Are race and ethnicity a contemporary issue in today's modern criminal justice system, or are they an issue of the past. Race and ethnicity play a huge role in our justice system, to say that this is not the case would be disingenuous. We can look back through history and we can see many examples of the role it played. There are many studies that demonstrate that race and ethnicity are still a current issue in our contemporary criminal justice system. There is a lot of debate about whether or not it also impacts our justice system. We cannot deny that race and ethnicity influence the operations of our justice system, not justice in our system, but in other systems around the world. In particular, race and ethnicity still impact our system. It could be argued that race and ethnicity feature heavily in sentencing more than any other phase of our justice system. If we look at cases from the past, we can see many examples of disparities between different ethnic groups. African Americans, for example, were sentenced to harsh imprisonment or death for crimes they may or may not have committed, unlike non-African Americans who managed to free themselves or were sentenced to only a few months. For example, in the past an African American male who committed rape against a white woman would be sentenced harshly, however, a white person who committed rape against an African American woman would serve little to no prison time, and this still happens today, maybe not as much openly as in the past. Disparities between different ethnic groups occurred then as they do today. Minorities are still harshly punished in our justice system. Minorities are more likely to be convicted than non-minorities. According to an article published in the Huffington Post, minorities are directly targeted and given harsher sentences than whites. In the article written by Bill Quigley, titled “Fourteen Examples of Racism in the Criminal Justice System,” it states that “the US Sentencing Commission reported in March 2010 that in the federal system, black offenders receive sentences that are 10 percent longer compared to white criminals." they can see many examples of how race and ethnicity impact our justice system at all levels. For example, we can see the impact in our courts in terms of prosecutions and convictions. We can also see this in our prisons, more specifically during confinement. We see that there is a huge disparity between non-minorities and minorities. The two are sentenced differently, they are housed in different areas of our prisons. They too are prosecuted differently. Many would argue that this is a matter of the past, and many would argue the opposite. There are many studies that show how race and ethnicity are a problem in our justice system, while there are other studies that show that race is not a problem. Race and ethnicity may not be as overt and blatant as they have been in the past, but they still stand out in our justice system. We as a society can fight the problem, but it will take a long time and everyone's participation to fight it