Racial Profiling

durations than whites. The New York Times analysis found that the disparities were the
greatest for violations where the prison guards had lots of discretion, such as
disobeying orders, but smaller for violations that required physical evidence, such as
possessing contraband.
A 2016 report by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune found that Florida judges sentence black
defendants to far longer prison sentences than whites with the same background. For
the same drug possession crimes, blacks were sentenced to double the time of whites.
Blacks were given longer sentences in 60 percent of felony cases, 68 percent of the
most serious first-degree crimes, 45 percent of burglary cases and 30 percent of battery
cases. For third-degree felonies (the least serious types of felonies in Florida), white
judges sentenced blacks to twenty percent more time than whites, whereas black
judges gave more balanced sentences. One judge responded by noting that about
ninety-eight percent of sentences are the result of plea bargaining and that sentencing
is a complicated issue given the various facts involved, thus no two cases can be
compared. Some attorneys note that poorer defendants often rely on public defenders
who often receive less favorable plea offers than defendants with private counsel
because private attorneys have lighter case loads, are less likely to go to trial with
prosecutors, and defendants with means are more likely to present mitigating factors.
Another theory proposes that racial inequality in the American criminal justice system is
mostly caused by a racial imbalance in decisions to charge criminal defendants with
crimes requiring a mandatory minimum prison sentence, leading to large racial
disparities in incarceration.
In a 2008 self-published paper Paul Heaton from the RAND Corporation and Charles
Loeffler wrote, that some scholars and studies have argued that police discrimination is
not an important explanation for racial differences in crime, others state that it is the
main cause and some argue that both discrimination and different real crime rates
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