Poll: Almost half of millennials don't think the U.S. justice system is fair

A new survey from Harvard University's Institute of Politics found that 49 percent of millennials ages 18 to 29 aren't confident the U.S. judicial system will "fairly judge people without bias for race and ethnicity."

Thirty-five percent of poll respondents said they had "not much" faith in the justice system's fairness, while 14 percent had no confidence in the system. On the other side, 40 percent of respondents said they had "some" confidence in the justice system, but only nine percent had "a lot" of confidence.

Unsurprisingly, the responses were sharply divided by race. Fifty-five percent of white respondents had "some" or "a lot" of confidence that the U.S. justice system is fair, while just 44 percent of Hispanics and 31 percent of African-Americans said the same. Party affiliations affected the responses, too: More than half (66 percent) of Republican respondents were confident in the justice system's fairness, versus 46 percent of Democratic respondents.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

One issue that united the poll's 3,034 respondents, though, was police officer accountability. Four out of five respondents supported police officers wearing body cameras while on duty.