Examining the Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I sometimes think about what the reaction would be if statistics showed that the German courts disproportionately often decided to sentence Jews to death?
Perhaps there are some things that could be improved within the penal system in the United States?
I won't venture to guess whether there are regional differences as well...
Now I certainly don't suggest that race is the only factor here. The USA is a very classist society, not least due to a residual Calvinism that equates earthly wealth with a sign of God's favor and thus some inherent moral superiority, a view which seems to have been implicitly incorporated into the platform of one major political party.
Even though it's a naive idea, I still think that everyone should be entitled to the same level of legal support in a criminal case regardless of your socio-economic status.
Explosive growth in income inequality makes the debate meaningless. There won't be grades of legal support, they'll just be billionaires who above the system and dirt poor peasants who get no support at all. Now (or recently) is probably not a good cultural era to go into the defense attorney field, for example. Being a defense attorney in an era where no one needs or can afford a defense attorney is like being a really great star trek warp field engineer in 2015, thats nice but how do you pay your bills?
If you assume the problem is racism, while in reality it's income, your earnest efforts to combat racism will be do nothing (at best) to solve it.
Legal support is a finite resource. There are only so many lawyers (thank god!) and of those that exist, some lawyers are better than others. It's simply not possible to give everyone the exact same quality of representation, short of ensuring that everyone has zero.
This is just one example of what the price system does in the market. The whole point is that resources are scarce, and the means of indicating how important a resource is for some purpose, is by voting with your money. And it's turtles all the way down: what gives you that money to indicate the importance of the scarce resource, is that you're providing some scarce resource to other people, who are paying you, and they are doing the same, and so on...
But the number of death sentences in Alabama isn't large. ~250 since 1980. The percentage of murders that are white on black is about 3% of all murders. And white men murder women about 30% of time they commit murder. So we are talking about probably 1-2% of all murders are white male on black female.
So you'd only expect 2-5 white people on death row in Alabama for murdering a black woman. That is way way way too small of a sample size to make bold claims on.
Though, I'm pretty damn sure racism has an impact on sentencing.
That's HUGE.
I was prompted to actually look into this claim because the incidence of white-on-black murder is extremely low and I imagine the incidence of white-on-black murder where the victim is a woman is even lower. I would be surprised if there were even 5 such cases in the past 50 years in Alabama.
Do you have any sources? Or can you post the relevant snippet from that talk?
~84% of white victims are murdered by whites and ~90% of black victims are murdered by blacks.[1]
Crime is primarily a function of opportunity. When opportunity is taken into account, the main reason for the discrepancy is blacks are simply more likely to come into contact with whites day to day than the reverse.
So while I can't confirm the above statistic for you I can refute the assumption that there is a significant discrepancy between white-on-black crime vs. black-on-white crime.
1. http://www.politifact.com/florida/article/2015/may/21/update...
It would be a mischaracterization to imply one is extremely low, while the other is much higher. They are both, comparably, very low.
Particularly when you take variance and margin of error into account.
With such a tight range, I would wager one could only definitely claim they were probably approximately within a percent or two at best.
Crime is primarily a function of opportunity in environments prone to crime. In environments not prone to crime it is primarily a function of motivated offenders, and most opportunities are not taken advantage of.
So many. But most of all, the attitude about what the hell prison is for needs to change. Many people embrace the death penalty in spite of increased costs, and support high sentences despite a low rate of successful rehabilitation. We need to care about our prisoners and vote for them for change to happen.
It's not that people aren't aware of it, it's a matter of priorities. There's a reason Trump is emphasizing immigration changes.
In general, murders where it is a lower class person murdering an upper class person in furtherance of a robbery or some such draw more vigorous prosecution and are more likely to get a death penalty than murders where it is some lower class person killing some other lower class person.
Since blacks have disproportionately high representation in the lower classes, and whites disproportionately high representation in the upper classes, black murderer/white victim is disproportionately represented among the death penalty attracting lower class on upper class murders.
However, the general conviction rate for "high class" black men is higher than the rate for "low class" white men: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/18/chart-of-the... I can't see any reason why I shouldn't assume the same applies to interracial murders as well.
I do appreciate your point, and perhaps it is time for a civil rights movement among the poor, or among the white poor. I would support that. We should at least be getting the data.
But since we have this data about black people specifically, it seems fine to try to solve that problem from a race-based perspective. As other data rolls in that shows there are similar problems for the white poor, then I think we should try to solve that problem too.
Saying we shouldn't try to fix this problem because new data might come along that shows it part of a bigger problem is, to me, "great is the enemy of good" thinking.
"Moynihan had lots of ideas about what government could do—provide a guaranteed minimum income, establish a government jobs program, bring more black men into the military, enable better access to birth control, integrate the suburbs—but none of these ideas made it into the report."
Unfortunately, racists and demagogues eventually decided it was easier to just throw people in prison and be done with it.
[1] Odell Newton...shot and killed the driver...Odell had the very bulwark that Moynihan treasured-a stable family-and it did not save him from incarceration. One guy with a stable family committed murder. Forget about it, and just keep subsidizing single-parent households through TANF and WIC.
[2] Discussing what he’d do about the problem among blacks in cities, Moynihan said, “When these Negro G.I.s come back from Viet Nam, I would meet them with a real estate agent, a girl who looks like Diahann Carroll, and a list of jobs. I’d try to get half of them into the grade schools, teaching kids who’ve never had anyone but women telling them what to do.” Everything about this quote is wrong. It's just wrong? That's it? You don't think kids should have positive male role models, or you don't think veterans should have help with housing and employment?
I would presume the author is rejecting a handful of stereotypes in the quoted statement. I think the author was rejecting the sexist undertones of men being preferable to "women telling [kids] what to do". And the sexist undertones of introducing young men to "a girl who looks like Diahann Carroll." And the tone-deafness of "meet them with a real estate agent." Maybe the author thought showing Vietnam Veterans "a list of jobs" was also tone-deaf.
1) In the earlier article about reparations, there was a large section about real estate red-lining. Importantly, minorities were not allowed to buy houses outside of designated areas. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case...
2) There are any number of reasons that a military veteran may have difficulty finding a job (PTSD?). Suggesting that they simply haven't looked is a little bit insulting. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/11/re...
3) While there are numerous claims of the importance of male role models, these arguments are dubious. http://www.amazon.com/Raising-Boys-Without-Men-Exceptional/d...
4) I presume the bit about Diahann Carroll is suggesting that black men would get married and stay married if they met a sufficiently sexy woman. I think most people would consider that to be insulting.
Moynihan [...] began pushing for a minimum income for all American families. Nixon promoted Moynihan’s proposal — called the Family Assistance Plan — before the American public in a television address in August of 1969, and officially presented it to Congress in October.
For all his faults, Nixon was a much more radical president than is often remembered today, though of course he also helped to launch the war on drugs, the burden of which has historically fallen disproportionately on black Americans. I wonder how things might have turned out differently if he had not had to deal with the mess of the Viet Nam war when elected - though I suppose you could argue that without that particular running sore, he would have had much less incentive to undertake radical domestic reforms than he did. Would love to get the perspective of older HNers on this issue, as I was born in 1970 and outside the US so my impressions of this period mainly come from books.
I see what you're getting at, I just object to the presentation as the war as something Nixon got saddled with, rather than something he actively worked to have around for his own Presidency.
I don't know if it's realistic.
No, and it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
> What if judges, juries and lawyers worked on cases where the accused and the victim are anonymous.
How is the jury going to evaluate guilt or innocent based on evidence (whether physical evidence or witness testimony) -- including, particularly, evidence relating to the perpetrator, victim, and the details of their interactions that are essential to the question of guilt or innocence of the crime, if the identities, sex, race, etc., of the accused and the victim(s) are obscured from the jury?
What you might plausibly do is remove sentencing from the trial court, and anonymize the bare findings of fact before forwarding them to a separate body that handles sentencing. That might have some utility, though it would still be subject to bias in the trial courts actually in completing the findings of fact used for determining sentence.
What you suggest in your last paragraph is pretty much what I had in mind. Facts would be gathered and then anonymized before being used for sentencing. Instead of "this black guy raped this white woman" they would make their decision based on "this person raped this other".
It's pretty relevant to evaluating whether a particular piece of evidence (whether a video or photograph, a witness description, etc.) implicates the guilt or innocence of the particular person charged with the crime. Which is, after all, the whole job of the jury.
> What you suggest in your last paragraph is pretty much what I had in mind. Facts would be gathered and then anonymized before being used for sentencing.
What I discuss in the last paragraph is something that can only happen after the jury has found the facts in a process in which the jury, judge, and lawyers knew who the victims and accused were.
Especially when we're talking about witness testimony, the jury needs to see the witness to determine whether they believe them.
Because it's part of the facts of the case (imagine for instance if you couldn't mention the color and make of a car that hit you)?
Not to mention how would you hide the race and sex of a defendant from the jury? Not let the defendant into the courtroom? Move everything to written testimony?
> Neither their sex, nor race, nor anything is disclose.
Who decides what is contained by 'anything'? That process will become corrupt and only serve power. I don't think justice will be served by withholding information.
It suits some politicians to have a large prison in their district, since the inmate population is included in calculations of representation (in accordance with the Constitutional design for representative government), but as the inmates can't vote, the number of people the congressperson has to actually answer to is that much smaller.
http://www.demos.org/publication/census-count-and-prisoners-...