You would think that, but research shows systemic biases in the justice system throughout the entire funnel: from who gets more police attention, arrests, charges, plea deals and how heavy the sentences are. This is a sign the actions are not well-defined, and quite subjective.
None of this detracts from the fact that these laws are ultimately relatively clear in their restrictions, compared to China's social score.
Theft is theft. Drug possession is drug possession. Had these "unfairly" targeted individuals followed the law, they would not be subject to its penalties.
Sure, I recognize that very few of us are perfectly law abiding citizens. But I have trouble with the notion that heavier police presence, and heavier sentencing for repeat offenders, are somehow unfair phenomena, and these alleged transgressions far too often are lumped together with actual institutional inequity.
In other words, one must not conflate subjectivity in sentencing and policing with some kind of ingrained, institutional caste system, so long as laws are followed as written. If you wish to stay out of the felon caste, do not break obvious laws, like those regarding drug possession. If you do not agree with such laws, work to change them.
The end result is still members of the executive branches of the government deciding who gets punished based on their whims.
Your point saying "...so long as laws are followed as written" cannot apply as long as you ignore when the government chooses not to apply those laws to everyone, even if everyone that's gets charged has violated the law
A good summary is the ACLU’s position paper on Race & the War on Drugs. https://www.aclu.org/other/race-war-drugs
You also are repeating a common misconception when you state that “If you want to stay out of the felon caste, do not break obvious laws, like those regarding drug possession.” It has been shown time and time again that black Americans are disproportionately arrested and sentenced. And your trite remark about how “If you do not agree with such laws, work to change them” is puerile. The GP was expressing their opinion; in our democracy that is a critical component of working to change the law.
It's a misconception that you could avoid being in the felon caste by not breaking laws? That's what he said. He didn't say "if you want to gamble with not joining the felon caste, you have fair odds". Lots of soapboxing ITT, threads should decapitate at the first post with 'systemic' in.
With the number of overturned sentences coming out of the courts lately, yes, it seems you can go to jail without ever having actually committed a crime.
Nonetheless, consider this after rereading the GP’s comment. If a doctor told two patients that they could avoid getting cancer by not exposing themselves to carcinogens, knowing that one somehow unknowingly lives on a Superfund site, but deciding to purposefully neglect to mention the risk this entails, would you say the doctor was presenting one patient an incorrect understanding of the issue at hand?
Likewise, if a car manufacturer found a problem with one of their models and decided to notify the US about this by saying “you can avoid harm from the problem by not driving cars,” I would say that thinking that this is not “somehow unfair,” as the GP writes, would be a misconception, as I wrote.
The sort of juvenile discussion you are attempting to bring to this conversation is not really appropriate for HN.
Does personal responsibility exist in your ivory tower?
What sort of convoluted logic could possibly drive you to equate necessities of life, or constraints of circumstance, with such antisocial choices? We're talking about smoking marijuana and stealing expensive clothing, after all, not theft of food for subsistence.
Why is it that any time race is brought up, any argument that even has the potential to cast minorities in negative light is immediately shouted down with any sort of logic or reason thrown out the window? What about objectivity?
We cannot shout down potential truths simply because they have unpleasant implications.
That you consider all drug use “antisocial” is revealing; that you think the need to use a car would exert more pressure on the average person than an environment which encourages drug use from a young age is telling.
Your use of the term “ivory tower” is ironic when your assumptions are based on a kind of life that many Americans do not inhabit.
There is such a thing as personal responsibility. I would argue that most drug use is not a good idea. I think environments that encourage people to make bad decisions should be repaired. But to argue that “just one drop” of bad decision making justifies massively unfair treatment is an argument that is as intellectually demeaning as it is dangerously naive.
Would you argue in favor of a law that puts people in jail for doing something “antisocial” like using bad language, and that is predominately enforced against people of a particular race? No one needs to use foul language, but having done so does not give us carte blanche to hate.
As my final comment, your unprompted use of the term “ivory tower” and your ominous reference to “unpleasant implications” regarding race suspect that you are trying to bring another argument into this discussion in which I have no interest. This is my final reply.
You conspicuously failed to substantiate his "misconception".
>It has been shown time and time again black Americans are disproportionately arrested and sentenced.
I could not in all charitability/good faith (all your efforts to troll noted btw) extract a relevant point here. If they are disproportionately arrested having committed a crime, that has nothing to do with allthenew's whole post. If one charitably adds the context that in america you can also be arrested for committing no crime at all, then you've switched a basic premise of his post in 'arguing' it.
And you also conveniently ignore that blacks disproportionately commit crimes, especially violent crimes.
Such discussions cannot be productive until we are willing to admit to both sides of the problem.
I do not deny that there are inequities in our justice system. However, disproportionate police presence in low income communities is not a symptom of racist targeting. The blackness of these individuals is incidental to the fact that low income communities have higher rates of all types of crime, especially violent offenses, and in any other context it would be obviously prudent to assign additional police forces to target high crime areas.
But this discussion has far surpassed the boundaries of what is acceptable on HN, and I will not comment in this thread further.
This is a racist lie. If you control for socioeconomic factors, the difference totally vanishes.
What knowing the controlling variable does is give you additional information about what interventions are likely to change the situation. If you thought the reason for more crimes committed by blacks were their skin color, you might think that vitamin D deficiency is the culprit and attempt to provide them with supplements. Knowing the influence of economic factors makes that suggestion appear silly, and crime-prevention efforts would be better focused on improving the economic standing of blacks.
The implication of "black people commit more crimes" is that there is something about being black that involves a degree of criminality. It is a very poor way of describing the issue. A much better framing is "black people in the US are disempowered socially, politically and economically and black communities are ignored by US social policy." Another, far more useful framing of the issue, that I hardly ever hear is that black people are more often the victims of crimes.
It sounds like you are the racist here.
Could you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and abide by the rules when commenting here?
How many times must the particulars of the system be documented and disseminated before these arguments go away completely?
If you are white and wealthy, then drug possession is against the law only in vague terms on paper. It is not your practical reality. That's how the drug war has been made into the new jim crow. It's astonishingly simple, and very real.
> If you wish to stay out of the felon caste, do not break obvious laws, like those regarding drug possession.
Yeah, except that most humans don't consider the government a legitimate arbiter of their diet. I'm not going to decide not to consume cannabis because some person in Washington (or my state capital) overstepped his bounds. And yet, because I'm white and not poor, I suffer no consequences of this.
> so long as laws are followed as written
You can't be serious. The whole point is that laws aren't followed as written. If every person driving 56MPH in a 55 zone, if every person possessing cannabis, if every person violations "intellectual property" laws is suddenly subject to enforcement of those laws, they'll change real quick. But instead, only the "lower castes" are subject to enforcement, and they haven't the power to change the laws.
Just please stop spreading this nonsense. There are possibly young people reading these threads whose understanding of basic sociopolitical principles isn't developed yet, and we need to stop poisoning the well of discussion with this, "follow the law and you'll be fine" nonsense.
The world you describe is a world to work toward, but not the one that black and brown people live in today.
Not to discount your other points, but this is exactly how the Chinese system will work as well. (and already does in other respects from what I have heard and read)
>What a bunch of bigoted hogwash.
What did he say that was bigoted? (I am serious, by the actual definition [0], not the pejorative commonly thrown around to silence dissent) As a side note, my brother has a felony on his record, so I have some knowledge of the cause and effects.
[0] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/bigoted
Edit: This turned sour fast... not sure it's worth replying to comments.
I mean, that's bigotry. That's something I expect to read on the_donald.
Bigotry [0], are you sure you are using this word correctly?
What aspect of this situation makes the GP's advice untrue? For any individual in either group, the best way to avoid becoming a felon is to avoid committing felonies.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees here.
For a white, wealthy person, the healthiest life choices are to select a diet based only on the effects of the ingested materials in question, independent of their legal status.
For a black person, the healthiest life choice is instead to make very different dietary choices in order to avoid becoming a felon.
It is simply not the case that individuals in the two groups have the same dynamic re: life choices.
I don't think it's likely that a purely scientific and non-emotional discussion about race related subjects can be had these days online. Primarily because too many people frame their arguments in such a way to automatically make the other person wrong.
GP says: 1) laws are clearly defined, 2) increased attention/punishment for repeat offenders != institutional inequity
You say: 1) laws are subjectively enforced, 2) white and/or rich people don't suffer the same consequences
Note that neither of your points are necessarily responsive to or mutually exclusive with gp's.
But your appeal to the youth who might be reading this was just over the top.
I think you're ignoring the more serious point, though. GP literally advised disadvantaged people to more judiciously follow the stupid laws that were designed in the first place to disadvantage them.
> But your appeal to the youth who might be reading this was just over the top.
Listen, I usually find any sort of "protect the children" narrative nauseating. But in the specific case of racism, I do think it's reckless to spout this stuff on this forum. You and I have perhaps read The New Jim Crow or exposed ourselves to the statistics of the drug war, but a lot of people (sure, young and old) come here from other fora where they're more likely to have followed the breadcrumbs of technological development and might need a little more help before being able to pick apart these basic, bedrock examples of institutional discrimination.
Not all laws are that simple. Are you aware that not even the US Federal Government is aware of how many laws apply at any given time in a given place[1]? While I'm not going to justify people breaking laws, there are many federal laws that you can see might cause problems for people that could not reasonable have known that a law was being broken. For instance 16 U.S.C 3372[2] (the Lacey Act):
> It is unlawful for any person [...] to import, export, transport, sell, receive, acquire, or purchase any fish or wildlife or plant taken, possessed, transported, or sold in violation of any law, treaty, or regulation of the United States or in violation of any Indian tribal law
So if you have ever bought or been gifted a fish or plant that at any point broke Indian tribal law (even if you didn't know about it, even if it wasn't the law where you received it, even if the plant or fish is legally farmed and sold in another area) you have broken a federal law and you're now a criminal.
Does it make sense to not allow someone to have their constitutional rights if they were given a fish that was caught in an area where that is prohibited by Indian tribal law, and they weren't aware of that? Not all criminals have been convicted under such strange laws, but having such a black-and-white view of criminals stops being as obvious when you look at cases like this.
[1]: https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE?t=279 [2]: http://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-16-conservation/16-usc-sec...
According to the article, the actions described seem like discrete and well-defined like giving false information about terrorism, and not paying fines.
Later we voted the cameras out >2 to 1. Try that in China too.
Second, you just made the argument for me, as you implied, fines are easy to define and redefine.
That's just the sales pitch to make it seem reasonable and positive to the average person. It's naive to think that this social credit system won't have a political component. Here are some descriptions of some current pilot programs that make that much clearer:
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-cr...:
> But the fourth category, behaviour and preference, is where it gets interesting.
> Under this system, something as innocuous as a person's shopping habits become a measure of character. Alibaba admits it judges people by the types of products they buy. "Someone who plays video games for ten hours a day, for example, would be considered an idle person," says Li Yingyun, Sesame's Technology Director. "Someone who frequently buys diapers would be considered as probably a parent, who on balance is more likely to have a sense of responsibility." So the system not only investigates behaviour - it shapes it. It "nudges" citizens away from purchases and behaviours the government does not like.
> Friends matter, too. The fifth category is interpersonal relationships. What does their choice of online friends and their interactions say about the person being assessed? Sharing what Sesame Credit refers to as "positive energy" online, nice messages about the government or how well the country's economy is doing, will make your score go up.
If they're slurping up your purchases and social media for your credit score, it's going to be a lot more than about if you lie or fail to pay fines.
Also what might "false information about terrorism" really mean in practice? Vouching for your friend when the government thinks he's a dissident?
Sounds like a propaganda botnet that uses gamification to spread influence evenly. By incentivizing many intermittent points of influence the propaganda cannot easily be filtered from the rest of the data.
That's true, but I see no reason for the government system to take a more moderate approach.
I don't really buy that Alibaba would have too much power, either. I'm pretty sure the CCP could swat it down pretty easily if it gets too uppity.
> China's social credit system (which doesn't exist yet)
My understanding is that things like Sesame credit are much like pilot projects -- if their ideas work to the CCP's liking, they'll make it into the government system.
I understand the US isn't perfect, but I feel the real effects of comments such as yours do as much to excuse China's brand new system as they do to bring light to flaws in the US's system.
I think it must be emphasized that "once untrustworthy, always restricted" is a new policy in China that's being implemented, while in the US it is a historical principle that's coming under increased skepticism and criticism.
Just one of the hard realities of the legal system.
This is, exactly, how the immigration debate is being held in DC. One undocumented shot and killed a citizen by accident, and now we're supposed to kick all immigrants out. Visceral emotion is a great tool to optimize society for corner cases.
I can understand why the question is asked though. The jury is there to find facts, i.e. define what has happened. The judge will then find the "correct" sentence if found guilty. The jury should not be swayed to a not guilty finding if they believe a guilty would be correct, just because the possible maximum sentence is too long, even if it would not be imposed in the case at hand anyway.
This is all nitpicky and arbitrary, which is largely my point. The line between misdemeanour and felony is thin, but the consequences of crossing it are severe. In one state, you might get a $50 fine; in the next, you might be barred from voting or lose your green card.
Besides, different states have different laws. This isn't arbitrary but how our country was designed to work.
This is the marketplace at work. It's not a government-imposed ban on access to public services.
A court that doesn't publish felony records is not a secret court. In fact, non-secret courts have been around for centuries even though easily accessible felony records are an extremely recent phenomenon (post-internet).
Reading back I suppose my previous statement came off as callous. That wasn't my intention. But let's take a quick peek at felony recidivism rates [0] Spoiler alert: it's quite high and depends on what they were convicted for.
> Property offenders were the most likely to be rearrested, with 82.1 percent of released property offenders arrested for a new crime compared with 76.9 percent of drug offenders, 73.6 percent of public order offenders and 71.3 percent of violent offenders.
[0]https://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/Pages/welc...
First, what about the 30% some-odd folks who aren't recidivist? The individual should be smothered over the statistic of the many, because he's in a set of individuals (felons) and there's 70% of this set that repeats? How fair is that.
Secondly, if you're barred from professional or high-paying work because everywhere you go, you fail a criminal background check... Doesn't that mean you're MORE likely to return to crime? I don't know what it's like to have been a street criminal, but I can imagine I'd be a lot more likely to steal if no one hired me because of a past thing I did (like stealing). I'd say, the system is against me, it's corrupt and so forth, so screw it.
That last sentiment I described ("the system is corrupt anyway, it's stacked against me so screw it") is an attitude I see a lot in the (very large) US city where I live, and I know a number of people with criminal histories. They'll never end up in a cubicle farm making 180K writing code, that's for sure.
I'm 100% sure this negatively impacts the ability for those with records to get jobs. That really, really sucks for them. And like you mentioned, of course that would contribute to recidivism. Who's going to hire a thief to work unsupervised where they could just steal stuff again? That might be an unfair characterization, but I'd like to talk to the candidate about that and see if _I_ believed they were not going to steal my shit. If someone has a litany of drug convictions, I'd probably be hesitant to assume they were totally trustworthy to show up to work every day. But I'd like to talk to them about it. I guess your position is "it's none of your business", and you could be right about that.
The average Joe won't experience any difference. The armchair political scientist will argue it endlessly (I put myself in that category, by the way).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/18/thousands-chin...
Meanwhile, back in the US, we've actually begun to recognize our mistake as a culture. Thus eight states have legalized marijuana, and another dozen will go that way soon. Decriminalization of drug offenses is a common point of discussion in every state. Nearly every state that puts pot legalization on the ballot sees it go through. We've begun recognizing the mistake of how we fail to treat addicts.
Over a decade ago the US recognized the huge mistake of mass incarceration, as such the US prison population has peaked and has begun to decline, with both sides of the political aisle now openly discussing how to correct that broken system.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/grover-norquist/republicans-a...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/12/prison...
http://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/354288-we-must-p...
And there's China, going the other direction full speed.
[2013] "China executes 4 foreigners, televises death march" ... "China has mostly abandoned the once-common practice of parading condemned criminals before crowds in stadiums and through city streets on the way to execution grounds on the edge of cities."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-executes-4-foreigners-tel...
> A court in China has sentenced 10 people to death, mostly for drug-related crimes, in front of thousands of onlookers before taking them away for execution.
Did you mean sentencing in instead of executing? Based on the article you linked, the executions seem to have occurred elsewhere.
Until the US has a share equal to its percentage of the global population of incarcerated people (instead of 4-5 times that), and has abolished the death penalty, the shame that are private prisons, and improved the third-world conditions of its prisons, it has nowhere near "recognized its mistake as a culture".
It just has a few fewer prisoners than a decade ago, because of several factors -- including the legalization of marijuana. It's still as Old Testament and punishing to its inmates, and especially to the black population, as ever otherwise.
Btw, regarding China, let's cut it some slack.
For historical reasons not all countries develop at the same speed or are at the same stage. 40 years ago the US still had aggregation. 80 years ago it still lynched blacks.
And China 50 years ago had mass political executions and a full on political slash civil war -- compared to that, sentencing 10 people on a stadium with a crowd present (not executing them with a crowd) is BS.
(Especially since the US also has non-judicial citizens and even relatives of victims attend executions, to enjoy their revenge on the person dying...).
No, let's not "cut it some slack" on human rights abuses in the making.
That's a pretty flippant statement to make.
China is an authoritarian country that's moving closer to an autocracy, let's not "cut them any slack" and "take [their human rights] abuses" based on some cartoonish caricature of US actions. China is developing new forms of totalitarian social control may superficially resemble certain western practices (e.g. credit scores and background checks) but there are important differences. If you don't find that troubling, I can't really take your views seriously.
>>> For historical reasons not all countries develop at the same speed or are at the same stage.
This belies some fallacious thinking that countries develop along the same track. This is a common foolish mistake when it comes to thinking about China, which is becoming harder to entertain in light of recent events.
No, you read it wrong. The crowd watched felons to be sentenced and then they were taken to the place for execution (private location not open to public display) immediately afterwards. So no public execution like what it was like in the ancient China. I know this because I read similar Chinese news in past.
For some context in case anyone was curious, please see the page numbered 116 (but 118 of 240 of the PDF) from this report from the ACLU: https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/111213a-lwop-complete-repo...
From the article:
> People who would be put on the restricted lists included those found to have committed acts like spreading false information about terrorism and causing trouble on flights, as well as those who used expired tickets or smoked on trains, according to two statements issued on the National Development and Reform Commission’s website on Friday.
The US may ban you from flying if you are politically controversial [1]+, get kicked off a flight [2, edit: 4], or sneak onto planes without a ticket [3].
Likewise, people who trespass on public transit are often barred from its use. And of course people who break traffic laws are (eventually) kicked off the roads.
I won't comment on whether the Chinese government's characterization of its laws is accurate or not (I don't speak any relevant language and don't know much about the culture, so all I have to go off of is western media). But at least according to the Chinese government, these rules are mostly in-line with how things often work in the US.
[1] https://theintercept.com/document/2014/07/23/march-2013-watc... (edit: changed from http://mentalfloss.com/article/68073/8-ways-you-can-end-no-f...)
[2] https://thepointsguy.com/2017/07/getting-banned-from-an-airl...
[3] e.g., http://wqad.com/2018/02/21/illinois-stowaway-woman-pleads-no...
[4] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39919229/ns/travel-news/t/can-bad-...
+ The "predictive assessments" (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/10/us-no-fly-li...) used for putting people on the no-fly list are not very transparent and, IMO, reminiscent of a social credit system. It's extremely hard to imagine such a system that doesn't harshly penalize certain constitutionally protected speech (e.g., about Islam and US foreign policy in the ME).
The provided source doesn't support this claim. The only part which could even remotely be constructed as support for this claim would be 3 and the anecdata there include "He suspects" and "He thinks" - on the other, that you can end on such a list without knowing the reason (and often without recourse afair) is a real problem, but that's not what you claimed.
There are other abuses that we have concrete evidence of. E.g., refusing the cooperate with the FBI. (https://ccrjustice.org/home/press-center/press-releases/laws...).
Hell, up until 2005, the TSA used CREDIT SCORES as a component in deciding who should be on no-fly lists...
DHS does not use social media posts alone to place someone on watch lists, but they are incorporated into predictive assessments. Given two people who are otherwise equivalent, the one with public stated controvsial opinions IS more likely to end up on a no-fly list. By the govt's own admission.