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Comment by celim307 | Hacker News Reader

Is it common to house non-violent offenders with ones convicted of violent crimes?

a large portion of the US electorate sees drug users and criminals as inherently violent. It isn't a fact or a conscious choice but rather a belief built from the constant narrative of tough on crime.

It is also fundamentally, systematically, and intentionally racist.

I'm wondering what set people off on downvoting your comment, as it's a commonly held view for anybody who has spent more than a small amount of time looking into our justice system, though perhaps shocking to those who have not examined the prison system. Perhaps the contrast between "not a conscious choice" and "intentionally racist"?

Probably because in people's experience "a large portion of the US electorate sees drug users and criminals as inherently violent" is untrue. Heck even the most hard line anti-drug politicians tend to stop short of calling drug users "inherently violent". The most extreme mainstream opinions tend to be things along the lines of "stop providing narcan and the problem will solve itself".

I didn't say people say 'inherently violent' I said that is the narrative that is created and used implicitly not explicitly. It's the same as 'forced busing' as code...

And you are wrong about the 'extreme' mainstream opinion. From making certain drugs illegal on forward...it is discussed, reported, and legislated in racist ways.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5121004/ [1] https://www.drugpolicy.org/issues/race-and-drug-war ...I can really keep going here...

Probably because the user didn't provide any evidence to back up his claim.

Why is it intentionally racist to hold the perception that drug users and criminals are inherently violent?

It isn't intentionally racist to hold the belief...but the belief is an intentional construction to justify racist policing.

Off the cuff and reducing a complicated discussion to somethign simple you can start here:

https://medium.com/equityorg/reefer-madness-the-racist-roots...

The early representations used to vilify marijuana were part of jim crow efforts to ensure racial hierarchies. They included representations (later reused with crack cocaine) of Black and Hispanic people using drugs and then being sent into a violent frenzy where they murder and kill white people.

The modern versions of this are more subtle, because they aren't being made explicitly but rather are part of a narrative societal norms is built on, which makes the entire discussion fuzzy and implicit. C.f. ...

the magical negro, and white people's belief that Black people actually have magical powers and super human strength - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/194855061455364...

and as an extension...

excited delirium, which is an invented thing used to justify violence by police and drug people and is often correlated with a presumption of drug use - https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2020/08/10/how-ex...

With excited delirium, 'symptoms' may include "attempts at violence, unexpected strength [see previous paper]...Complications may include rhabdomyolysis or high blood potassium". Those complications happen to also be side effects of narcotics people are injected with...the 'diagnosis' is much much more likely to be applied to Black people (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28990246/)

it is a disease, invented by police, that only seems to occur when police are involved and suspect drug use, that is disproportionately applied to people of color, to provide a post hoc rationalization for violence comited against them.

A lot of this is narrative and you really have to be skeptical of any narrative that is too clean and simple and flat to describe a complex situation. Crime rates have gone down dramatically in the past couple decades, so we have the luxury to apply hindsight and see what we got wrong and what we got right. But you should generally assume positive intent. Crime was a very serious problem in the U.S. in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. Take a look at NYC from 1965-2019: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm

Murder rates were 5x higher in 1990 than today. It was a big, big problem. It was believed that drugs drove a lot of that and funded gang activity...some of which was absolutely true. Some of which was absolutely exaggerated.

The victims of crimes are on the other side of this equation of justice. They also deserve justice and consideration. The ideal of our system is for the law to apply the minimum sentence to prevent the crime from re-occurring again. I think it unfortunately oscillates with the moods of the moment, but if murder rates were to suddenly return to NYC 1990 levels in your town, and someone you know or love was murdered, you might be singing a different tune.

Dude, it's been a hundred years. Times change.

Nobody cares about weed anymore for the most part.

Crack is mostly a non issue as that epidemic has already ran its course.

Perceptions of coke are relegated to jokes about white collar professionals and crazy parties.

Heroin and meth are the two drugs people really look down on these days and they're stereotypical white people drugs.

Attempts to cast everyone who wants some sort of stricter drug enforcement as closet racists is naive at best. And this is coming from someone who thinks meth should be available at Walmart just like caffeine pills.

Seeing some people as inherently violent is a very destructive attitude. Almost nobody is inherently violent. It all depends on context. Someone who might be violent in one context might not be violent in a different context. Changing the context can help a lot. A US prison is probably not it.

>> Is it common to house non-violent offenders with ones convicted of violent crimes?

Bigger issue: Is it very common to house non-convicts, people not found guilty of anything, alongside violent actual convicts. Go to any US jail. The number of people literally waiting for their day in court is usually greater than those convicted and serving time.

(Note I said jail, not "prison". Prisons are for longer sentences. Convicts in US jails are generally serving less than a year.)

Considering how many wrongfully convicted people you'll find here in America, I'd say it is exceedingly common.

It is. Most American prison systems have some kind of low-security units which exclusively house non-violent criminals, but not all non-violent criminals will go to a low security unit.

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