination of the complex dynamics that shape the experiences of Jews and Arabs within Israel's legal framework. Through meticulous research and insightful analysis, this book delves into the intricacies of how the Israeli criminal justice system navigates issues of identity, power, and discrimination in cases involving Jewish and Arab individuals.

By shedding light on the unique challenges and disparities faced by these two communities, "Justice for All?" prompts readers to critically reflect on the notions of equality and fairness within the legal landscape of Israel. With a nuanced approach, the authors navigate through a range of perspectives, offering a compelling exploration of the multifaceted interactions between ethnicity, religion, and the pursuit of justice.

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of the Israeli criminal justice system and its implications for the diverse communities it serves. "Justice for All?" serves as a thought-provoking contribution to the ongoing dialogue surrounding issues of representation, equity, and human rights in the context of Israel's legal institutions.

Westport, Connecticut London. Praeger. 1998. 142p.

By Hedwig Lee

I describe how cultural and structural racism operate the entire contemporary American criminal justice system via five features: devaluation of certain human lives, ubiquitous adaptation, networked structure, perceived neutrality, and temporal amnesia. I draw from specific historical and contemporary examples in policing, courts, and corrections to further emphasize the foundational nature of racism and its role in shaping racial/ethnic inequities not just in relationship to criminal justice outcomes but also in relationship to health, economic, and social well-being.

Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 7, Page 233 - 255

By Amber R. Crowell & Mark A. Fossett

This monograph builds on innovations in segregation measurement and analysis, previously developed by one of the authors of this book, by conducting empirical analyses of racial and ethnic residential segregation across a wide and comprehen-sive selection of communities in the United States. Past studies of residential segregation have been limited by a well-known and difficult challenge, which is that most segregation indices are prone to a sometimes very problematic upward bias that inflates segregation scores and makes it difficult to measure segregation at a single point in time, follow segregation patterns over time, and compare segregation across groups and communities. These problems are worse when using small spatial units such as census blocks, when the groups in the analysis are extremely imbal-anced in size, and when population counts are small. This has resulted in a literature that is heavily focused on segregation in a selection of the largest urban metropolitan environments, with only limited studies focused on nonmetropolitan communities or small racial and ethnic populations. Even so, restrictive case selections do not directly solve the problem of index bias. Fortunately, we have the solution to index bias, in addition to other solutions that address related problems with segre-gation measurement, which allow us to reanalyze residential segregation patterns and include more communities and contexts. In this book, we examine White-Black, White-Latino, and White-Asian residential segregation across metropolitan, micro-politan, and noncore county communities from 1990 to 2010, giving special atten-tion to how our findings may differ from what previous studies have found with measures that were not corrected for index bias and other related issues. We find that under the conditions where index bias is less likely to be a problem, our results track those from previous studies. But these communities do not make up the majority of cases, and in most communities our findings deviate in substantial ways from previous findings. We also employ new methods for linking micro-level processes of locational attainments to overall segregation patterns and develop a more complex understanding of residential segregation dynamics. This leads us to conclude that it is important to use our findings as benchmarks for residential segregation patterns over this time period and to adopt the methods of measurement and analysis that we endorse throughout this book for residential segregation research. 

United States, Springer. 2023, 260pg

By Ihar Paulau

The large growth of the United States’ criminal legal system in the late 20th century brought a widening racial gap in incarceration.1 By the year 2000, Black people made up almost half of the state prison population but only about 13% of the U.S.2 population. And although a wave of changes to sentencing and corrections policies over the past two decades has helped lessen disparities in federal and state prisons, Black adults still were imprisoned in 2020 at five times the rate for White adults.3

Far less is known, however, about racial and ethnic disparities in the country’s approximately 3,000 local jails.4 Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reports show that the gap in the rate of jail incarceration between Black and White people dropped by 22% between 2011 and 2021.5 However, these reports contain no race or ethnicity data on critical topics such as admissions or lengths of stay and little or no information about the severity or types of criminal charges for people in jail either in the aggregate or broken down by race, age, or other demographics.

The lack of detailed and timely data on who is in jail, for how long, and why led The Pew Charitable Trusts to partner with the Jail Data Initiative (JDI), an up-to-date source of data from approximately 1,300 of the nation’s nearly 3,000 jails created by the New York University Public Safety Lab, and the Data Collaborative for Justice (DCJ) at John Jay College, which conducts research to help local-level criminal justice decision-makers identify areas for reform.6 Although JDI is not necessarily nationally representative, it is the only publicly available source of near real-time data featuring a substantial sample of jails throughout the country. Additionally, DCJ collected and analyzed in-depth demographic and offense data for different racial and ethnic groups across jails in three counties—Durham, North Carolina; Louisville-Jefferson County, Kentucky; and St. Louis, Missouri—some of which is unavailable in the JDI database.7

Using the data from JDI, Pew researchers examined race in recent jail populations, admissions, and lengths of stay. Of the JDI data set, 595 jails had data for 2022, and within those facilities, Black people made up, on average, 12% of the local community populations but more than double that, 26%, of the jail populations. Additionally, although the jail population decreased nationally during the early months of COVID-19 in 2020, the previous 10-year trend of declining racial disparities in jails may have reversed as the pandemic progressed. Between March 2020 and December 2022, the average number of White people in jail increased by less than 1% compared with an increase of 8% for Black people in 349 jails from the JDI database that had complete data for that period.

Two factors, how many people go to jail and how long they stay, determine jail populations.8 As of 2022, Black people were admitted to jail at more than four times the rate of White people and stayed in jail for 12 more days on average across the 595-jail sample, contributing to the larger increase in population observed for Black individuals.

The findings from the three counties in the DCJ study reflect similar admissions and length of stay disparities broadly and across several metrics:

• In 2019, in all three counties Black people were admitted to jail at a rate at least double—and up to six times—that of White or Hispanic people and spent up to 12 days longer in jail than White people.

• Black people were admitted to jail at a higher rate than other groups for both misdemeanors and felonies in all three counties and typically spent the most time in jail for felonies.

• Racial disparities in admissions to jail and length of stay were largest among younger adults.

• Black men and Black women both had considerably higher admission rates than their White or Hispanic counterparts, but the length-of-stay gap was greater among men than women.

Although the findings in this brief are specific to the jails studied, they nevertheless demonstrate that significant disparities exist in many facilities. However, because jails are local and people are sent to jail for many reasons, identifying and understanding persistent racial and ethnic gaps nationally and at the local level will require further data collection and analysis, as well as collaboration across multiple jurisdictions and data systems. Individual localities may find that the disparities in their jail populations and the factors that influence those gaps are different and will require tailored solutions.

United States, A brief from Pew. 2023, 19pg

By Kelly Roberts Freeman, Cathy Hu, and Jesse Jannetta 

Racial and ethnic disparity is a pervasive characteristic of the American criminal justice system. This starts at the beginning of the justice process with substantial racial disparities in arrest.1 Once arrested, people of color face disparities in pretrial bail decisions (Schlesinger 2005) through disposition and sentencing, where they are imprisoned at 5.9 times the rate of their white counterparts (Carson 2018). Disparate outcomes by race continue to emerge at decision points that are even later in the justice process, such as in determining prison release on parole (Huebner and Bynum 2008). Many of these disparities arise from discretionary decisions and sentencing policies that disadvantage people of color. Disparities are also rooted in a history of structural racism and inequities that continue today, contribute to the overrepresentation of people of color in the justice system, and require action across multiple policy domains to address (Kijakazi et al. 2019). 

USA, Urban Institute. March 2021, 14pg