Addressing Racial Inequities in the Criminal Justice System Through A Reconstruction Sentencing Approach

Authors

Jelani Jefferson Exum, St. John's University School of LawFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Ohio Northern University Law Review

Publication Date

2021

Volume

47

First Page

557

Abstract

(Excerpt)

Justice reform is having a moment. Across the nation and in the federal government, legislation has passed “to reduce the scale of incarceration and the impact of collateral consequences of a felony conviction.” While some of these reforms were the result of fiscal concerns over mass incarceration, others were in response to the criminal justice reckoning brought on by events of 2020 and intensified calls for racial justice. In the summer of 2020 media attention on the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor sparked nationwide and global protests and accompanying antiracism pledges by individuals and institutions. This social unrest and resulting commitments to social justice corresponded with an intensifying global COVID pandemic, which has disproportionately affected racial minority communities and motivated calls for release of nonviolent prisoners. In a way, this has been the perfect storm for reforming a system that has been in need of revision from its start. However, despite the movements to reform policing and efforts to reduce mass incarceration, few reforms truly take an antiracist approach— one designed to actually lead to equitable outcomes. This article argues that a Reconstruction Sentencing approach is needed to uproot the racism embedded in the entire criminal justice system and to restore the damage done by that racism. Though sentencing may seem to be the end stage of a criminal prosecution, this article will demonstrate that a Reconstruction Sentencing approach requires going to the foundations of a criminal case and unearthing how the racially biased decisions along the way lead to disparate sentencing outcomes. An effort to reconstruct sentencing will necessarily require a reconstruction and reformation of the entire criminal justice system into one that is racially equitable and, therefore, antiracist.

Comments

Available at: https://digitalcommons.onu.edu/onu_law_review/vol47/iss3/2/