Bernie Sanders Tackles Native American Discrimination
Bernie Sanders Tackles Native American Discrimination
Kyle Jaeger
ATTN
Sen. Bernie Sanders called attention to a frequently overlooked aspect of America's criminal justice system on Thursday. In a tweet, the Vermont senator addressed the disproportionate incarceration of Native Americans, who are imprisoned at levels 38 percent higher than the national average.
Though there has been a significant amount of media attention focusing on the disproportionate sentencing of other minority groups in the U.S. namely black and Latino citizens the Native American incarceration rate is often ignored, according to this 2016 report from the Nieman Foundation. That's in spite of the fact that Native American men are "imprisoned at more than four times the rate of white men, and Native American women over six times as often as white women."
Approximately 22 percent of Native Americans in the U.S. live on reservations or tribal lands, where the federal government has jurisdiction in criminal proceedings. The National Institute of Justice cites higher rates of violent crime in Native American communities as the reason behind the group's disproportionate representation in the criminal justice system, but experts note that those tried in federal courts also tend to serve longer sentences than those tried in state courts.