ABSTRACT
Black people are over-represented among prisoners in this country, and under-represented among prison staff. As noted in Chapter 1, imprisonment is the final step in a process whereby black people are treated differently from white people at almost every stage of the criminal justice system. The evidence is ambiguous in some areas, and not enough work has been done to explain some of the disparities between the treatment of black and white defendants (Gordon, 1988), but the overall picture is quite clear.
