The U.S Criminal Justice System after WW II

After WW II, the U.S crime rate and imprisonment faced a lot of fluctuations. Notably, there was no correlation between crime and imprisonment. During this period, the Whites associated criminality with blackness and brownness. This notion determined who the criminal justice system policed, arrested, and imprisoned. Southern Blacks were offended by how the Whites associated them with criminality. Nevertheless, the American prisons and jails were experiencing mass incarceration with people of color. Mass incarceration was not based on criminality but rather discrimination (Child, 2015). The northern and Southern parts of Mason Dixon were full of African Americans and they were continuously pinpointed for policing, arrest, and imprisonment. After WWII, more Blacks were moving from the south towards the north in search of economic and social stability. This contributed to the racial disproportion of the northern prisons as more Blacks were being arrested. Meanwhile, the West also witnessed a pattern of racialized imprisonment (Lytle, 2017).

A close look at the northern areas like Detroit post-WWII reveals the unequal application of law and racial discrimination at various levels. Whites committed crimes against African Americans who were making their way into the White neighborhood for economic benefits such as offering factory labor (Miller, 2014). During this period, the factories focused on hiring Whites only, making the Blacks who were interested in factory labor subject to mistreatment by their White counterparts. Although the Whites committed dramatic crimes against the Black looking to work in the factories, no arrests were made on them. The crimes were later termed as “hate strikes” and Blacks living near Detroit’s Packard Plant faced mob violence from the Whites (Thompson, 2019). The Whites also held several strikes to oppose the Blacks and attacked the Black families who were moving across the nation to seek public housing but they were never arrested.

Apart from the actions of singling out the Blacks for arrest post-WWII, there were also complaints in the 1950s against local police forces that mistreated African Americans. However, city officials never took any measures against the complaints that were filed by African Blacks. As a result, the mistreatment continued to worsen. In 1957, The Detroit NAACP documented all the complaints filed by African Americans and forwarded them to the major for appropriate actions. The Detroit NAACP hoped to resolve the issues that were facing African Americans in the city by compiling the report. Most of the complaints filled involved physical assault and racial epithets (Thompson, 2019).

The high rates of criminal justice discrimination in the 1960s increased prison populations. A large portion of the population comprised Blacks and Brown Skins who were frequently disproportionately singled out and sentenced to prison after being charged with unwarranted crimes. African Americans not only faced discriminatory sentencing for crimes they didn’t commit but also faced harsh treatment while serving the sentences. Currently, most observers do not believe that such vices were taking place in the south. Most of the documented criminal justice discrimination and mistreatment were recorded in the north. For instance, there was a case of 14-year old black who was serving three months for shoplifting and was shot in the face by a trustee for unwarranted reasons (Thompson, 2019. As a result, the black youth suffered permanent brain damage and went blind. While on another case, Walter Nathan, an African American was handcuffed and hung from a tree (Thompson, 2019). These are some of the examples of criminal justice mistreatment of African Americans.