50 - Diversity in Legal Decision-Making

Summary

Biases in judicial decision-making are prevalent throughout the criminal legal system. In various chapters of this volume, the contributors have highlighted specific incidents or indicators of biases in decision-making that disproportionally affects minoritized persons and groups. If these biases are inherent in decision-making, is the criminal legal system upholding its aspiration of distributive and procedural justice? What is justice? Justice typically refers to fairness (or equity) for all people. Advocates and scholars have refrained from referring to the system as the criminal justice system because for some victims, victims’ families, defendants, and those who have been convicted, the system is not operating in a just manner. In my view, the US criminal legal system is broken – or, as Hunt (Chapter 3) suggests, operating in the way it was originally intended. The criminal legal system disproportionately targets racial and ethnic minoritized populations, as well as minoritized sexual and gender-diverse populations. This phenomenon, known as disproportionate minority contact (DMC), has been in the purview of the criminal legal system for several decades.