African-Americans Receive Longer Jail Sentences Essay

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Selling in public obviously can result in an arrest far easier than selling in a dorm, or a bar, or a workplace, as whites tend to do. Police can stop a black man on the street and frisk him without a warrant. And so if African-Americans are far more likely to be selling crack in the open air, and crack sales result in far longer jail sentences than powder cocaine sales, there is at least part of the answer as to why African-Americans serve longer sentences in some cases.

A Washington Post analysis of 79,000 federal sentences between the years 1993 and 1995 (referenced in Jet Magazine) reflects that "Blacks received 2% longer jail terms than whites" nationally, and in the District of Columbia Blacks received sentences that were 12% longer than whites (Jet Magazine).

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Meantime, in the publication Sentencing Law and Policy (a participant in the law Professor Blogs Network) the authors reference an opinion column taken from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, that alludes to sentencing unfairness. "While the average federal prison sentence for black offenders was about five months longer than for whites in 1984, by 2001, the average sentence for blacks was almost 30 months longer" (http://sentencing.typepad.com).

As alluded to earlier in this paper, the institutional prejudice that is apparent in the penal system is based on unfair sentencing laws. The Sentencing Law and Policy publication asserts that (quoting the Sentencing Commission) "the sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimum statues have a greater adverse impact on black offenders than did the factors taken into account by judges in the discretionary system…"

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