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Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

eurekalert.org

201–210 of 333 posts

Re: Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Receiving a citation is a non-custodial arrest. edit just to make it clear: This is not my opinion. This is the legal definition. The study includes citations as arrests. This is why they make sure to point out that they do not include minor traffic offenses.

ok, that's a little weird. I got a ticket once for cutting through a park after dark. I would never have considered that being arrested, but hurray, today I learned I'm part of the 40%. I have also received a ticket for speeding, which all things considered, was a more serious offense/penalty. It's weird that the speeding ticket is excluded but not the walking ticket.

To me the more bizarre thing is that there is such a thing as getting a ticket for walking through a park after dark. WTF...

Re: Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

#203
post #124

Laws in the US are far too strict. I am one of the people that are covered by this statistic, I was arrested around age 16. For curfew. Curfew, the law that says you can't be outside after an arbitrarily dictated time. Absolutely ridiculous. For what it is worth--my record has been "expunged" and this arrest has not affected my adult life at all.

I'm not sure, but does this have anything to do with being common law rather than civil law? To be more specific, it's not a matter of the law being "too strict", but rather it's too vague and have to be interpreted by a judge. So until someone actually fight a case, the interpretation could be too broad and can be used easily. In civil law, you pretty much have to iterate everything. Disclaimer: I have no idea what…

>and have to be interpreted by a judge.

...and don't forget the important role that is supposed to be played by the jury. I always like opportunities to link to common law resources. I like:

"HAYEK, THE COMMON LAW,AND FLUID DRIVE"

http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/nyufinal.pdf

"The Myth of the Rule of Law":

http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm

Re: Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

#204

Laws in the US are far too strict. I am one of the people that are covered by this statistic, I was arrested around age 16. For curfew. Curfew, the law that says you can't be outside after an arbitrarily dictated time. Absolutely ridiculous. For what it is worth--my record has been "expunged" and this arrest has not affected my adult life at all.

>Curfew, the law that says you can't be outside after an arbitrarily dictated time.

We had curfew laws in my country too.

Mostly during German occupation, under World War II.

I'm amazed people in the "land of the free" even have such a law...

Re: Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

#205
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The manuscript highlights the differences among the male populations are significant while those among the female populations are within the estimated confidence intervals.

Correct. To see the original, you can check the journal itself [0] (check for it on google scholar if this link doesn't work) or look for it at your nearest academic library, if they have it. It is published in the April issue. The conclusion was that the difference was not significant for the female population. Keep in mind that the study was based on a limited sample so care must be taken when generalizing conclusi…

This is a curious approach to the study. You'd think you'd at least consider using census data paired with arrest data. Sure there are statistical biases there, but they'd probably be smaller than the sampling error.

Re: Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did he arrest you or give you a citation?

Receiving a citation is a non-custodial arrest. edit just to make it clear: This is not my opinion. This is the legal definition. The study includes citations as arrests. This is why they make sure to point out that they do not include minor traffic offenses.

There is a such thing as a non-custodial address, but that does not make every detention encounter with the police that doesn't result in you being taken into custody a "non-custodial arrest". By way of example: if you're issued a speeding ticket, the police do not gain the right to search your vehicle. But they do have that right if they arrest you.

Re: Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

#207
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vagueness of the laws are a different problem. If the laws were just vague then you could have judges interpreting them in favor of defendants as often as prosecutors. If you had to point to one thing as the cause of all this, it is likely to be the privatization of criminal justice. As soon as you have a private prison or a defense contractor selling military-grade equipment to civilian police forces, you create…

Only 6% of american prisons are private.

That's 6% too much.

Letting private corporations profit from incacerated people? What's next, slavery for the blacks? Oh, wait that's been tried already...

Re: Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

#209
post #161
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was a sensitive topic while I was in high school in Colorado. I don't think the school had a majority, but the largest groups were white and hispanic groups. We always had at least 1 permanent police officer heading a group of a couple of people who could be either police or security. Nominally this was a response to incidents throughout the rest of the state such as Columbine, but in reality the purpose was to…

As an outsider that seems incredibly wrong. The answer to youth gangs is not more security. Perform a root cause analysis and go back to the fact that kids often fall into gangs because parents are not around (working double jobs), they are stuck in poverty with an easy out (crime). It saddens me to read about solving youth problems by attacking the symptoms rather than the cause. Though I understand why, fixing the…

Your analysis certainly has merits. I think that that is why a lot of schools throughout Denver are still struggling. My own high school saw better results though, largely because it has an excellent administration which realized that improving the overall environment of the school was key.

To tackle the problem of gangs around school, there were a couple of important changes our last principal initiated, that other schools in the area did not necessarily pick up on. 1) Strictly enforce a ban on certain types of clothing that were being used to display allegiance to given gangs. 2) Increase the amount of open spaces for students to stay in while not in classes. 3) Require that students show up to school each morning, even if they do not have classes that morning. 4)Encourage students to stay inside during school hours, even when they have off blocks. 5) Have police/security officers at school introduce themselves to students, and engage students in conversation to get to know them.

On the whole the principal was very engaging so it was thanks to these programs that the gang problem was not as bad when I left compared to when I entered. In this case the heightened role of security was leveraged to have some positive effects, something not seen at other schools where there is a fundamental lack of trust between students and security. Trust and positive engagement are key, but achieving that is difficult.

Re: Study: Half of black males, 40% of white males arrested by age 23

#210
post #116
post #58

I think that this trend, at least in part, has been influenced by a change in the way that we treat adolescent crime. For example, even when I was a kid (early 90's) you would not get arrested for getting into a fist fight at school. Nowadays, bam; call the cops. Get caught with some pot? Arrested. Get caught performing some petty vandalization? Arrested. Get caught at a party drinking as a minor? Arrested. We arrest…

Honestly, I'm not sure that police involvement for this stuff is a bad thing. Schools are no longer equipped to handle violence between students, and it's questionable whether they ever were. They've lost many disciplinary tools they could use to deal with violent students, and even then it's hard to say that schools properly handled bullying or other student-on-student violence issues back in the "good old days". Br…

>Honestly, I'm not sure that police involvement for this stuff is a bad thing. Schools are no longer equipped to handle violence between students, and it's questionable whether they ever were.

I don't know, they are perfecty fine to "handle violence between students" in Western Europe, and without metal detectors and police on site.

Perhaps it's time for the society to recheck it's course, instead of throwing jail time at the problem?

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