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A harsher punishment for being Latino: study says they are more likely to receive prison sentences

2023-05-02T19:09:29.080Z


An expert points out why the US penal system gives them worse sentences. Also, in the Axios Latino newsletter, behind the best academic conditions for Afro-Latinas.


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 Axios Latino is the newsletter that summarizes the key news for Latino communities in the hemisphere every Tuesday and Thursday.

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1. The topic to be highlighted: Punish for assuming

A recent analysis reviewing data from the US criminal justice system found that Latinos who are registered by officers only as a "white person" often avoid higher-security prisons and end up in misdemeanor jails or on probation.

In contrast, Hispanics classified as such tend to receive harsher sentences.

Big Picture

: The academic study adds to several recent ones that have found how US Latinos, who can be of any racial category, come to be treated differently by criminal justice institutions based on their skin tone, accent, or your possible immigration status.

  • By consigning these differences, the studies could contribute to better understand how the interaction between Latinos and the system is to pave the way for possible reforms.

  • Prison systems and police rarely record racial and ethnic data on Latinos being questioned or arrested.

    When they do search them, it is usually according to which category the officer who registers them thinks they belong to, which can lead to misidentifications.

More Details

: The recent study was conducted by two academics at the University of Oregon School of Law.

They examined more than 200,000 criminal records of people who served time in that state's prisons between 2005 and 2018.

  • They found that stereotypes about Latinos had a marked impact on sentencing outcomes: people who had been labeled Hispanic by authorities were twice as likely to be sentenced to prison over (lower security) jail or probation in compared to non-Hispanic whites and also in contrast to Hispanics who were registered as white but later self-identified as Latino.

  • About 40% of Latinos had been misidentified as solely white in state records.

  • That higher punishment difference happened even when the seriousness of the crime and the criminal records of the defendants were similar, according to the researchers.

Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios

  • "There are sentencing guidelines or tabulators where judges' discretion is not supposed to come into play very much [...] However, we did see that there was discretion based on the perceived ethnicity of the defendant," says Erik Girvan, co

    -

    author of the studio and professor of law.

In their own words

: The evidence found in this study and others like it can be used to mitigate the impact of potential biases, according to Lourdes Rosado, president of LatinoJustice PRLDEF, a human rights and civil defense organization.

  • "We're not going to move the needle until key decision makers—judges, sentencing recommendations and others—have the hard facts in front of them and are thus compelled to set targets to reduce disproportionality, and are held accountable. if they don't stop it," says Rosado.

  • He adds that it is also necessary to develop tools that make punishment less dependent on the confinement of people.

What to watch

: Some states are addressing racial/ethnic disparities through reforms to their criminal justice systems.

  • Girvan has also proposed implementing panels that examine a potentially biased sentence before it is applied.

  • "That would reduce the impact of discriminatory decisions without having to make people not discriminate" as a stopgap in what is achieved "the challenge of changing behavior," says the specialist.

The Fact

: The federal data that does exist on the ethnicity of defendants, based on reports from US corrections departments, show that adult Latino men are 2.5 times more likely to be incarcerated than non-Hispanic whites.

2. Recovering the stories of Latinos of African descent in the United States.

A new University of New Mexico project seeks to record oral histories and collect photographs of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants in the US who are descendants of black and formerly enslaved people.

A mural celebrating black heritage at the Museo de las Culturas Afromestizas in Guerrero, Mexico, in 2020. Pedro Pardo/AFP via Getty Images

Big Picture

: The multi-state initiative is part of growing international efforts to investigate the stories and lives of long-unseen Afro-Mexicans.

  • Just in 2020, Mexico included mention of Afro-Mexicans in its Census.

  • In the United States, many Latino families have been questioning and reviewing possible discriminatory attitudes or claiming their Afro-Latino background in the face of the fury of the Black Lives Matter movement (#BlackLivesMatter) unleashed after the murder of George Floyd. 

Details

: The

AfroChicanx Digital Humanities Project

, funded in part by the Mellon Foundation, held a three-day event this April in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

There academics recorded interviews with Mexicans and black Mexican Americans.

  • Doris Careaga-Coleman, a professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of New Mexico, said additional interviews will take place in Tucson, Arizona, and Santa Barbara, California, later this year.

  • The interviews, photos and other materials will be stored in a digital file for the free use of researchers.

The intrigue

: The project not only seeks to record stories of Afro-Mexicans (people who have black roots in Mexico), but also of the so-called

blaxicans,

a term for those who are children of Mexican-Americans and African-Americans.

  • It also seeks to identify how the food of both cultures has evolved in the United States.

Beyond

: Two out of every 100 Mexicans, about 2.5 million people, identified as Afro-descendant or black in Mexico's 2020 census.

  • Black communities in the country are found mainly in Veracruz, where the Spanish landed enslaved people from Africa, and on the coast of Oaxaca and Guerrero, where Afro-indigenous traditions that have existed since colonial times persist.

  • The MascĂłgos are descendants of Black Seminoles in the state of Coahuila.

    There are also descendants of people who fled to Mexico from the United States in the 1830s, when the Mexican government abolished slavery and it was still practiced in the United States.

3. Afro-Latino educational achievement, with flats

Afro-Latinos in the United States have higher rates of higher education but lower markers of financial success compared to non-black Latinos, according to new data.

Why It Matters

: The UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute analysis, released in late April, is one of the first to delve into the differences and disparities between Afro-Latinos and non-Black Latinos.

  • The researchers say that highlighting differences is key to illuminating Afro-Latinos' strengths and addressing the unique challenges they face.

In Numbers

: Researchers analyzed data from the 2015-2019 US Census American Community Survey and found that:

  • 26.2% of Afro-Latinas had a college degree in 2019, while 17.5% of non-Black Latinas did.

  • A higher proportion of Afro-Latino men also had a college degree compared to non-Black Latinos.

  • Afro-Latinos had higher or nearly equal rates of labor participation.

  • However, in general they have worse financial indicators.

    For example, the median annual household income for non-black Latinos was $52,100, compared to $47,400 for Afro-Latinos.

  • Non-black Hispanics had home ownership rates of 54%, compared to 40% for Afro-Latinos.

Such disparities

, according to the researchers, are likely a result of Afro-Latinos facing racist attitudes (in terms of access to housing, for example) on top of the disparities Hispanics face in general, such as difficulties accessing a bank account.

In her own words

: Nancy Lopez, an Afro-Dominican sociologist at the University of New Mexico and co-author of the study, says she was personally echoed by the analysis's findings.

"[We need to analyze] according to an intersectionality that recognizes the various axes of inequality"

  • "In my experience teaching at universities over the last 30 years it has always been the case that relative to others, mostly white men but also other Latinas, I was paid less," Lopez tells Axios Latino.

  • She says it's extremely important to highlight all the factors that could differentiate Latino subgroups to bring those disparities to light.

  • "We have to make sure that when we talk about Latinos we are no longer talking about the monolith, but doing that deep analysis by race, by national origin, by gender, by citizenship... an intersectionality that recognizes the various axes of inequality."

Between the lines

: The authors say the Afro-Latino population may not be fully counted in the US Census, in part because the racial category question defines being black as having origins in "racial groups in Africa."

That, they say, can make people who are more directly descended from black communities in the Caribbean feel like they don't have to check that box.

  • They suggest that the Census Bureau should also define by physical characteristics, such as skin color, and not just by ancestry.

4. Summary of key news in Latin America and the Caribbean

1. The next president of Paraguay

 will be Santiago Peña, an economist from the ruling (right-wing) Colorado Party.

  • Peña, who won on Sunday with 42% of the vote, had been criticized by his rivals during the campaign for links to former President Horacio Cartes, who was sanctioned for corruption earlier this year by the US Treasury Department.

  • Peña promised to fight corruption, advocated austerity and said he will work to attract more foreign investment to the South American country.

Paraguayans elect their new president

May 1, 202300:28

2. Cuba has just

connected

to an underwater internet cable

 from the French company Orange to try to improve its service, the island's government announced this week.

  • Internet access in Cuba is fully controlled by the state company Etecsa.

    Service is often patchy and the government has been known to create blackouts when there are protests.

5. Trash Art Treasures 

A young Salvadoran

which promotes product reuse and recycling also turns plastic trash into wall art, hats, flower-shaped necklaces and children's toys.

Planet Earth: This young Salvadoran activist protects a beach against pollution

April 18, 202301:52

Details

: Rosie Romero walks every week along the beach of El EsterĂłn, near the border of El Salvador with Honduras, to collect plastic garbage and then transform it into decorative pieces.

  • Romero invites others to clean and reuse on her social media channels, using the hashtag #ReinadelaBasuraChallenge.

  • She is also a volunteer at a sea turtle sanctuary.

Important note

: 30% of the 4,000 tons of plastic waste generated daily in El Salvador ends up in rivers or other waterways, according to the country's Ministry of the Environment.

Thanks for reading us!

We return on Thursday.

  • If you want to share your experiences or send us suggestions and comments, send an email to axioslatino@axios.com.

Do you want to read any of the previous editions?

Alert for viral outbreaks caused by mosquitoes that travel more thanks to climate change

US congressmen call for more protection for Latino workers in the oil industry

The regional consequences of the Salvadoran state of exception that seeks to combat gangs

The long road for history to be remembered: this is how academics fight to identify sites of massacres against Hispanics

Source: telemundo

All news articles on 2023-05-02

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