TY - JOUR AU - Rochin, Nick PY - 2015/06/30 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Social Inequality: Race and the Criminal Legal System JF - TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology JA - TRAILS VL - IS - SE - DO - UR - https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/social-inequality-race-and-the-criminal-legal SP - AB - Inequality is a broad concept that is central to the discipline of sociology and can be understood in a number of different contexts. Inequality is not simply a disparity in outcomes, such as educational attainment or income, but it is a systematic unequal distribution of rewards or life chances for different individuals within a group or groups within society. This can translate to differential access to resources like wealth, or different levels of social power which can affect one’s ability to receive financial services or the treatment by the judicial system. As such, structural inequality is not a natural occurrence, but rather something that is largely created and maintained by social institutions.The police controversies that have arisen over the past few years have illustrated how we are currently at a tumultuous juncture with respect to the public’s perception of the criminal legal system. Moreover, criminal justice outcomes are often not discussed in terms of inequality, at least not in the same way that we tend to discuss earnings and achievement gaps, despite the fact that disparities in incarceration are unmatched by other social indicators that are typically analyzed as evidence of social inequality. For instance, the black-white incarceration disparity of 8 to 1 surpasses black-white disparities in unemployment (2 to 1), infant mortality (2 to 1), and wealth (1 to 5). Due to the dearth of classroom discussions that highlight these disparities as indicators of social inequality, this activity frames law enforcement disparities as a fundamental form of social inequality. ER -