It’s not that they’ve solved criminal justice in America, unfortunately. Lady Justice is blind. At least, that’s how the saying goes. Too often though, she is not color-blind. Disparities in charges, sentencing and incarceration rates abound in America’s criminal justice system, with outcomes disproportionately tied to the answer to a single question: What is the color of your skin? After all, Black men receive federal prison sentences nearly 20 percent longer on average than White men for the same crime, according to a report from the United States Sentencing Commission in 2017. The Deep South probably isn’t the first place you think of as a poster child for equal treatment and equitable prison populations across racial lines. Yet, four of the five U.S. states with the lowest racial disparities in prison populations are in the South. |