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Comment by 40acres | Hacker News Reader

"Tough on crime" was always a dog whistle to signal to (most) voters that politicians were willing to lock up minorities for comparably minor crimes. It's good to see that the winds have shifted towards a more just system although there is a long way to go.

I think there are many factors that contribute to this trend and would love to see a paper which goes into the details. I would bet that prosecutors have a lot to do with this. Prosecutors have so much power in our criminal justice system due to what charges they choose to bring forward.

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This seems like revisionist history. From the seventies thru the beginning of the nineties, the national homicide rate was double to triple what it is today. We had real crime problems in the "Tough On Crime" era, and we were hitting record crime rates.

A lazy Wiki snip:

Violent crime nearly quadrupled between 1960 and its peak in 1991. Property crime more than doubled over the same period. Since the 1990s, however, crime in the United States has declined steeply.

I'm sure there was probably always some racial influences, e.g. perhaps people were more willing to hand out harsh sentences because the defendants were mostly black. But to say that "Tough On Crime" was really just a cover to marginalize african americans & nothing more... it just seems like a stretch when you suggest everyone was in on it.

There are a lot of things to consider, including what you consider a crime.

I read one article that described how because of the increase in police presence in schools students were more often being handled by the criminal justice system like the common school fight, that would’ve otherwise not been included in assault statistics in the past.

During the crack epidemic many small offenses, such as petty theft were being punished harshly and used as an excuse to put more resources towards the war on drugs rather than diversion and treatment.

I really encourage you to read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Hand waving away racial influences is convenient to some, but definitely not to those affected by it. If you look into the statistics, you'll see that primarily minority communities were targeted by the "tough on crime" era. And these touted "tough on crime" policies only had the effect of enslaving and crippling generations of minority communities.

The crime rates are nearly similar among all races, and it's actually been shown that whites use more drugs than minorities. The thing is though, police don't patrol white communities. They also let white people off the hook. If you're not white though, the tradition is "one strike" (see Bill Clinton's damning policy). Hence, you get in trouble for something any kid might do at 16, and you get locked into a system of control and degradation for the rest of your life.

Please, please, please, do not defend the dark parts of American history. Especially when they're still going on.

"The crime rates are nearly similar among all races" Do you have any stats to back that up? Everything I find says the opposite.

A Channel 4 News fact check says: https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-black-amer... "Blacks were disproportionately likely to commit homicide and to be the victims. In 2008 the offending rate for blacks was seven times higher than for whites and the victimisation rate was six times higher."

You can look at the stats yourself: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rhovo1215.pdf See Page 3 Table 2. This is the "Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey" where they ask victims of violent crime demographic information about the offenders. This avoids any question of bias from the arrest rates. Doing the math, black people offend at a rate 2.4x higher than whites.

I disagree that whites are left off the hook: "The probability of arrest given the commission of a crime is higher for whites than it is for blacks for robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault, whereas for rape the probability of arrest is approximately equal across offender race. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S... https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/81/4/1381/22345...

I tried to find data about offender rate for property crime, but every discussion said that since the victims don't encounter the offenders, there is no good way to estimate offender race.

I'm not defending anything in American history. I just want to set the facts straight.

BTW, how pathetic is it to use a throwaway account to post this nonsense and then rush in to down-vote replies?

Hi dnomad. Though I'm personally inclined to agree with the gist of your arguments, the way you're presenting them violates the HN guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Even if you believe someone is arguing in bad faith, the exercise of responding to their best possible interpretation forces us to sharpen our own arguments and makes us stronger. It's a worthwhile constraint.

I hope you'll find a way to accommodate yourself to the guidelines and stick around; if not, I hope you'll find a venue that suits you. Regardless: keep on keepin' on, amigo.

When you just look at race numbers it doesn't correct for things like economic or educational standing.

Besides, isn't this begging the question? You can't really use statistics from the same institution you're trying to evaluate. The wikipedia link you posted gives a good summary of whats misleading about the snippet you chose immediately after that snippet.

> The crime rates are nearly similar among all races

This is patently false and not all crimes are the same. The murder and assault rate, for example, is tragically - and dangerously - high for blacks.

> The thing is though, police don't patrol white communities.

The thing is though, police patrol crime-ridden communities, which sadly are often black communities. Or do you think there's a massive unknown murder wave in New Hampshire that would be uncovered if only the police presence there was increased?

I'm sorry to be blunt but this kind of obfuscation of facts is extremely unhelpful and we'll never resolve societies problems by shifting the blame to 'the man' all the time.

Like I said, I encourage you to read the book.

Actual crimes committed is what you need to look at, not who gets caught and charged. That's the part that's broken, and that's what you're using to justify the brokenness. I see this time and time again from people.

The more you patrol an area, the more crime you'll find.

All you need to do is look at the statistics. The crime rates (I don't mean arrests or charges here!) are the same or higher among whites. They simply aren't charged or harassed like minority communities are.

You misunderstand. I'm simply objecting to the claim that "tough on crime" was a political dog whistle, aka a code word all the voters understood to actually mean "oppress minorities".

"Law and order", "tough on crime", they're all code words. Maybe not everyone realizes, but they're simply a method to enforce racist policies and hierarchies without getting in trouble.

As long as you don't explicitly say it's about race, the Supreme Court has ruled time and again that it's okay for police to target minority communities.

This is all detailed with plenty of sources in the book I mentioned. It's truly sickening.

Its a very interesting subject, and depends how far down you want to go before you are satisfied with an answer.

Both victimization and offending rates for murder were 3-4x the rate for blacks than whites in 1980 for example. Why was that? Could it be factors like systematic racism, redlining, bundling a lot of poor people into housing projects, brain drain in cities (due to redlining post-integration)?

The result of "tough on crime" has been incarceration rates exploding. They just throw anyone in jail. 5% of black adults are in jail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...

You would think that since the crime rates are down, the incarceration rate would be going down - how can incarceration rates go up as crime goes down? Technology and standard of living increases for the poorest has probably helped crime. The mass incarcerations just help for-profit prisons.

Yes, the results are a mess. But did the voting public elect "tough on crime" politicians as a covert way to oppress minorities? Or did they elect those politicians because they were concerned about crime?

Option 3: Did they elect those politicians because they were concerned about the idea of crime? Fear is a powerful motivator; I'd be interested to see how areas that elected "tough on crime" politicians correlate to actual crime rates.

I think you have to look at the effect at the end of the day. Did redlining happen to specifically punish and oppress minorities, or to let white homeowners feel "safe from criminals"?

"Lock all the criminals up" when the subtext/unspoken relation for "criminals" is "black people/minorities" is a way to oppress minorities. Its also a failure to think of or implement a different path to work against poverty or criminality - something politicians love to do as a crackdown is easier for them to implement than actually improving people's lives.

Yes, there was a crime spike around the early '90s. Here's the fascinating thing: it went away, everywhere. It didn't just go away in some cities that were "tough on crime" and stick around elsewhere. It went away in every city across the nation, regardless of their local policing. It was a transient phenomenon that probably would have gone away even if no changes happened to the criminal justice system.

Also, one thing that's worth understanding here is that a group of individuals all working under the same values system responding to the same stimuli will typically exhibit the same responses, which can often have the appearance of collusion or organization. And in a way it is, through the shared values system, but not in the overt way many think. That doesn't make the results any more palatable.

Tough on crime has gone out of style. We had our primaries recently and only a few conservative dinosaurs even mentioned ToC in their voter biography. Most of the candidates running for AD, circuit judge, and other legal offices were drumming up their crime intervention bonafides.

Voter suppression through felony disenfranchisement, however, remains en vogue.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/09/florida...

"In Florida, more than 21 percent of black adults are disenfranchised because of this policy."

Certain states are likely to remain relatively worse places for minorities, particularly blacks, to live. But the system is bent in this manner everywhere, including California. The diffference, of course, is that in Florida the voting populace has collectively decided that they like the way things currently work. Whereas in places like California, the voting populace is deciding for a lot of reasons that they don't like the current situation.

Even the most backwards parts of the Deep South are just trailing, but they're on the same path. They'll catch up eventually.

There was a time when lynch mobs were normal in the South.

Maybe don’t commit felonies?

It’s harder than it sounds!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594035229/ref=as_li_tl_no...

They can move to Kansas where they could vote Republican.

Just saying...

I never understood the mindset of "oh, this person committed a crime, let's disallow them from voting in the future".

My opinion is, if society has decided that an individual does not get to exercise their right to vote, then they also should have no tax liability. No taxation without representation, and all that jazz. I guarantee you if they were forced to make the choice between the two, they'd immediately reinstate every felon's voting rights.

For sure, we are also starting to see more minority district attorneys and attorney generals. I don't have stats to back this up to sense a trend but America recently had their first black AG (Holder, Lynch) and California and New York have had minority AGs recently (Kamala Harris & Becerra for CA, NY recently elected Letitia James for the democratic nomination and she is likely to win the general)

> "Tough on crime" was always a dog whistle to signal to (most) voters that politicians were willing to lock up minorities for comparably minor crimes.

I think race in these discussions is a poor stand-in for the reality of the situation. It's convenient, because it's much more easily quantifiable than culture, and we in the US had laws calling out race until ~55 years ago. But, looking at today, cultural mores and attitudes are the more dominant factor.

Even liberal Minnesota has the highest (or one of) achievement gaps in education. Part is the high influx of immigrants, which introduces a lot of second-language barriers, but not all. See https://www.twincities.com/2017/08/18/15-years-later-mn-scho...

Looking at very rural, very white areas, you see very similar bad outcomes WRT education and crime. Some companies are willing to pay very good wages for workers, and are very short on staff, but cannot hire because so many of the candidates fail a drug test or won't take one. A teacher I know in rural Iowa has white children in kindergarten who know (and use) more swear words than most adults, and their parents (if they know more than one of them) have little interest in encouraging achievement in school. They'd rather blame the teacher for the child's bad behavior and grades.

Tough on crime was a misguided attempt to change the culture of drugs and violence. That culture is still glorified in popular music, and fueled by poverty. It destroys the potential for hope, and so leads to more hopelessness, which fuels the culture.

Yes, race plays a factor in all of this, but it's not the only factor, and I suspect (though know not where or even if it is possible to gather) that culture plays a far more significant role. I know several people who believe (or believed) in "Tough on Crime" and not one of them did so because of race, or to lock up minorities for minor crimes. They see families in their community torn apart by drugs and violence, drunk driving, and so on, and want it to stop.

Edit: I read / skimmed the article, and realized it mentioned growing segregation, but failed to mention an experiment run by Eden Prairie and Minneapolis, where students could voluntarily switch schools in an effort to de-segregate. The results were that those who took advantage of the switch were black students moving from suburban to urban schools, and minority white students in urban schools going out to the suburbs.

> Tough on crime was a misguided attempt to change the culture of drugs and violence.

- Why is violence a sibling of drugs?

- Why do people feel the need to take drugs?

I think you're right that poverty is the problem, and its not only the "culture" of poverty to blame for it. The criminal justice system upholds poverty as a way of life by mass incarcerations of working-age people rather than treatment and rehabilitation. The lack of any social real safety net also upholds poverty - an entire town can be devastated by an arbitrary boardroom decision.

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