The New Jim Crow
Law enforcement has enormous discretion for probable cause and can give straight up contradictory reasons for different cases, it is what officers are taught to do (i.e. something like driving too fast, driving too slow, driving too rigidly at the speed limit). This allows individual bias to overwhelm any attempt at equal enforcement. It's pretty well documented in both The New Jim Crow and Usual Cruelty, the Supreme Court has made it difficult to gather data in the last couple decades.
Policing perpetuates poverty and thus crime by forcing poor, black men to deal with the criminal justice system from an early age. Court fees, court appearances, civil asset forfeiture, jail time, and property damage from police searches are all burdens that poor, black, law-abiding people bear, not to mention wrongful conviction. Edit: missed this line in your comment before: > Why this is the case is an interesting problem that I hope we can tackle, better understand, and attempt to solve as a society This is what Black Lives Matter is about. They understand the problem (often by living…
Read "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander. I'd suggest starting with chapter 2 since the introduction as well as the first chapter are more of a manifesto, the data which thoroughly demonstrate the point are in chapters 2-5. One particularly damning statistic: black people pulled over and searched for drugs are significantly less likely to have drugs than white people. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/us/racial-disparity-traffi... This is a pretty good digest of the figures, but really read The New Jim Crow: http://www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet
You must be living under a rock to not have read one of the bazillion of stories about policing and racism that have come up since last fall, but for a great overview of the subject I highly recommend The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness [1] [1] www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/
> But people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor. They are committing crimes, and pleading or being found guilty. The US is locking up very, very large numbers of young black men for minor crimes that people of other races regularly commit -- i.e., for activities that are only crimes when blacks are found to be doing them. Recent studies have shown that whites use more drugs than blacks, and yet are charged far less. Even the sentencing on perceived "black drugs" (drugs more readily available to the poor) such as crack is far more punitive than sentencing for the…
Read Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow" for cite after cite. My copy is lent out to a friend and the internet isn't bringing up specific cases. Excellent, irrefutable and seriously depressing book.
"The New Jim Crow" is an excellent book on this. There's a chapter about how this disproportionately affects young black men and disenfranchises them.
Just bought this one, excited to start reading it when it arrives.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindn...)
I just read The New Jim Crow (I'm late) and it makes a pretty strong case the USA prison industrial complex/drug war is simply an extension of Jim Crow since drug laws are not enforced equally and the Supreme Court through a series of decisions has made it so the prosecutors and law enforcement have to admit to racism to show that anti-racism laws have been broken and they cannot be forced to reveal any evidence that shows this via discovery, overturning much of the post civil war/civil rights reforms. It's a crazy catch-22. I've heard there is a simpler way that does not consider race that…