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

Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers

harvardlawreview.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 326 posts

Re: Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers

#111

Post by Lawtonfogle »

arethuza wrote: post #30
WDCDev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just private prisons, it's the correctional officer unions too. They benefit greatly from large prison populations.

I found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Correctional_Peace_O... So they lobby to increase prison terms and to "enforce current drug laws". I suppose they should have the right to do that, but it still seems a bit odd to me!

Yes, they do have a right to do that. NAMBLA also has that same right. I also have the right to call them both a cancer to society.

Re: Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers

#112

Post by justaman »

happyscrappy wrote: post #92
CPLX wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Much like "end apartheid" or "US out of Vietnam" we are occasionally presented with government policies so clearly unethical or ineffective that they defy oversimplification. The drug war is one such obvious failure.

It is ending. Legalization of marijuana is the start.

Legalizing marijuana is _very_ different from changing the policy on crack-cocaine. Crack is one of the primary issues in lower income/black communities.

A good first step? Absolutely, but it will be another generation before any policy is passed that results in the taxation of other narcotics. The US needs to sell guns to someone...

Re: Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers

#113

Post by bsenftner »

There is an insidious reason driving our incarceration rates: prisons rent inmates to corporations as contract workers for pennies an hour. With guarantees of the number of inmates they will be supplied. Follow the money. Follow the money. Follow the money.

Re: Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers

#114

Post by ams6110 »

CPLX wrote: post #48

There's all this discussion of these issues, which relate to racism, economic issues, police brutality, crime, etc. They seem complicated and nuanced and people throw their hands up and say well what can we do. The answer to that question is actually so simple you can say it in four words: End the drug war. Someone far more eloquent than me, The Wire creator David Simon, can flesh that out a little: http://www.washin…

I'll agree that the drug war is out of control and as a "cure" it's worse than the disease. But people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor. They are committing crimes, and pleading or being found guilty. The problem I have with pieces like the original article are that they are making it sound like we are engaging in a Gestapo-like rounding up of large numbers of minorities for no reason and throwing them in jail.

By blaming the war on drugs we are also completely ignoring the other elephant in the room, and that is the massive breakdown in family structure that has occurred amongst the impoverished.

This is particularly the case for African-Americans but I don't claim that it's a racial thing, directly. It's part of the cycle of poverty. In DC, which is a large focus of the original piece, over half of babies are born out of wedlock. For African Americans it's close to 70%.

With no parents working, and fathers typically absent, children do not learn the behaviors and responsibilities that are required to be a productive and self-supporting member of society. They then perpetuate this in subsequent generations. Our "war on poverty" has, like the war on drugs, been a failure. The poverty rate in 1965 was about 15%, same as today, with trillions of dollars spent.

The war on drugs funds a massive effort to catch and punish drug dealers and users. So of course that happens. The war on poverty rewards disfunctional, irresponsible, and self-destructive life choices.

You get what you pay for.

Re: Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers

#115

Post by ctdonath »

lars wrote: post #106
CPLX wrote: post #48

There's all this discussion of these issues, which relate to racism, economic issues, police brutality, crime, etc. They seem complicated and nuanced and people throw their hands up and say well what can we do. The answer to that question is actually so simple you can say it in four words: End the drug war. Someone far more eloquent than me, The Wire creator David Simon, can flesh that out a little: http://www.washin…

The drug war is part of it. But the big thing to fix is income inequality. High income inequality is correlated with higher homicide rate, higher robbery rate, lower civic participation, higher mortality, lower social cohesion and lower well-being in children. So many social problems are strongly predicted by this variable, yet many refuse to consider inequality to be a problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_…

Many consider inequality a symptom/consequence of one's own chosen behavior, not a cause.

(ETA "chosen behavior" clause.)

Re: Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers

#116

Post by maxerickson »

arethuza wrote: post #30
WDCDev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just private prisons, it's the correctional officer unions too. They benefit greatly from large prison populations.

I found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Correctional_Peace_O... So they lobby to increase prison terms and to "enforce current drug laws". I suppose they should have the right to do that, but it still seems a bit odd to me!

There are about 1/2 million correctional officers in the US:

http://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/correctional-offic...

So they might be able to have quite some impact by lobbying and voting as a block, but they are not a big enough body to swing votes against a meaningful majority.

(your link states that union has ~31,000 members, California had about 17.5 million registered voters in the Nov 2014 election)

Re: Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers

#117

Post by Lawtonfogle »

tomgallard wrote: post #99
mellavora wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummm, no. IF this was true, we would see a correlation between gun ownership (or access) and murder rates. If anything, the correlation is slightly negative, both in the US and globally. Where you DO see the correlation is inequality. In US states, using data from wikipedia, I find a 70% correlation between gini coefficients and homicide rates. The same is true globally.

Where do you get that information? This Harvard review - http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and... suggests a positive correlation between gun ownership and homicide, both nationally and internationally

Per the official numbers, Sweden has the highest rate of rape in the world.

Without knowing exactly what they considered homicide and what they considered a firearm related homicide, these numbers are meaningless. Only a few years ago the CDC released a large study where they choose to define a female forcing a male to penetrate as not being rape, thus resulting in very different statistics about rape than had the definitions been the more common 'non-consensual sex' or such.

Re: Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers

#118

Post by bilbo0s »

Bostonian wrote: post #61
pessimizer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

African-American males are 0.25% of the world's population, but 10% of the world's prisoners.

Black men also commit violent crimes at much higher rates than the rest of the population. Most people are in jail for a good reason. I suggest reading a recent essay "The Smart Way to Keep People Out of Prison" by Megan McArdle.

I don't know man... I looked at the numbers. It seems like the violent crime thing is being somewhat overstated here. For example, murder. So... even if we assume that black males committed EVERY murder in the US last year. (I realize they didn't, but I wanted to look at the numbers in a fashion as favorable to your view as possible.) Anyway, even if we assume they committed EVERY murder... that would still only be less than 0.01% of black males committing murder in a year. That would mean that well over 99.99% of black males could not possibly have been involved in a murder. The statistics are similar for crimes like grand theft, rape, attempted murder etc etc etc. All very violent. (Well ... maybe not grand theft... but the fbi had it on the list and, full disclosure, I cut and pasted from fbi dot gov.)

Point is... in any given year, black males seem to go to prison or jail at a MUCH higher rate than their violent crime participation rate would warrant. There is probably a reason behind this that is perfectly legal. I think the questions are... what are some of those legal reasons ? And, are those legal reasons "just" ? I think those are reasonable questions.

Re: Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers

#119

Post by aidos »

JonFish85 wrote: post #87
thawkins wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all drugs where legal then they would be made by commercial organisations, instead of illeagal non-accountable crime organisations. Some people will die, and then those commercial organisations will get thier asses handed to them in a law suit, the industry will find ways to make it safer and accountable for thier own proTection. Instead of the current situation, where very large numbers of people die, and the sup…

If people voluntarily take drugs that make them invalids, fully knowing the risks, what lawsuit would account for that? People still voluntarily smoke now, knowing that there's a very good chance it'll kill them.

It's that people smoke knowing that it will kill them but that's something different. Think about the dangers of illegal drugs - the chemical itself isn't generally the problem, it's the impurities / bad manufacturing.

If you were buying drugs over the counter you wouldn't expect to hit on a batch that contained a poisonous substance. Drug companies would be very careful to make sure that doesn't happen.

Here's a recent case from the UK:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/superman-ecstasy-...

Re: Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers

#120

Post by [deleted] »

ams6110 wrote: post #114
CPLX wrote: post #48

There's all this discussion of these issues, which relate to racism, economic issues, police brutality, crime, etc. They seem complicated and nuanced and people throw their hands up and say well what can we do. The answer to that question is actually so simple you can say it in four words: End the drug war. Someone far more eloquent than me, The Wire creator David Simon, can flesh that out a little: http://www.washin…

I'll agree that the drug war is out of control and as a "cure" it's worse than the disease. But people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor. They are committing crimes, and pleading or being found guilty. The problem I have with pieces like the original article are that they are making it sound like we are engaging in a Gestapo-like rounding up of large numbers of minorities for no reason and…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN