Dear Future President,

Throughout American history there have been a lot of injustices based on people’s race and the color of their skin. Many people think that those days are over or it’s not important. The incarceration and persecution of Blacks and Latinos are exponentially higher than white people in this country. I do not think that is fair because the law should be applied to everyone in an equal way. How does having a different skin color change the law? The system believes that minorities such as Blacks and Latinos are more likely to break the law. These injustices must stop happening once and for all, if the ideology of the judicial system changes.

Evidence of this persecution towards Blacks and Latinos can be found in the statistics of the “stop n frisk” policy implemented from 2002 to 2015 in New York, the city where I live. The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) defines “stop n frisk” as “ where a police officer had the right to stop and ask questions to pedestrians and frisk them for weapons and other illegal objects”. It also shows how close to 90% of police checks were done to people of minority races. “80% of all people stopped were innocent, 54% were Black, 29% were Latino and only 11% were white” (NYCLU). We can tell from the evidence that Black and Latinos are tremendously more searched than white people, even though ]in most of these searches nothing is found. It only shows how police view these races or targets them for no reason whatsoever.

There’s an disproportionate distribution of Black and Latinos in the prison system, and data shows how unfair this system is towards Black and Latinos: “58% of the U.S prisoners are Black and Latino while Black and Latinos only make up about a quarter of the U.S population. Whites constitute only 32% of the population in prison, when whites are more than 60% of the United states population”. (NAACP, Criminal justice Fact Sheet) This shows how unbalanced the jail system really is when some minority races are thrown in jail at a rate higher than whites. “If African Americans and Latinos were incarcerated at the same rate as whites the jail population will decline by approximately 50%” (NAACP, Criminal justice Fact Sheet). This shows how in fact Black and Latinos are put in prison more than whites. As a result, being a person with a different color of skin other than white will put you at risk of being put in jail more so than your white neighbor.

Some people may argue/think that Black and Latinos are not more persecuted than whites because they are the races caught doing the most illegal acts, and are doing the most wrong to the country because they are always stealing, using and selling drugs. Every single story I see in the news I see is a minority doing that. However, the crimes that Black and Latinos are caught doing are the same that white people are doing too, Blacks and Latinos are just persecuted more often because of the color of their skin. “About 14 million whites and only 2.6 million African Americans report using an illicit drug. 5 times as many whites are using drugs as African Americans but African Americans are sent to jail for drug offenses 10 times more than whites.

African Americans and Latinos are the racial groups more persecuted by police and put in prison just because of the color of their skin. This needs to change because this country was founded on the believe that everyone is the same. This will not be true until the law is applied fairly and everyone sees each other as equal people.

Sincerely,

Walter Miranda