The criminals committing the crimes.
Or, ya know, perhaps there's a reason why some culture have insanely higher incarceration rates than others?
It is easy to put the blame on "evil racist cops" and whatnot, it is much harder to stop ignoring the issue that a small part of the population represents a vast amount of the criminals and start thinking about real solutions. What are the causes of the violence? There is welfare to those who need it, there are opportunities for those who work for it. Is it an economical issue, a social/cultural one? Perhaps prison life is "comfortable" compared to working your ass off, perhaps education is lacking, perhaps a bit of everything, and so forth...
Even if you did isolate those factors, it's still not really an answer to "why does this happen more here than there?" You're answer is, essentially, "because it happens more often there."
Edit: After rereading the second paragraph I realize that you do seem to be pointing towards solutions to the root cause of crime rates, but I find the first statement confusing in light of that.
A kid actually said this, "Writing is important so that when I grow up and I'm in jail I can write my kids like my dad writes me." because every man in his life is a gang member who sells drugs or is in jail. What the hell do you think he's going to grow up to be? It sure seems like he knows.
I'm certain that racist policing is a problem but it doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the problems we have. If it's just the police why don't you(not specifically you) go raise your family in North St Louis. You can kiss them goodnight to the sound of gunshots.
And it seems like everyone just ignores it. I don't really have a point. I'm just confused and frustrated. I don't understand why the US has a seemingly permanent underclass that gets completely ignored.
Because there are lots of instances of people living in deep poverty without killing each other at ridiculously high rates. Most people in China or India are more materially deprived than those living in the American inner-city, yet the neighborhoods there are much, much safer. Philadelphia in 1890 was much poorer, and much more unequal, yet the homicide rates were 10X lower. Also Edwardian England is a compelling counter-example. Read "The Classic Slum" by Robert Roberts. British society around 1900 was massively unequal and lots of people were desperately poor. But their homicide rates were 100X lower than the rates seen in the contemporary ghetto. The poor working class areas of England during that period had intact families, schools that provided discipline, strict policing, and strong institutions.
We are a savage species and crime is the default. What prevents crime is civilization. What you see in the black inner-cities is an utter void of civilization.
There were white (mostly Irish) inner city areas with a complete void of civilization, such as old southie, but those areas are less prevalent these days. That said there is lots of degeneracy among the white population in some areas too. I'd call those areas more of a partial void of civilization rather than an utter void of civilization.
You've described the scene: poor and predominantly African-American neighborhoods oftentimes lack stabilizing social networks. I mostly agree with this description. I might not call it a "void of civilization," but I will agree that there's a difference between West Oakland and Berkeley.
I am asking a different question. To be blunt, which contributes more to the current lack of "civilizing influences" in inner-cities: that the actors involved are black, or that the actors involved were born into the same lack of "civilizing influences" 20 years earlier?
"I am asking a different question. To be blunt, which contributes more to the current lack of "civilizing influences" in inner-cities: that the actors involved are black, or that the actors involved were born into the same lack of "civilizing influences" 20 years earlier?"
To be even more blunt, I take it you asking whether black genes matter more or whether the environmental conditions matter more? It is not really possible to answer that question along a comparative axis of "more or less." With most human traits, genes determine both the slope of the improvement curve and where the improvement curve plateaus. Environment determines where one is along that curve. I cannot throw a javelin 80 meters. Which matters more, genes or the fact that I have never trained to throw the javelin? That's not really a well put question. I'm sure with training I could throw it 40 meters, I highly doubt I have the genes to ever be able to throw it a world-class 80 meters.
Similarly with African-American neighborhoods -- I think they have the genes to have peaceful, orderly neighborhoods because such neighborhoods have existed in the African-American population before. I am pessimistic that there will ever be an African or African-American Pudong or Silicon Valley, because I don't think the concentration of genes are there. I would love to be proven wrong, but I think more evidence backs that view than not ( https://jaymans.wordpress.com/jaymans-race-inheritance-and-i... https://liberalbiorealism.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/the-likel... )
Most likely, there are statistical differences in gene frequency that make average behavioral traits differ between the races, all things being equal. I say that, because the world looks exactly like you would expect, were that hypothesis to be true. When you compare races, such as the Han Chinese, the Irish, and Africans, the Chinese tend to be the most orderly, regardless of where they live (China, Singapore, Taiwan, the American Chinatowns, etc) whereas those of African descent tend to have higher rates of crime and disorder, no matter whether it be Johannesburg, Belize, Rio, Liberia, Jamaica, Haiti, or Madison, Wisconsin. Worldwide, race predicts crime better than anything else.
But given the right conditions, Chinese can be quite disorderly. And we have proven cases in the past of black communities being quite disorderly. So regardless of the genetic tendencies, the outcomes are malleable.
Robbery and homicide are the two most clearly defined and well reported crimes. Robbery because the victim can see the offender, and has an incentive to report it to get the goods back. Homicide because it is very hard for the police to ignore a body.
* According to surveys of robbery victims, the offending rate of blacks is 6 times higher than that of whites. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cvus06.pdf
* According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, homicide offending rates for blacks are 8 times higher than for whites.
The proportion of blacks in prison is not at all out-of-line with the proportion of serious crime committed.
If any enemy country had these outcomes, we wouldn't talk about police psychology or the comforts of prison life. We'd talk about the nation's distribution of power (history of slavery and dominant "white" race, systematic inequality, etc) and figure it out with cold rationality.
So I suppose unionization in industry is caused by bosses selecting for socialist employees?
That's not true. At least not when it comes to drug use, blacks and white use drugs at similar rates [0]. Asymmetric enforcement is another explanation.
[0] http://c1.nrostatic.com/sites/default/files/pic_corner_07101...
Legislators, DAs, judges and police adjust their behavior when sentences feel out of whack with the crime. Unfortunately, that empathy goes out the window when the people in charge are sentencing "other" people, who they don't empathize with.
Poor, uneducated people live by one set of laws, and middle-upper class people live by another set of laws.
I believe that the law enforcement strategy is a concentration on drug dealers; prosecution of users is pretty much incidental, used to enhance sentences for other crimes as much as anything else.
If prosecution of dealers is the policy, then you'd need to show that blacks and whites sell drugs at similar rates. I have no idea whether or not that's true...
I don't think that's right [0]:
"[M]arijuana arrests now account for over half of all drug arrests in the United States. Of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010, 88% were for simply having marijuana."
So more than 44% of all drug arrests between 2001-2010 were for possession. It may be that blacks arrested for possession carried much more than whites because they were dealing and whites were just using. I haven't been able to find any numbers on that.
"Whites were about 45 percent more likely than blacks to sell drugs in 1980, according to an analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth by economist Robert Fairlie. This was consistent with a 1989 survey of youth in Boston. My own analysis of data from the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that 6.6 percent of white adolescents and young adults (aged 12 to 25) sold drugs, compared to just 5.0 percent of blacks (a 32 percent difference)."
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/09/30/w...
Drug use is a small part of why someone is getting arrested..especially to the point of a prison sentence. A chart showing that just as many whites and blacks tried an illegal drug (smoking weed is still illegal in most states) doesnt really tell us anything.
A plant that is native to this ecosystem.
It's the most absurd thing I can think of when it comes to America's war on drugs.
The shocking thing about incarceration rates in the U.S. is not just the fact that it quadrupled from 1960 to 1995, it's that even with that increase, the growth in incarceration didn't catch up to the growth in violent crime until about 1998.
Since you accusing me being a simpleton, you are going to have to explain what you mean.
It's a shining example of marketing having a negative impact on public discourse.
<sarcasm>You can't blame poor people for not having access to the immunity bankers have.</sarcasm>
If the point was to try to understand the reasons for incarceration period, then fair enough, "people committing crimes" would be good enough an explanation. But I think the debate is more centered around "massive incarceration", which implies that there is something special about the rate of incarceration in the USA and that people are trying to understand why that is that the USA are putting so many people in prison for petty offenses, drug use and myriads of other controversial reasons. It also questions the reason why some minorities are so disproportionately represented in that carceral population and whether or not there is a system in place to target them specifically in the response to crime in the country.
I would like to apologize if the phrasing of my answer was a tad snarky, I just found that you were addressing the topic with way too broad a brush for an issue that is so extremely serious, far-reaching and bordering on institutional social management.