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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Poor whites and poor blacks are both subject to mass incarceration; though poor blacks are incarcerated at even higher rates. This is clearly among the factors that, on average, favors poor whites over poor blacks. I certainly did not deny the existence of such factors (I even enumerated some of them.)

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> Poor whites and poor blacks are both subject to mass incarceration; though poor blacks are incarcerated at even higher rates.

Yes, good to point that out.

My argument (implicitly) was that this is a really huge factor which gives poor whites a "net advantage."

An aggregate advantage maybe, however the individual who decides to not put themselves in the position to be incarcerated is confused why you are calling them privileged.

Well some people have to work much harder to avoid incarceration.

I concede that point to you, however certain types of violent crime are easier to avoid.

Avoiding committing crime and avoiding being incarcerated for crime are not the same thing.

(The first may help in the second, but just as committing a crime is neither necessary nor sufficient to assure incarceration for it, avoiding committing a crime is neither necessary nor sufficient to avoid incarceration for it. It is frequently argued that it is both more necessary and less sufficient for blacks to avoid crime in order to avoid incarceration as compared to whites, for instance.)

Its hard to be incarcerated for murder without someone actualy being murdered. Therefore the most effective way to avoid incarceration for murder is to stop murdering. People are not being wrongly incarcerated (wholesale) for violent crimes that dont exist, not being violent is sufficient to avoid incarceration for such crimes.

> Its hard to be incarcerated for murder without someone actualy being murdered.

No, its hard (but not impossible) to be incarcerated for murder without someone being dead. In a system in which law enforcement, the judiciary, and/or the population from which juries are drawn are biased against people like you -- whether for race or other reasons -- it can be quite easy to be incarcerated (or worse!) for murder without having killed the person who is dead, much less having murdered them (which is legally more specific than merely having killed them.)

> People are not being wrongly incarcerated (wholesale) for violent crimes that dont exist, not being violent is sufficient to avoid incarceration for such crimes.

No, even if the premise was true (that people are not wrongly incarcerated for violent crimes that do not exist), it doesn't justify the conclusion: not being violent would not be sufficient to avoid incarceration based on that premise, you'd have to stop everyone else from being violent, too, since only the existence of the crime, not you actually being the one who committed it, is posited as necessary for the punishment to occur.

Are you suggesting that the majority of convicted murderers are wrongfully convicted? And if you are what is the basis of that premise?

>People are not being wrongly incarcerated (wholesale) for violent crimes that dont exist, not being violent is sufficient to avoid incarceration for such crimes.

That's absurd. You're completely ignoring the face that the FBI invented completely bogus disciplines of forensic science (hair analysis, bite marks) and self-certified experts in those disciplines who then went forth and helped convict scores of people for two decades.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-fo...

Of all murder cases in a period of time what % of cases are effected by these issues with these types of forensic science (you arent suggesting all forensic science is bunk are you?), I never said the justice system is infallible, however are you suggesting that the majority people who are convicted of murder are innocent?

I'm not suggesting, I'm pointing out the fact that the FBI has systematically perverted the courts with bogus testimony, and for a long time.

I'd suggest that the fraction of wrongly convicted people is much higher than the number of those who are/were known to be wrongly convicted.

So its a subjective claim then not something that can be looked quantitatively? There are around 13,000 murders per year in the US, how many of these murders per year result in the wrong person being convicted? I would be surprised if its greater than 4%

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