Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers

Is your contention that the obvious irony of that situation renders it impossible?

If you grow up in the ghetto with role models largely being gang members and most your friends have been or are going to jail, it's difficult to grow into a mentality that value education and achievement. It just happens due to historical reasons, especially racism, majority of the ghetto are blacks. This actually perpetuate the unspoken racism, where people consciously or unconsciously associate black people with all the bad things happening in ghetto.

As a counter example, Asian Americans were also highly discriminated against in the past century, immigration from Asia were barred, those who were here cannot acquire citizenship, cannot own land, etc etc. Asians were generally viewed as poor uneducated labours, not too different from blacks. But today Asians are hardly viewed as that, largely thanks to large influx of educated and hard working Asian immigrants in recent years (due to immigration law preference), who changed the public perception of Asians, lifted Asian neighbourhoods from ghetto status and gave positive role model and connections to poor Asian kids (local or immigrants).

Conclusion? Focusing on "helping" visible minority actually reinforce the perception that certain ethnic groups need help. What we need to focus on instead, is to help those in need of help, without regards to skin colors.

From "Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America":

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This was how Coughlin did his job on many a night. Coughlin couldn’t do much about all the shooters in Southeast who got away with it. But he could enforce drug laws, gang injunctions, and parole and probation terms relatively easily just by driving around and making “good obs”— good observations, cop lingo for catching, at a glance, a bulge under a shirt, a furtive motion of hands. A chase might ensue, and sometimes ended with the cops shutting down whole neighborhoods as the LAPD “airship,” or helicopter, thumped overhead. Coughlin took extra risks to get guns— this was the gold standard.

Coughlin’s methods were guaranteed to look like straight harassment to those on the receiving end. After all, how important was a bag of marijuana in a place where so many people were dying? But Coughlin’s motivation wasn’t to juke stats, boost his department “rating,” or antagonize the neighborhood’s young men. He had seen the Monster, and his conscience demanded that he do something. So he used what discretion he had to compensate for the state’s lack of vigor in response to murder and assault.

This practice of using “proxy crimes” to substitute for more difficult and expensive investigations was widespread in American law enforcement. The legal scholar William J. Stuntz singled it out as a particularly damaging trend of recent decades. In California, proxy justice had transformed enforcement of parole and probation into a kind of shadow legal system, sparing the state the trouble of expensive prosecutions. State prisons, already saddled with sick and elderly inmates, were all the more crammed as a result.

But in the squad rooms of Southeast station, cops insisted that desperate measures were called for. They would hear the name of a shooter, only to find they couldn’t “put a case” on him because no witnesses would testify. So they would write a narcotics warrant— or catch him dirty. “We can put them in jail for drugs a lot easier than on an assault. No one is going to give us information on an assault,” explained Lou Leiker, who ran the detective table in Southeast in the early aughts. To them, proxy justice represented a principled stand against violence. It was like a personalized imposition of martial law.

Leovy, Jill (2015-01-27). Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (pp. 140-141). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

My point is that I take issue with Americans being painted with a big, wide brush of "compassionless" when there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Is there perhaps less compassion or concern (in general) directed towards criminals or individuals who are perceived to have engaged in criminal activities, here in the United States? Probably. But implying that such mindset reveals a lack of compassion in toto is ignorant.

You're ignoring the fact that black people are more likely than white people to be arrested for minor crime; they're more likely to get prison time for similar crimes; etc.

> or poor.

Ferguson etc showed us that small towns used minor traffic violations as a revenue stream. Someone would have a minor, small, traffic violation and get a fine for it. They would then have to decide between taking time off work to pay he fine (and thus lose their job) or go to pay the fine, if they can pay the fine by the time they have too.

Because many people can't afford to pay the fine they end up in jail.

That's pretty much putting people in jail for being poor, and the US does it a lot.