People of color make up about 13 percent of the United States population. However, over 60 percent of inmates in jail are non-white. On the other hand, whites count for 64 percent of the population but make up only 39 percent of the prisoners according to americanprogress.org.

The disproportionate numbers are not because People of Color are more violent or likely to commit crimes, but because they are more likely to be target due to systematic racism.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration released a survey in 2011 reporting that 20 percent of whites used cocaine, whereas only 10 percent of Black people had used the same substance.
Despite Black people having a lower drug usage rate, they are the most targeted group in the War on Drugs.

“The race issue isn’t just that the judge is going, ‘Oh, black man, I’m gonna sentence you higher,’” Jamie Fellner from Human Rights Watch told the Huffington Post. “The police go into low-income minority neighborhoods and that’s where they make most of their drug arrests. If they arrest you, now you have a ‘prior,’ so if you plead or get arrested again, you’re gonna have a higher sentence. There’s a kind of cumulative effect.”

Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released a report in September 2011 stating “Relatively more black drivers (13%) than white (10%) and Hispanic (10%) drivers were pulled over in a traffic stop during their most recent contact with police…White drivers were both ticketed and searched at lower rates than black and Hispanic drivers.”

The racial bias is present in large scale crimes as well.

When people of Arabic nationality commit mass shootings, they terrorists. When a black person commits an atrocity they are called a thug. But when a white man slaughters innocent people, the media rushes to his defense, claiming he was mentally ill (regardless of the fact that mental illness doesn’t equate to violence and whether or not he actually showed symptoms), emphasizing that he was a lone wolf.

Mass murder is a serious crime and white men should not receive special treatment from the media. They are just as guilty as the People of Color who shoot up public places.

Mother Jones Maganize compiled a list of all the mass murderers since 1982. 44 out of 73 were white, 14 of the shooters were black. 7 of the shooters were Asian, and 4 were Latino.

Yet whites are never seen as inherently dangerous and black people are assumed to be untrustworthy and violent.

The criminal justice system is beyond broken and in need of serious reforms, both on state and national levels, are needed if America truly is “the land of the free”.