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Comment by smokeyj | Hacker News Reader

Are you kidding me? Prisons are filled with poor black drug offenders. If you're wealthy you can literally be a convicted paedophile sex offender and not do time.

The fact you attribute clean water as a sign of a functioning justice system shows how low your bar is.

Edit: I will say we have rights that exist. You just need to able to afford high power attorneys to prove such.

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Prisons are not in fact filled with drug offenders; the majority of all inmates are incarcerated for violent crimes.

http://harvardjol.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/HLL104_crop...

Your bar is too high; getting clean water consistently for almost a century straight, without any major interruptions, for 99% of the population is damn good proof that rule of law works.

> Prisons are filled with poor black drug offenders

How is that an example of the justice system not functioning? 80-90% of people think drugs other than marijuana should be illegal. 32% see drug abuse as a "crisis" and another 55% as a "serious problem": http://www.people-press.org/2014/04/02/americas-new-drug-pol....

People thinking drug use is dangerous and making it illegal, and then putting people in jail for trafficking in drugs (which accounts for the vast majority of sentences), is not a failure of the justice system.

EDIT: Since people seem confused by certain FUD on this subject. The vast majority of "drug offenders" filling prisons are there for trafficking not possession: http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Prisons_and_Drugs (only 5.3% of federal drug prisoners are serving time for possession; 91.4% are serving time for trafficking). And 80-90% of people support keeping cocaine and heroin illegal: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/17/drug-legalization-p....

Also account for the time lag between changing public opinion and changes in policy. As recently as 2001, 45% of people polled (and probably a much higher percentage of actual voters, who skew older and more conservative), opposed getting rid of mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug crimes.

Probably due to the inequality of enforcement. If everybody agrees something should be a crime but offender group A gets a 5 year sentence and group B gets 10 years or one gets community service and the other gets jail there's some kind of problem.

Study controlling for type of crime and circumstances finds ~10% more severe punishment for crimes black to white: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1985377

Evidence that despite approximately equal occurrences of consumption of narcotics black citizens are arrested much more frequently than white citizens: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/04/the-b...

We need not tell you to do more than what you're obviously capable of: find some research into the difference in outcome for black people and white people.

A successful rule of law functions in spite of, and not at the utter service to, the majority.

Did you even read the headline of the source you posted, let alone its content? It says the exact opposite of what you are claiming. Here's the sub-head: "Two-Thirds Favor Treatment, Not Jail, for Use of Heroin, Cocaine."

People do NOT support jailing offenders for minor drug offenders.

Your link is the opposite of what you claim - hell, the first paragraph clearly states that the bulk of people want rehabilitation rather than incarceration for users of harder drugs.

Isn't "trafficking" determined by amount, not activity?

I don't have appropriate legal citations, but yes, via the doctrine of "possession with intent to distribute" -- i.e. if you have more of the drug than one person could possibly hope to use, then courts have ruled that one can infer the person was intending to share or sell the drugs.

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