The Pipeline Grows: Overcriminalization and Inequitable Policing and Sentencing of Latinas/os Within America's Judicial System

• In Event: Roundtable Session 53
  In Roundtable Session: Criminalizing Youth of Color and the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Disciplining Race, Gender, and Disability

Abstract

This theoretical paper focuses on the creation of the overly criminalistic Latin@ stereotype in the United States as a response to growing numbers of immigrants threatening white hegemony. As a mechanism of social control, Latin@s have faced inequitable treatment within the judicial and school systems of the United States (e.g., Gonzalez & Portillos, 2007) This paper examines existing criminality literature and its focus on the white/black binary before exploring how the legal system evolved to control Latin@s in a manner similar to blacks in the Jim Crow South. Social and legal control of Latin@s has occurred due to a change in public sentiment, inequitable juror practices, biased judicial sentencing and leniency decisions, over-policing and targeting, and the “War on Drugs.”

Author

• Erik James Shaver, Indiana University - IUPUI