Inequality Prevails, Essay Example

Although the issue of gender and race inequality in the system of justice is far from being new and various programs and policies were aimed at the improvement of the situation, the overall case is that the system is far from improving. While the issue was raised on various occasions in the past, it remains an essential problem of the system of justice today. The system did not improve since at various stages of justice process people of different races are treated differently, and individuals are often processed based on racial and gender bias (Gavrielides, 2014). People of the non-White ethnic origin and females are more likely to be stopped and searched, detained and kept in custody without profound grounds for it, abused verbally or even physically during interrogation and lack further proper representation in the system of justice (Burgess-Proctor, 2006).

According to some findings, in the case of felonies, non-White ethnic nationals were more often detained than White groups. The corresponding ratio is that 10 per cent of the ethnic minorities would have been realised without any further arraignments if they belonged to the White ethnic group (Hudson, 2006). Another indicator of the continuous inequality is the violent behaviour with the detainees of the non-White ethnical groups and females. In this regard, females are two times more likely to be detained and strip searched by the local authorities than men; if women are of non-White ethnic belonging the likelihood of strip and search increases (Spohn and Brennan, 2011). One of the reasons why the situation has not improved but even deteriorated is due to the increase of gender and race biases in the context of the Muslim fundamentalism that raised suspicion and paranoia about Middle-Easterners (Spohn and Brennan, 2011). On various occasions, personal misperception or suspicion played the key role in making a professional judgement in various procedures of the system of justice (Hudson, 2006). In this case, women wearing veils were particularly traumatised since they often had to strip in front of female policewomen and on a few occasion male ones that violated their beliefs and rights as well (Burgess-Proctor, 2006).

References

Burgess-Proctor, A. (2006). Intersections of Race, Class, gender, and Crime: Future Directions for Feminist Criminology. Feminist Criminology, 1, 27-47.

Gavrielides, T. (2014). Bringing Race Relations Into the Restorative Justice Debate: An Alternative and Personalized Vision of “the Other.” Journal of Black Studies, 45.3, 216-246.

Hudson, B. (2006). Beyond white man’s justice: Race, gender and justice in late modernity. Theoretical Criminology, 10.1, 29-47.

Spohn, C. and Brennan, P.K. (2011). The Joint Effect of Offender Race? Ethnicity and Gender on Substantial Assistance Departures in Federal Courts. Race and Justice, 1.1, 49-78.