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Home arrow Courts arrow Race and Gender
Race and Gender
Minority Ethnic Groups, Racial Minorities, and Sentencing in Britain and the United States PDF Print E-mail
by Georgios A. Antonopoulos   

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The Middlesex Guildhall, future site of the new UK Supreme Court
Since the 1950s there has been a consistently high level of suspects and prisoners drawn from minority ethnic groups and racial minorities1 all over the world. The over-representation of minority ethnic people in English prisons is a longstanding pattern, which is verified by the prison statistics of subsequent years. In 1999, for example, Afro-Caribbeans accounted for 12% of the total male prison population, and 19% of the total female prison population,2 and in June 2000, 19% and 25% of the male and female prison population, respectively.3 The percentages for Asians, however, were much lower, 3% and 1% for males and females, respectively. However, we ought bear in mind that there is a large number of illegal drug importers of foreign nationality (mainly Africans) in the male prison population,4 and an equally large number of foreign women, who are not members of a settled minority ethnic group. Yet they significantly influence the number of Afro-Caribbean people in the prison.5

The situation in relation to black people in the United States is no different. According to Blumstein (1982), black people, although they represented 12.5% of the total population in 1982, accounted for as much as 50% of the prison population, with young black males having the highest ratio of incarceration (twenty-five times the rate of the total population).6 Apart from their high representation, black people are also numerically over-represented in the United States’ institutions of confinement.7 More recent evidence8 verified that there is a huge racial difference in the rates of incarceration.

 
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