Earlier quoted context omitted.
Growing up I lived in a town where there were hippy dealers and there were dreadlock dealers. They both got harrassed pretty evenly and the users I knew also would get stopped and issued summonses for small possession. The police would also confiscate beer in the car, etc. They were nice enough not to cite us for underage drinking, but I think the police were busy with the car thieves and guys testing out the small t…
>> it was mostly due to neighbors calling in "suspicious activity" i.e. being black FTFY
Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers
301–310 of 326 posts
Re: Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would be genuinely interested in a rebuttal to elevated testosterone levels (the linked National Cancer Institute abstract). I almost always provide links to sources that provide a reasonably analytic angle. They are generally ignored or misunderstood. Because, you know, (structural) racism.
Your theory is just damn racist. You make a huge jump from correlation to causation that isn't warranted from the data you present -- it's that (I stress, obnoxiously unsubstantiated) jump that's damn racist. Ex: "Melanin is positively correlated with crime. " is exactly the same argument, and is (I hope obviously) damn racist. The study cited also doesn't say what you think it does, and your misreading is obnoxiousl…
(Structural) sexism? Poverty? Poor fashion sensibilities?
Re: Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers
#303There'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_…
Re: Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But they happen in most counties If you meant "countries": no. No other country jails that many people, either compared to its population, or in absolute numbers. Not now, not ever. The US is not "the land of the free", it's "the land of the jailed". "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"... and I will promplty put those bums in my private prisons where I'll watch them be rape…
Oh, there is no question we jail too many people, and we jail rather than treat the mentally ill. Reform is definitely needed, no question. What I was saying is that other countries also disproportionately incarcerate their poor. It's not a uniquely American racist thing. Go to Angola, Nigeria, Russia, China, it's no different. Yes, we overdo the incarceration fixes all ills thing, we've got an unhealthy fetish for i…
But incarceration-fetish is uniquely American. No other country has ever done that in all of history.
When it is done in such huge numbers it really isn't "law enforcement" anymore, it's just some form of apartheid.
The rest of the world should subject the US to the same kind of shaming that was used against South Africa. But of course, the rest of the world doesn't have the balls to do that, so here we go.
Re: Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't mean to imply that there was government sponsored aid that was race-restricted. There definitely is for scholarships[1] and affirmative action policies for admission to schools or specific programs in those schools. (although that's not necessarily monetary aid) Some quick googling shows results of what appears to be private organizations solely focused on providing assistance to african americans or people…
Think about how circular this is... you're now arguing that the problem is a sense of victimization brought on by racially-driven aid in the form of college scholarships . So your victims have already succeeded in finding their way out! There are excellent arguments that the welfare state structure is a significant cause of racial inequality. But your "teaches them to be victims" argument is not one of them. A much m…
Re: Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
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_…
In the US, yes. In China, not so much. For all the correlations which are greatly attenuated in China, it is safe to conclude that inequality is not a significant cause of the corresponding phenomenon; instead, causation goes the other direction and/or a third factor causes both.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_issues_in_China#Overview
I remember when my home city was still very poor, people treated each other much better. There is a general sense of community and trust. People are always offering a hand to those in need of help, even though helpers themselves are poor. Theft was literally unheard of, let alone more serious crimes.
Re: Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In other countries, if you're convicted of a crime you may have a body part cut off. You may be executed. You can be executed in the US, too. In fact, the US executes more people per year than anyone but China and a handful of countries in the Middle East. So adding the possibility of execution into the comparison doesn't actually make the US look better.
"So adding the possibility of execution into the comparison doesn't actually make the US look better." Apples and oranges. Consider this report: http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/10/world/amnesty-international-de... In 2012, the US executed 43 people. The number of executions in China? Believed to be in the thousands . How did the condemned in the United States die? Here's the breakdown: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/meth…
No one is in the same league as China with regard to the death penalty (so the "let alone" is backwards, there), but leaving aside China and handful of Middle Eastern countries the United States is far out in the "heavy use" of the death penalty compared to every other country on Earth.
So you probably don't want to bring up the "in some countries, criminals might get killed instead of imprisoned" in a discussion of how the US is worse on imprisonment than every other country on Earth, because, compared to all but a handful of the ~200 countries on the planet, adding in consideration of the death penalty on top of incarceration exacerbates rather than mitigates the ways in which the US is worse.
Re: Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If less than what you would expect from two non-correlated random variables, this suggest where you start in life has an effect of how far you can go. Where you start in life is not independent of innate traits.
Agreed. But if that's the case, how (or to what degree) can inequality be the consequence of "one's own chosen behavior".
Re: Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The problem isn't that we're throwing them in jail for no reason . The problem is we aren't throwing non-poor non-minorities in jail for the same reasons. Most friends of mine regularly do drugs. Even the self made multi millionaires. None of them have been to jail. They aren't subject to the random ass searches like the poor are. If things were different - if the millionaires were treated with the same suspect, you…
The fact that I cannot determine this from context may be a problem all by itself.
And while it's true that there is usually a reason for throwing people in jail, that reason is often an arbitrary, capricious, or morally dubious reason. I prefer that people go to jail for doing a specific, non-accidental harm to someone else, rather than doing something that merely offends a moral principle held by someone else.
Get high on a PCP dipper, and you are only hurting yourself. Get high, strip naked, and go out to jump on top of cars, and you might do time for all the auto-body damage, proportional to the cost of repairs. Get high on heroin, and you are only hurting yourself. Share some of your heroin with someone who doesn't know how dangerous it is, who then dies from asphyxiation, and you might go down for negligent manslaughter. Get drunk on alcohol, and you are only hurting yourself. Get drunk, and then try to drive home, taking out 14 mailboxes and one step-down transformer, and you might be doing some time.
...unless you have money, or know the right people. One of my former bosses occasionally mentioned at work that he grew weed inside his house. He probably went months without ever even seeing a cop. No suspicion means no searches, means no evidence, means no prosecution, means no jail. I have known people who drove drunk on at least a weekly basis, and never got cited for it even once. They all either had money or a few cop friends.
It isn't just that the justice system is not enforcing malum prohibitum offenses among that class, but they also look the other way for more serious malum in se crimes. The rich can afford more skillful lawyers. The connected can get the police and prosecutors to back off a bit.
I know someone who quit a prosecutor job because she got tired of putting people in jail for being poor. That's what modern policing is doing. It's packing the prisons with poor people and the jails with the untreated mentally ill. I didn't vote for this. I don't know anybody that would. Yet the people around me keep electing representatives who promise to be "tough on crime" and the "law and order" candidates, without stopping to consider that those people may be inventing new crimes just so they can get tough on them, or that their new laws may encourage more civil disorder.
Re: Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your theory is just damn racist. You make a huge jump from correlation to causation that isn't warranted from the data you present -- it's that (I stress, obnoxiously unsubstantiated) jump that's damn racist. Ex: "Melanin is positively correlated with crime. " is exactly the same argument, and is (I hope obviously) damn racist. The study cited also doesn't say what you think it does, and your misreading is obnoxiousl…
If testosterone has nothing to do with incarceration rates, what mechanism do you propose for why men are in jail at much higher rates than women? (Structural) sexism? Poverty? Poor fashion sensibilities?
Second, there are tons of alternative explanations (e.g. socialization). Nature vs. nurture is adolescent-level stuff, and obviously males and females are socialized differently. Stop being thick.
Third, that's not how science (or anything except religion) works. You don't get to make fallaciously substantiated conjectures and then demand everyone believe them until the core claim is disproven.
edit: Oh wow, based on prior coments you're actually just straight up early 20th century style racist, or a troll, or both. Done engaging you, and really hoping you're just a stupid troll and don't believe anything you're saying here.