There have been different outcomes for different racial groups in convicting and sentencing felons in the United States criminal justice system. Experts and analysts have debated the relative importance of different factors that have led to these disparities. Minority defendants are charged with crimes requiring a mandatory minimum prison sentence more often, leading to large racial disparities in incarceration. At the end of 2002 the Bureau of Justice released a group of data that stated that there were 3,042 black male prisoners per 100,000 black males in the United States, compared to 1,261 Hispanic male prisoners per 100,000 Hispanic males and 487 white male prisoners per 100,000 white males. The likelihood of black males going to prison in their lifetime is 28% compared to 4% of white males and 16% of Hispanic males.[2] Non-biological (racial) social factors sometimes argued as being the cause of the racial differences include socioeconomic status, the environment in which a person was raised, and the highest educational level a person achieves. It has been argued by some that the race a person is born into has a substantial effect on the amount of discrimination they experience in their lifetime.[citation needed] For the Baby Boomers, some 1.2% of white men and 9% of black men had been imprisoned by 2004, according to Bruce Western, a Harvard sociology professor.[6] Out of those born in the 1970s, 3.3% of white men and 20.7% of black men had been in prison. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_inequality_in_the_American_criminal_justice_system The relationship between race and crime in the United States has been a topic of public controversy and scholarly debate for more than a century.[1] Since the 1980s, the debate has focused on the causes of a high proportional representation of some minorities (primarily African Americans, hence "Black crime") at all stages of the criminal justice system. This including arrests, prosecutions and incarcerations.[2] African American and Hispanic defendants are charged with and convicted of violent crimes far more often (per capita) than whites or Asian Americans, which contribute to large racial disparities in incarceration rates. The relationship between race and crime has been an area of study for criminologists since the emergence of anthropological criminology in the late 19th century.[48] Cesare Lombroso, founder of the Italian school of criminology, argued that criminal behavior was the product of biological factors, including race. He was among the first criminologists to claim a direct link between race and crime.[49] This biological perspective, sometimes seen as racist and increasingly unpopular, was criticized by early 20th century scholars, including Frances Kellor, Johan Thorsten Sellin and William Du Bois, who argued that other circumstances, such as social and economic conditions, were the central factors which led to criminal behavior, regardless of race. Du Bois traced the causes of the disproportional representation of Blacks in the criminal justice system back to the improperly handled emancipation of Black slaves in general and the convict leasing program in particular. In 1901, he wrote: There are no reliable statistics to which one can safely appeal to measure exactly the growth of crime among the emancipated slaves. About seventy per cent of all prisoners in the South are black; this, however, is in part explained by the fact that accused Negroes are still easily convicted and get long sentences, while whites still continue to escape the penalty of many crimes even among themselves. And yet allowing for all this, there can be no reasonable doubt but that there has arisen in the South since the [civil] war a class of black criminals, loafers, and ne'er-do-wells who are a menace to their fellows, both black and white.[50] The debate that ensued remained largely academic until the late 20th century, when the relationship between race and crime became a recognized field of specialized study in criminology. Helen T. Greene, professor of justice administration at Texas Southern University, and Shaun L. Gabbidon, professor of criminal justice at Pennsylvania State University, note that many criminology and criminal justice programs now either require or offer elective courses on the topic of the relationship between race and crime.[51] Sociologist Orlando Patterson has explained these controversies as disputes between liberal and conservative criminologists in which each camp focuses on mutually exclusive aspects of the causal net, with liberals focusing on factors external to the groups in question and conservatives focusing on internal cultural and behavioral factors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_States

• published: 24 May 2014
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