Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

eurekalert.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 333 posts

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

#251

Post by steele »

smackfu wrote: post #18

One key point with this study is that it only covers people who were born between 1980 and 1984, and follows them through their lives. The summary articles tend to ignore that, and imply the same stats apply to people born in all years.

A few wars to fight in, 2 widespread market downturns to lose jobs in, record high tuition, predatory loans, culture of easy credit/overspend without financial literacy education, American Dream indoctrination .... and all these lazy edge genX>Y "millennials" seem to want to do is go to jail then expect boomers to golden spoonfeed them the world from a silver platter! Instead of competing for boomer jobs, these convicts need to suck it up and fight boomer wars, feed boomer economic mess, and shut up about climate bogeymen. Just vote, consume, and live out your sentence until the hatchlings of the greatest generation are able to retire on value you create.

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

#252

Post by mpyne »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #167
NhanH wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

I find it fascinating how so many systemic problems in the U.S. have such simple causes and easy solutions on HN.

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

#253

Post by akjetma »

Fezzik wrote: post #154
pertinhower wrote: post #19

I find this frankly implausible. What percentage of people you know have been arrested? I'm guessing very small (even assuming that many hide it and so you're knowledge is substantially skewed). So maybe that's because of your high/squeaky-clean socio-economic class? No: imagine yourself in any class you care to. Unless that class is much, much larger than your "real" class, then it would have to have an astronomical…

The study appears to be using "arrested" to mean "convicted of a crime for which the person could have been arrested (taken in to police custody)"? Example: I have never been arrested/taken in to police custody but, I was convicted of providing alcohol to minors at a college party and, had I not willingly taken the citation from the officer or, had I been belligerent and uncooperative, I could have been arrested. Tec…

I just skimmed the article and found no (re-?)definition of 'arrest'. If it's 40% for the general population and the arrest rate is a function of economic class, the rate for the lower class would have to account for the significantly smaller rate that I perceive in my middle-class peer group.

Either that or my peers are statistical outliers. I don't think there's any other form of selection going on that would prevent them from being a representative sample of their economic class, though.

The article possibly indicated a loose definition of 'arrest' here, though:

> ...arrested or taken into custody for a nontraffic offense by age 23.

For my definitions of 'arrest' and 'custody', being arrested implies being taken into custody.

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

#254

Post by mpyne »

watwut wrote: post #111
EpicEng wrote: 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…

They can really arrested you for drinking as a minor? In here a bar can get into trouble if they sell you a drink, but your only trouble are parents if they ever find out. And I remember that 18-19 years old Americans I knew indeed used to drink (and get wasted too).

As always in the U.S., it depends on the state and city where you live. But I'm pretty positive there are cities where it's actually illegal for a person to be drinking underage. Knowing some of our cities, mere possession of an open container by itself might be enough.

However as you note, that hasn't really stopped teenage drinking...

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

#255

Post by rayiner »

watwut wrote: post #169
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #167

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.

And most of the laws people on here don't like (I'll add cerfew for teenagers to the running list) were instituted long before we had a non-negligible amount of for-profit prisoners.

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

#256

Post by rayiner »

watwut wrote: post #169
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #167

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.

And most of the laws people on here don't like (I'll add cerfew for teenagers to the running list) were instituted long before we had a non-negligible amount of for-profit prisoners.

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

#257

Post by rayiner »

watwut wrote: post #169
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #167

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.

And most of the laws people on here don't like (I'll add cerfew for teenagers to the running list) were instituted long before we had a non-negligible amount of for-profit prisoners.

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

#258

Post by Anechoic »

refurb wrote: post #235
Anechoic wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Black males are disproportionately represented among those in poverty or with low income compared to white males. If the police completely ignored race, we would expect black males to be arrested at a higher rate than white males. When is comes to violent crime, yes. However violent crime arrests make up a relatively small amount of arrests (about 8% of arrests according to my accounting, including arson [0]). Drug r…

I'm not sure what the data looks like for your reference on black vs. white drug use since the original data isn't there. Some data indicates there is a 23% higher level of drug use among blacks than whites [1, Table 1.19B]. That would explain _some_ of the higher arrest rates of blacks for drug crimes. [1] http://www.samhsa.gov/data/NSDUH/2012SummNatFindDetTables/De...

Some data indicates there is a 23% higher level of drug use among blacks than whites

My quote was "whites and blacks are known to use use and sell at about the same rates" - your link shows 8.7% of whites use drugs vs 10.0% of blacks in the past month, and 15.9% of whites used drugs vs 18.7 in the past year (and when looking at lifetime use, that usage flips) - I think "about the same rates" is a fair characterization of that data.

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

#259

Post by baddox »

pyre wrote: post #218
coldtea wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Curfew laws are mostly aimed at children and don't apply to adults. Would you draw parallels between the government legislating that 'school-aged' children must go to school and the US decreeing that all Japanese people on the west coast must go to internment camps? Probably not.

I would draw that parallel.

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

#260

Post by obvious_throw »

alexeisadeski3 wrote: post #240
gametheoretic wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Black females don't have the time in the day to get arrested. White women live in a consequence-free environment until they don't. A dozen other things. It depends how frank we all want to be. >Black males are disproportionately represented among those in poverty or with low income compared to white males. Who on earth is the intended audience here--

Why downvoted?

Because of this:

White women live in a consequence-free environment until they don't.

While absolutely true in North America, it's one of those things you're not permitted to say:

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Hence, the downvotes.

Post reply on HN