Joint ACLU-TSP Submission to the UN on Racial Disparities in Sentencing in the US

On July 14th, the ACLU and The Sentencing Project (TSP) submitted a shadow report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The report addresses key areas of racial disparity in sentencing and imprisonment that require further attention, review and action by the U.S. government in order to comply with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Despite the centrality of racial disparities in the criminal legal system, and in sentencing and imprisonment in particular, these critical areas of race discrimination and disparate impact receive scant attention in the U.S. government’s combined tenth to twelfth periodic reports submitted to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in 2021. As the criminal legal system's racist underpinnings in the United States must be acknowledged in order for meaningful reform to be accomplished and human rights to finally be upheld, the United States should heed the recommendations of global human rights entities and reform its domestic laws to eliminate racial disparities in sentencing.