Writer: Ava Seaborn
Editor: Natalie Maruyama
Fall 2023
Historically, racial and ethnic minorities have been the target of law enforcement and have disproportionate incarceration rates than their white counterparts. The NAACP reports that despite similar patterns in drug usage, the rate of imprisonment for African Americans is nearly six times that of White Americans.
Racial profiling is pivotal in the disparate rates of imprisonment among races. Counterterrorism and drug enforcement have become two of the most race-targeted offenses for Black, Latinx, and Muslim Americans. Police are more densely populated in majority Black and Brown neighborhoods, thus creating an environment where these individuals are more likely to be caught and convicted than those engaging in similar offenses in White communities.
One of the many means of “catching” these individuals that contributes to these unsettling statistics is entrapment. Entrapment is a law enforcement tactic that involves luring an individual into committing or engaging in a crime and then prosecuting them under the assumption of guilty intent or predisposition. The issue arises in that both terms are ambiguous and are measured under an individual's discretion, and systemically speaking, people of color are more likely to be victimized by negative stereotypes.
Some could argue that entrapment prevents illegal acts and filters out people more likely to turn to crime and therefore keeps communities safer; however, this ideology is flawed as the criminal justice system in the United States is flawed. Compared to other founding NATO nations, the United States incarcerates 716 people per 100,000, whereas the following nations' numbers range within 100 (Loevy, 2015).
The United States incarcerates minorities at a higher rate than any other developed nation and has failed to bring justice to over half of its population. According to Pew Research, “Fewer than half of crimes are reported, and fewer than half are solved.” Some legal experts argue that such alarming statistics have led many police organizations to facilitate crime–marginally improving such statistics.
In the case of Hampton vs. United States, Charles Hampton was convicted on two counts of distributing heroin using entrapment. Essentially, Julia Hutton, one of Hampton’s friends, worked for the Federal Drug Enforcement Association and supplied Hampton with a supposedly “non-narcotic” compound closely resembling heroin to sell to two other DEA informants. This is a fatal mistake for Hampton as he was later convicted of a federal offense under the “predisposition theory,” again, arguing the courts or law enforcement cannot or do not affect a criminal’s likelihood to commit a crime.
The dilemma within entrapment falls in that the courts cannot accurately measure a person's morale, nor can they assess whether a person is more likely to commit a crime than not. At what point does law enforcement’s role in facilitating crime infiltrate the minds of innocent people leading them to do bad things, and at what discretion do they select these subjects? All of these factors remain unmeasured and are subjective to courts, juries, and judges to conquer an individual's conscience.
References
Loevy, D. (2015, December 21). How does us justice stack up? an international comparison. Loevy & Loevy. https://www.loevy.com/blog/how-does-us-justice-stack-up-an-international-comparison/
M., M. (2020, August 18). The Entrapment and Criminalization of Young People of Color. Junior State of America. https://jsa.org/blog/the-entrapment-and-criminalization-of-young-people-of-color
Pew Research Center. (2020, November 20). Fewer than half of crimes in the U.S. are reported, and fewer than half of reported crimes are solved. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_20-11-12_crimeintheus_feature/
Scholarly Commons: Northwestern pritzker school of law. Site. (1976). https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/
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