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.washingtonpost.com/rweb/commentary/want-to-fix-ba...
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.
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 bet your ass these laws would change.
But they aren't. So the laws stay the same. And that's a problem.
For instance, up until 2010, there was a 100:1 (one hundred to one) disparity between federal criminal penalties for crack cocaine possession vs. powder cocaine possession. Crack possession also carried a mandatory minimum five-year sentence. Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010, reducing the disparity to 18:1 and removing the mandatory minimum. The law is still influenced by the incorrect belief that crack is more dangerous than powder, but the legal system is capable of recognizing and fixing its flaws (even if the fix is partial).
So if the police get complaints from neighbors they respond to that. If your rich neighbors tolerate your coke addiction, they don't come knocking. If you have a noisy neighbor who complains they do come knocking. Police respond very much to community complaints, from my experience with them growing up.
Whenever the police came to "bust" activities, it was mostly due to neighbors calling in "suspicious activity" I.e. Underage drinking and weed.
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.
The family structure breakdown among the poor is directly, painfully correlated to the high incarceration rate. Absent fathers are absent because they're in jail, or expect they will be sooner or later, or because they're ashamed because they are unable to provide for their children.
One of my best friends is a doctor in Orlando, who happens to be black. Back during the Trayvon Martin shooting, he told me he would not even drive through Sanford. He didn't feel safe - from the police. In his daily life, he's a key administrator at a large hospital and a radiologist. In Sanford? He's a black man driving a car too nice for him.
That's not about the war on drugs.
Actually, it kind of is. What's the implicit assumption in that story? Of course, that he's a drug dealer. What would be the pretext for pulling him over and searching his car? To look for drugs.
It really is the cornerstone of policing in 2015, just try to imagine counterfactuals where there was no such thing as illegal drugs and drug dealers and so on and it becomes obvious.
The Moynihan report decrying the break down of black families was released in 1965, before the drug war, at a time when incarceration per crime committed was approaching all-time lows.
The incarceration rates in America bottomed out around 1973. At that time, about 63% of black and poor persons lived in a single-female headed household. By 1978, with incarceration rates still within their historical range, the rate was nearly 70% (source Losing Ground by Charles Murray). Family structure breakdown came first, it was not caused by incarceration. It is wishful thinking to believe that if all these men were not locked up they would be upstanding and faithful fathers, the problems go far beyond that.
The reason people are "making it sound like that" is because that's actually what's happening.
Freddy Gray was plucked from a sidewalk, detained, and then killed, for literally no lawful reason.
The context for his story, and the many others like it, is the war on [certain] drugs [when used by some kinds of people] that is current social policy.
This approach to criminal justice appeared at precisely the same time that overtly racist means of policing were outlawed, to accomplish the same goal.
Do you really think it's random happenstance that urban blacks get arrested for experimenting with drugs in a way that suburban whites do not?
Did a country with a few centuries of of legally enshrined racism and violence towards blacks just, you know, stop doing that fifty years ago, suddenly?
Do you know what Ockham's razor is?
It's more complicated than that. Police are actually much more tolerant of open-air/street corner drug-dealing in black ghetto neighborhoods than in suburbia. If you read books or news articles about these neighborhoods, you see that the dealing gets ignored for months and months, or the dealers are harassed and arrested and then right back out on the street later in the day. This would never be tolerated the same way in suburbia. Then what happens is that there is a shooting, or a gang war with many shootings breaks out. Neighbors demand that the police "do something." Since the police do not know who is responsible and witnesses refuse to talk, the police take the path of least resistance and lock up whoever they can on drug charges. I recommend the books "Ghettoside" and "Don't Shoot" for more on these issues.
Do you know what Ockham's razor is?
The elephant in the room is that black ghetto communities do not self-police and have a dire problem of particular senseless and indiscriminate murders. For instance, Ghettoside recounted a story of a 13-year-old, black kid wandering through the back alleys of his neighborhood, stumbling across a gang of older youths, who immediately started shooting at him. That is just insane. Completely insane. And the book is full of examples like that, of street shootings that take out innocent bystanders because the shooter couldn't be bothered to verify that the target was actually in an enemy gang.
If a community does not self-police, then there are two equally bad options: 1) outsiders can impose their own policing, which is always going to be fraught, brutal, and mistake-prone. 2) other communities can just try to contain the problem, ie, they can segregate themselves.
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.
The problem is economic and cultural (we allow for guns) so the police take maximum caution, and given the police are the only expression of government in some areas, the negativity falls on them. It's not as if most of the community in a blighted area don't want police - they do, but they also want police to act as if the areas didn't have a violent characteristic. Any area of the world with high crime, be it Russia, china, France, germany, greece will have police act differently in those communities. It's a reaction to the dynamics in such places. It takes effort to overcome and the local Govs typically don't put in the necessary effort.
I'd say that institutionalize/systemic racism in America makes it exceedingly more likely that a minority will end up poor and exceedingly more difficult to get out of ---> poor neighborhoods --> more crime ---> broken window policy ---> problems we've been seeing recently.
Conversely, a rich kid in a wealthy neighborhood(that probably doesn't have police at every corner) could be smoking weed right now. Nobody will notice/care, and even if they did some millionaire parents will make sure things work out for the best. And we know the general demographics of rich neighborhoods. It's not that only minorities commit crimes, but the police are always heavily more present where minorities are often located. It's death of a thousand paper-cuts. Housing discrimination, workplace discrimination, poor neighborhoods with horrid schools, war on drugs, excessive police presence/force. Then when they end up poor & desperate, the police are right there waiting for them to step out of line. "See?! We got him committing a crime!" ...without understanding everything in America that led to the event. And when the police jail/kill these people(often black men), you've potential just taken a father away from a family and there's now a young child without a father... and the cycle almost unavoidably continues.
The war on drugs has been a huge driver of this cycle. End it and I think we will see a change for the better. Won't solve everything, but it'll be significant improvement.
This kind of intellectual forgery is why the left (and it's prescriptions) are increasingly viewed with suspicion. Bring yourself to be honest with your words and assessments. Make sure what you say passes the smell test. Otherwise you're just preaching to the converted.
There've been a number of cases recently where large number of convictions have been thrown in to review because of either evidence of systemic race-based misconduct by law enforcement authorities or systematic falsification of evidence by law enforcement authorities. So, in many cases, either or both the "not being locked up...because they are black" and the "they are committing crimes" part are in considerable doubt.
> 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.
The selective targeting for higher penalties an higher prosecution rates for drugs predominantly used in the black community as part of the "War on Drugs" and the correspondingly higher rates of incarceration in that community resulting from it is a directly contributing factor to the "massive breakdown in family structure" in that community (and the war in drugs in general, and the incarceration resulting from it, is likewise a contributing factor to the breakdown in family structure among the impoverished outside of the black community.)
> Our "war on poverty" has, like the war on drugs, been a failure.
Arguably, "like" should be replaced with "in large part due to" in that sentence. The "War on Drugs" largely is a war on the poor. It directly opposes any "war on poverty" (though even as a slogan, much less any substance, the "war on poverty" was largely abandoned shortly after it was announced, and replaced by the War on Drugs.)
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.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-m...
I was as surprised as you likely will be. The exception is with capital punishment. It looks like black people are more likely to get it than others. But otherwise nationwide crime and punishment statistics look mostly fair.
Also, if the father is absent, maybe it's because he's in jail, like some scary number of people in the US? Maybe he can't get employment, because he's a felon, like a scary number of people in the US?
The person you replied to is right, ending the war on drugs makes a lot of things, including all the things you list, better. It's a great place to start.
The US is locking up very, very large numbers of young black men for minor crimes that people of other races regularly commit -- i.e., for activities that are only crimes when blacks are found to be doing them. Recent studies have shown that whites use more drugs than blacks, and yet are charged far less. Even the sentencing on perceived "black drugs" (drugs more readily available to the poor) such as crack is far more punitive than sentencing for the equivalent cocaine.
For a good book on the subject, see The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. It illuminates, with facts, just how disproportionately our system of laws punishes young black men while young whites are given second and third and fourth chances.
I just said this elsewhere, but I knew many people in college who used illegal drugs, and none of them were ever locked up (or even searched). When we have a set of laws and we choose to enforce them on some communities but not on others, then we are in fact locking people up just because they are black or poor.
Others have already pointed out that high incarceration and felony rates (in part due to the drug war) have contributed a whole lot to the social patterns that you mention here. I'll agree with you on one thing, though: our social programs today are in a particularly ineffective state with some messed-up incentive structures and still not enough resources to actually solve the problem. I'd much prefer something like a universal basic income to the complicated, market distorting system we have today. (But I still think that getting rid of these programs would be far worse than what we have now, even if the incentive structure would be more straightforward.)
That's actually not how the Gestapo worked. They were very bureaucratic and followed protocol. Their most misused power, according to Wikipedia, was the "protective custody".
If the intent is to help combat drug use then putting a user in prison and ruining his and his family's life doesn't seem like the way to do it. Not to talk about the crime it generates when a business that WILL happen doesn't have any other means to compete than with violence.
There's a great discussion between Glenn Greenwald and former Bush Drug Czar:
https://vimeo.com/32110912 (Janus Forum - Should the US Legalize Drugs?)
Besides the selective enforcement of laws, most laws themselves discriminate against the poor.
And that's exactly what you're doing.
Using drugs or selling drugs should not be a reason to put someone in jail.
Tobacco, alcohol or sugar (HFCS) do MUCH more harm to users than illegal substances ever will, and cost much more to society as a result.
> behaviors and responsibilities that are required to be a productive and self-supporting member of society
Define "productive".
If you sell illegal substances at a profit, how aren't you "self-supporting"??
There is nothing wrong with the 'culture' of Black people in America that ending white supremacy can't fix.
I have a friend, someone that has been my friend for 30 years, who is in prison right now for drugs.
He wasn't incarcerated because he's black. He was incarcerated because he was caught selling marijuana and laundering money.
I, on the other hand, chose a different path in life. I made the decision to not get involved with the things that he was doing. I have no criminal record and I'm every bit as black as he is.
I agree that fatherlessness is the key component here. The best predictor of criminality in young people is the presence of a father in the home. This holds true across racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. The large number of single parent households in the black community has a lot to do with the high levels of crime in the inner cities.
If you think drug trading and consumption is a crime, you're part of the problem.
(ETA "chosen behavior" clause.)
During that time my car broke down, and it would cost $3000 to fix it. This was money I didn't have. The car was otherwise reliable, so overall it would have been a good financial decision to fix the car that would have provided me with more than $3000 worth of transportation amortized over its future useful life.
But that didn't matter, I couldn't afford to fix it.
I did need a car though, or I couldn't get to work. What I could afford was to take out a loan to buy a used car, even though that used car was not as reliable as my previous car and cost more than $3000.
I ended up getting the used car. My decision to do that was based on my need to get to work and keep my job. It was the right decision, but had I had an extra $3000 in cash, the right decision would have been to fix my otherwise reliable car.
People without extra cash are constantly one misfortune away from a downward spiral.
Is there any statistic to show what percentage of today's top 1% earners where born to a bottom 50% family from the previous generation, and viceversa? 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. This does not invalidate your hypothesis, but may suggest that upwards mobility takes more than one generation to lift people from poverty to wealth.
Further more, we can do the same analysis to figure out how many people from bottom 50% families grow to reach 75% percentile or above. I do not know what it would be, but if much lower than expected, that would suggest that upwards mobility is quite limited, invalidating your hypothesis.
(I've been poor. I don't think that.)
Inequality starts from inequality of opportunities.
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.
The real culprit is education. Why is it that the poorest neighborhoods have the poorest schools? If you want income inequality you have to flip that upside down and start teaching students what they need to know to have better income. Things like basic finance, how to negotiate, the realities of what jobs pay etc. They should know about student loans, scholarships, government programs, and how to pick a college that will actually pay off as an investment.
Also kids in desolated neighborhoods need to be counseled. They need to learn how to take care of themselves and how to avoid eating nothing but sugar with no fiber since their parent(s) are too exhausted or beaten down or addicted to make a meal that isn't mac and cheese and sprite.
The drug war is part of that. How can kids learn and grow up properly when their families are being put in jail and they are left with no one to provide for them or take care of them while it costs huge amounts of money from the government to imprison them? It is an almost impossible cycle to break out of when the ods are stacked against you.
Really?
http://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic-resources/charitable-gi...
>In 2013, the majority of charitable dollars went to religion (31%), education (16%), human services (12%), and grantmaking foundations (11%).2
That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with those donations, it just means they might be to keep the lights on at religious, academic, or arts institutions.
It also doesn't mean that Americans aren't at all compassionate givers... I think we are. It's just that we're also all too often anxious to draw lines about deserving or undeserving, though (criminals, of course, being deserving of punishment rather than charity).
"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscoe_Arbuckle#The_scandal
Clearly part of it was due to newspapers of the time just flat out publishing lies, but the prosecutor had a huge hand in what happened.
Prosecutors often overreach, even when they are not downright corrupt, and this can lead to destruction of people's lives. There need to be consequences for prosecutors that do this. And if people are to tell me there are laws on the books that cover this, then they need to be enforced a lot more, because don't hear about it happening.
[1] http://www.danagould.com/hot-buttered-shame/
EDIT: added link to Dana's podcast.
You realise that racist policies around suburb building and home loans cause the inner cities to be mostly black? White people got cheap home loans to move into nice neighbourhoods. And that's one of the reason people are calling it a race issue.
Edit: That said, I do think the argument that even with all this, the argument that legalizing everything now and worrying about the details later is better than keeping it illegal while we work out details does have merit. I'm not convinced it is right, but I'm not convinced it is wrong either.
After the violence and racism, a big problem with police is the crappy solution rates to violent and serious property crimes. The Drug War just masks that lack of effectiveness.
From "Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America":
-----------
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.
When the author was asked in the comments to expound on the thesis he just provided a link to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Court#Due_process_and_r...
I think the crux is in the last paragraph of that section, although the link to the War on Drugs is not made explicit:
> Conservatives angrily denounced the "handcuffing of the police." Violent crime and homicide rates shot up nationwide in the following years; in New York City, for example, after steady to declining trends until the early 1960s, the homicide rate doubled in the period from 1964 to 1974 from just under 5 per 100,000 at the beginning of that period to just under 10 per 100,000 in 1974. Controversy exists about the cause, with conservatives blaming the Court decisions, and liberals pointing to the demographic boom and increased urbanization and income inequality characteristic of that era. After 1992 the homicide rates fell sharply.
I think it's entirely reasonable that the War on Drugs began as a reaction to rising crime rates.
My two additional bits: I've often heard that the US is a little exceptional in that it approaches the problem of "police doing bad things" by throwing "tainted" evidence out and mostly not holding the police accountable for their actions, whereas other countries allow the "tainted" evidence to stand but then allow some sort of proceeding against the police to address the bad behavior. It seems from my limited understanding that the US approach stands on the Warren Court.
It's interesting that both aspects of the US approach (War on Drugs, shielding the police from liability) are under fire. I wonder if these things are as controversial in other Western countries -- if not maybe the Warren Court really does deserve some scrutiny. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that the Warren Court caused the police protectionism, rather that it tacitly allowed it to persist with frameworks that mostly provide indirect corrective feedback to police misbehavior.
I think a cost-benefit analysis needs to be done for each drug.
And there will still be a market for black market drugs. The legal, high-quality, taxed drugs will be more expensive than the underground variants. People will still make and sell homebrew meth, just as people still make and sell homebrew booze.
This isn't to say that I think we should keep things the way they are. There are many intoxicating substances that cause grievious harm to individuals, families, and society in general and I don't think that any of the illegal ones are worse than alcohol in that regard. And I don't think that getting high or being addicted is a criminal act (though it may lead to things that are criminal, such as stealing, driving under the influence, etc.)
I also think that intoxicating oneself is usually a bad idea, particularly if it's done to escape from or avoid some problem or life situation that needs to be dealt with and resolved. My worry is that legalization will be percieved as endorsement, absent any campaign to highlight the ethical, moral and personal responsibility expectations that people will need to live up to. And we seem as a society to have really gotten shy about teaching that certain behaviors and ways of living can be right or wrong, absolutely.
I'm not saying that it shouldn't end. I'm saying that it is not "as simple as it sounds" and if you try and treat it that way there will be fallout to deal with.
Also, you don't need to totally legalize drugs. Though I'd love to see how that might work out.
If at any point your society thinks it needs to wage a war on the way its own citizens choose to behave you might want to take a nice long introspective look at society.
EDIT Additionally the studies have already been conducted in many cases. Asked to conduct a scientific study for your country into effects of various drugs you might find that you just end up being dismissed for presenting the data [0]
Why not spend some of that money on drug treatment and long term care for the few people who'll suffer permanent harm as a result of drug use?
Actually, no. Soft drugs are not a problem. Opiate addiction isn't addressable with prisons. We know treatment is far more effective and less costly. Other drugs don't have a large social impact one way or another. And on top of all that, disemploying narcs will get a lot of thugs off the streets.
LSD is effectively non-toxic. It's not addictive. It's less likely to make people do something dangerously stupid than alcohol, which kills thousands in drunken accidents every year. Marijuana is also non-toxic, and generally makes people cautious rather than risk-prone.
This sums it up for me.
How do we fix inequality? Companies run american prisons now, companies control elected officials, and voters are manipulated by basic psychological tricks to keep voting against their own interests (vote GOD, not basic human rights!). That's just one issue among 50 other giant issues america/world is currently failing at "doing the right thing" towards.
Also if you are referring to the proplem of private prisons I do agree it's probably not a good thing but since less than 1/5 of prisons are privately run I don't think it is the main cause of the problem.
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.
http://www.npr.org/2015/05/14/406699264/historian-says-dont-...
Is it possible that, due to race-income inequalities in America, that black males are also more likely to have low/no income at the same "much higher rate"?
When it comes to the disparity in non-violent arrests, remember that whites are more likely to abuse drugs than blacks
http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/07/study-whites-more-like...
when you control for socioeconomic status.
[0]: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#Development_3
I suspect wider cultural reasons rather than just simple corruption - though that no doubt plays a part.
8.4% owned, how many are not privately owned have services/goods/staff provided in large part by private companies?
This sums it up for me.
Here in the United States, we do have issues with the justice and penal systems. But these number alone do not paint the full picture.
In other countries, if you're convicted of a crime you may have a body part cut off. You may be executed. Or you may simply "disappear". In any of these cases, you're not considered a prisoner.
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.
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/methods-execution . Note that all of these individuals were afforded appeals and legal representation.
Some of the other countries? Maybe no trial at all. Maybe a completely rigged trial. Appeals? Doubtful but short. Time between being charged with the crime and execution? Perhaps days, as opposed to years in the United States. The method of execution? Anything goes; in North Korea the Kim regime has become especially creative here, dropping mortars and using AA guns to kill prisoners.
Is the U.S. justice system faulty? Yes. Can one make a compelling argument against the death penalty? Probably. Can an honest argument be made that the United States and China (let alone some of the other countries on the list) are even in the same league? Doubtful.
But are those really the countries you would like the USA to be compared with?
"The percentage of criminals in the United States"
Like I said, drawing and inference from the two stats you posted is disturbing because both of those stats say nothing of the actual amount of valid criminals/lawbreakers.
Why are Americans so criminal? More than Iran, China, Russia, Syria, Saudi Arabia.... Why is it that Americans can't follow the rules? What is wrong with them?
Of course that assertion is absurd because, at its foundation, that logic gets very racist very fast.
Not sure how this is really an additional fact. If you defined criminals in the sense of "criminals as defined in the US", you have almost by definition a direct correlation to the number of prisoners.
BTW, here in Germany we also have politicians who think that Europe's criminals concentrate in Germany. Probably every country has some people believing that all criminals come to them. The difference between countries is how much influence those voices have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
Note however that this is wild speculation, just things you have to take into account.
In the United States, there are 487,000 incarcerated awaiting trial [1].
Try the scenario when you're in a low income family with an addict. This very easily leads to a vicious cycle - eventual arrest and incarceration. That's one less person coming home with a paycheck. That's a family growing up a generation with a criminal.
And our culture doesn't shame (rightfully) the selfishness of doing drugs - it's ramifications on families. Instead, we blame cops, we blame the government, the privileged roll eyes and think being soft, sympathetic and compassionate will help.
Whatever the solution we want to take to crime - and however hip Ivy League law students make going soft on this and that - our culture needs to recognize criminal acts are inherently selfish, not cool.
http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/trends/cig...
http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/Social/Module1Epidemi...
Lately the government is becoming more firm here (the Netherlands) as well. Beer drinking is now legal only from age 18 and up and serving minors is punishable by law now, a bar owner pays 1360 euro the first time but may risk closure of the establishment. Drinking in private is never punishable. For public drinking (but not for being drunk) the fine is 90 euros, 45 when below age 16. If you are sick from alcohol you will never be punished as it may be inhibiting for seeking help.
Yes this is inhibiting for seeking help.
[edit] See replies, this isn't universally true.
And of course, it happened maybe twice in my life, not a couple times a week.
This means it is not legal for a police officer to control your identity unless they have established this risk of public disorder.
Of course, as a white person living in mostly affluent neighborhoods, I have not even been controlled once in my life. The experience of my friends of "north african descent" on the other hand, has been quite different.
Of course "reasonable cause" can (and usually will) mean, that if you happen to have the "wrong" skin-tone, hair-color etc. you will be controlled. The Police justifies this racial profiling with "experience" and "statistics" (at least in Germany)
> Border Patrol, nevertheless, cannot pull anyone over without "reasonable suspicion" of an immigration violation or crime (reasonable suspicion is more than just a "hunch"). Similarly, Border Patrol cannot search vehicles in the 100-mile zone without a warrant or "probable cause" (a reasonable belief, based on the circumstances, that an immigration violation or crime has likely occurred).
> In practice, Border Patrol agents routinely ignore or misunderstand the limits of their legal authority in the course of individual stops, resulting in violations of the constitutional rights of innocent people. These problems are compounded by inadequate training for Border Patrol agents, a lack of oversight by CBP and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the consistent failure of CBP to hold agents accountable for abuse. Thus, although the 100-mile border zone is not literally "Constitution free," the U.S. government frequently acts like it is.
They are not allowed to search you without a reason (In theory. I heared that they might just say "I think I smelled cannabis" and then they have a reason.)
Disclaimer: IANAL, and maybe I got some details wrong.
In France, that depends mostly of your shade of skin.
Well, it mostly depend if you live in a sensible district or not. It happens that mostly Arab and black people live in sensible district because they are poorer than the normal average french people. And (relative) poverty is the source of a lot of social problems.
I don't say there is no racism in France too, there is. But it is more indirect, like people trying to avoid looking at black people, or people who prefer helping the white guy instead the black one at school is another example.
The taxi driver made no indication that it was anything abnormal.
But guys, nothing is ever 100% one way or the other, no matter how much you support it. So you have to look at differing points of view -- unless the objective is just to have a good rant.
Here are the things that come to mind reading this:
- Yep, highest incarceration rates ever. Also violent crime has been dropping to unheard-of lows and the country is safer than it ever has been
- Prisons are not about justice or reform. [insert really long discussion here]. Political systems exist and function for political reasons. Therefore the prison system is made and maintained to keep society together. They don't put the guy who killed you friend in the electric chair because of justice. They do it so you don't kill him yourself, or have a lifelong vendetta against both him and the system.
- This piece is written by a lawyer. Do not expect it to fairly talk about all of the options. It's invective; well-written, emotional, powerful invective. The goal is to make you turn off your brain and feel a certain way. Treat it as such.
- Although this is targeted at lawyers, whatever failings there are? Most likely a result of judges and elected officials -- in other words, the public. If the public wants something, and it wanted harsher sentencing, it gets it. That means changes need to occur with the electorate, not elite legal minds
- If the system is broken, it's broken. Toss out all of that racism stuff, it's a red herring. People shouldn't have their civil rights abused because it's the wrong way to run a country, not because they're a member of an oppressed minority. If you want to win this fight and fix things, toss out every other issue aside from fixing the system. Sure, use various things like incarceration rates among blacks as an argument, but only very carefully. If this is a true problem affecting everybody (and I believe it is), then don't attach yourself to one particular cause or the other. That's just an easy way to lose the discussion.
We desperately need to fix things, but that's only going to happen if we make both impassioned and dispassionate arguments -- and only if we understand the terms at stake. I'm not sure this article helped any, but it damned sure made me angry at how broken things are.
"Racism" isn't merely a buzzword or an excuse if it's actually a historic and ongoing phenomenon.
If racism is _the_ problem, why does it produce perfectly antipodal outcomes for different "people of color"? i.e. Asians are economically ascendant (surpassing whites on most metric), while blacks, well... you get the idea.
Rubbing the amulet of "structural racism" so much has entirely debased the term.
Hint: one history includes codified discrimination until ~50 years ago and legal enslavement until ~150 years ago and the other one doesn't. Well, I'll give you that Asian Americans faced codified discrimination into the 20th century, but don't overlook the "antipodal" patterns of how each ethnic group came to be in America.
Hint 2: Asian Americans came over, at a minimum, in indentured servitude.
>Invective: Denunciatory or abusive expression or discourse
I vehemently disagree and think you insult the paper. It's well written, attempts to describe logical inconsistencies in how we approach our reasons for punishments, and what the legal profession might be able to do to fix it. It turned my brain up, not down, and it makes me think more about logical underpinnings of our justice system. I haven't been spoon-fed, and you also insult readers who might feel they got something honest out of the paper.
This is only true if you exclude from "the country" all the prisons where people are routinely raped and stabbed.
Also, even if it were true, the important question is: what caused it, and could that result be achieved with other means? How do other safe countries address the problem?
- [edit: I misread what you were saying here, the point about the death penalty is a non-sequitur on my part] Your second point isn't one I would disagree with but, but I don't think your example is a particularly good one: there is ample evidence indicating that the death penalty does not serve as a particularly strong deterrent. For example, murder rates in the US are actually lower in death penalty states, and have been since the 90s.
- "That means changes need to occur with the electorate, not elite legal minds." The author never asserts the legal profession is the only thing that can reform our broken criminal justice system. However he points out that the legal services we have now are vastly inadequate to the job of protecting the rights of most Americans caught up in the criminal justice system, and that part of the reason so many people are incarcerated is that they recieve little-to-no represenatation. Furthermore: "even apart from the millions of pending criminal cases for which people are not being provided a well-resourced and zealous attorney, every one of the thousands of unlawful stops, searches, home raids, beatings, taserings, shootings, and arrests that take place every day forms the basis for a freestanding constitutional civil rights suit. A quiet tragedy of the legal system is that these rampant daily violations are almost never litigated."
The broader point he is making is that the criminal justice system is only able to grind through tens of thousands of lives each day becuase those involved in it--and that includes lawyers and judges--are commited to keeping that system well-oiled and functioning. "Imagine a world in which lawyers stood ready, en masse, to use their skills and training and intellects to vindicate these constitutional rights every day. Such a social movement of lawyers would dramatically alter the nature of the legal system and our society. The system of modern policing, which depends on callous indifference to vindicating basic rights, would crumble at our simple willingness to hold it to its own formal rules. We can do it, but only through massive collective action to act on our professional and moral values."
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_Sta... [2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w13097.pdf
Imagine a city where police commit blatant traffic violations and never ticket one another. The authorities could decrease power inequalities by developing an online system in which all citizens are able to anonymously report dangerous drivers. Anyone who received too many independent reports would be investigated – police included. This sounds almost laughably simple, and yet the model indicates that it ought to do the trick. It is, after all, essentially the same system used by many online communities.
[0] http://aeon.co/magazine/society/game-theorys-cure-for-corrup...
Of course what actually happens if you report a moderator (or even just a friend of a moderator) is that the report will get thrown out on a technicality, and then you'll get banned over a minor infraction you may or may not have committed half a year ago.
PS: Big shout-out to all my buddies who are Not Here To Build An Encyclopedia.
...
> An intellectually rigorous system would, for example, study in great detail the connection between hundreds of billions of dollars in financial fraud and tax evasion and millions of easily preventable deaths, not dramatically reduce every year the resources devoted to fighting crime committed by the wealthy.
I'm glad when they said how over-policed some areas are that they also pointed out how we don't police other areas at all and the effect of those other areas, like white-collar crime, are HUGE.
The article stressed injustices based on race and geography. It touched less on differences of injustices based on class. I don't think it mentioned sex at all. Since I applied to volunteer with the Innocence Project -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocence_Project -- I've become much more aware of how what we all know, which is how much more men are targeted and jailed.
I volunteered because after seeing a documentary on the project I felt compelled to do something. The innocent people the project freed spent an average of 13.5 years in jail -- completely 100% innocent. My taxes are paying for the system this piece described.
You can do something to change the system too.
Edit: a quick search for the question below on differences in sex for the same crimes -- "Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases" http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2144002, which I found in "Men Sentenced To Longer Prison Terms Than Women For Same Crimes, Study Says" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/11/men-women-prison-se..., which has links to other research too.
> ... we’re starting to have symposia in which people talk about whether everything will be better if we give police more money to buy cameras for their lapels.
This was my mindset--that with more accountability, police will shape up. However, this article highlighted this solution as a symptomatic treatment.
I wonder how we could help address this major problem technologically?
Some states you only have to verbally identify yourself to police. Some states you're required to show I.d. if requested. Some states you can decline a breathalyzer and other states you cannot.
And if you know the law then you should exercise your rights to the limit of the law. Of course they keep passing new laws to push the limits in the other direction. And I don't think anyone wants to be a test case for throwing out a bad law in the courts.
The problem is similar here in Switzerland with the exception that there are fewer laws and that the federal government has very little power (unlike the u.s. With its strong federal laws). For example, here in one canton you can grow 2 marijuana plants for your own use while in another canton you will go to jail for even a small amount of marijuana.
Beyond that, I think that there is a lot of opportunity to advocate around these issues on the state and local level right now. Whatever you think of bodycams for police, you have to admit that in light of recent events they're going to become dramaticaly more common. That's just one example of how a crisis can provide a great opportunity for advocacy, and ultimately change. That's not to say that we will be able to make fundamental change quickly on this very difficult issue. But it is to say that there are paths forward, and I would invite people who care to dive in.
I dread the day that standard plod in the UK carries a firearm.
In reality, it's just a question of what they want to do, and whether they can get away with it. For example, if an officer insists on seeing your ID even if the rulebook says you don't have to show it, he can escalate until he gets his way.
A police officer can saw off your leg and feed it to some crocodiles if he wants to, and no one's looking or filming.
But of course, this misconception is central to the belief in "the rule of law", which keeps us misguidedly comfortable with the fact that there's a bunch of guys in blue costumes who can abuse you as they please, confiscate all your cash, shoot your dog, or just ruin your life on a whim.
