The study also notes that the disparity between sentencing lies heavily on “non-government sponsored department of variances”—i.e., basically, the discretion of judges.

From the Washington Post:

Judges are less likely to voluntarily revise sentences downward for black offenders than for white ones, in other words. And even when judges do reduce black offenders’ sentences, they do so by smaller amounts than for white offenders.

Advertisement

It is currently a well-known and accepted fact that the United States has the largest prison population in the world. In 2015 the Sentencing Project noted that roughly 2.2 million people were currently incarcerated in the nation’s prisons and jails, marking a 500 percent increase in incarceration over the past 40 years.

Black men, the nonprofit found, were nearly six times as likely to be incarcerated as their white counterparts.

Advertisement

Now we can prove once again that not only are black men more likely to be imprisoned—they’re also likely to sit behind bars for a far longer time.

Read more at the Washington Post.