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Comment by 0x27081990 | Hacker News Reader

0x27081990

I'm not sure it is a race issue. Times were different. People are now accepting that drug consumption doesn't make you a criminal.

At some point Britain thought that wealthy highly-educated people were incapable of being criminals, until time proved them wrong. Science is always evolving.

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In a fair system, black and white defendants who score the same number of points under this formula would spend the same time beyond bars. But The Herald-Tribune found that judges disregard the guidelines, sentencing black defendants to longer prison terms in 60 percent of felony cases, 68 percent of serious, first-degree crimes and 45 percent of burglaries. In third-degree felony cases — the least serious and broadest class of felonies — white Florida judges sentenced black defendants to 20 percent more prison time than white defendants.

The war on drugs weighs particularly heavily on black defendants. The police target their neighborhoods, herding people into a court system where judges are demonstrably harder on black offenders. The report found that nearly half of the counties in Florida sentenced African-Americans convicted of felony drug possession to more than double the jail time of whites — even when their backgrounds were the same.

This may just be a Florida problem, but I doubt it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/17/opinion/sunday/unequal-se...

Male vs Women rape statistics seem to denote the same thing, 10% difference, 18% difference, -5% difference. How many cases did the study cover? Looks to be about 300 given the dataset from the website.

300 is a small statistic.

10% of 300 is even smaller.

Science is hard.

I'd like to see a control for the amount of money spent on legal defense. The anecdote in that report itself suggests that it's the skill level of the defense attorney which is most likely a dominant factor.

From someone I know with personal experience, after they were charged with possession with intent to distribute due to growing pot, they had 3 choices. Go to jail, spend $X on an attorney who would get them probation, or spend 10 * $X on an attorney who would get them off. Both attorneys had perfect records, n>100, at their respective objective.

I'd like to see a control for the amount of money spent on legal defense.

So, then, why would black people spend less money on legal defense?

People spend as much money on legal defense as they can possibly afford, obviously. But that doesn't make the system racist.

So, black people have less money to spend on legal defense, because . . . ? And, do you think that the people in charge of the system don't know that black people have less money to spend on legal defense? Do you think they're unaware of the history of slavery -> convict leasing -> our modern prison system?

I would agree with this perspective. Over the last few decades there has definitely been a change in how people view addiction and more importantly how to address it. Harm reduction has much more traction then 20 years ago.

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