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Comment by omegaworks | Hacker News Reader

> ... other than the people at the capital getting kick-backs from industries profiting off of the prison industrial complex, and the owners of the prisons themselves.

And the mostly white communities that get to boost their representative power by counting prisoners in their census, while stripping them of their right to vote.

1. https://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/

2. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/racialgeography/report.html

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Since males are also incarcerated at a rate many multiples of females, is the prison system also sexist?

Or is your explanation for that „that males commit more crimes“?

You might want to be careful applying this logic to the black incarceration rates, then.

Prisons aren't disproportionately located in majority-female areas.

Prisons are, however, disproportionately located in majority-white areas. Prison gerrymandering allows majority white communities to count Black prisoners from outside their community in their census while stripping them of their ability to vote. It gives the white community more power and resources, and takes not only from the prisoner their right to vote, but from the prisoner's community a census taker. The Census is literally how representatives in the House are allocated and per-capita funding is divided.

The prison location has nothing to do with the location of the crime. Not every town has a prison, and prisoners often get shifted around to different prisons for various reasons (security requirements etc.)

Also, pretty much all of the US is „majority female“, even if it‘s just by 1.6%.

A far simpler explanation for the same pattern would be that prisons take up a lot of space, and are therefore often located outside of urban centers, and rural areas also happen to be whiter than average. People generally also don't want to live near prisons, making it politically expedient to stick them somewhere out of sight in the boonies.

Those reasons seem a lot more convincing to me than a concerted effort to shave a few fractions of a percent off census data.

The benefit of the doubt can only go so far, extending it to this issue is an exercise in willful ignorance of the history of this country[1] and how it has systematically accumulated and protected white wealth at the expense of people of color. It's not just "a fraction of a percent." It's one in five. "One in five people in prison for at least 10 years is a black man incarcerated before age 25.[2]"

You have no idea the sheer magnitude of the problem we have here.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619...

2. https://apps.urban.org/features/long-prison-terms/demographi...

I think prison demographics have a lot more to do with inequalities in the justice system and how different communities are policed than it does who actually "commits more crimes", especially when you start looking at things like fraud and non-violent drug offenses.

You’re intentionally jettisoning historical context (3/5 compromise + wording of fourteenth amendment) here

Could you elaborate what you refer two with those two concepts? As you can see, I am not doing anything intentional as I don‘t know enough about the „3/5 compromise“ and the 14th admt

First, my bad! I mixed up 13 and 14 -- I meant the 13th amendment.

So first, the 3/5 compromise:

When the constitution was being drafted, there was a disagreement between the free and slave states (actually, I'm not sure if there were any free states, or if at the time the North was just not reliant on slave labor and essentially winding it down).

The north wanted slaves to not count towards your state's population for the purposes of apportioning house representatives. Since slaves could not vote, they argued, they shouldn't count towards your representation in the federal government.

The south, on the other hand, wanted slaves to count towards the state's population for apportioning house representatives. Since slaves still required the same resources to survive as non-slaves, they argued, they should be counted.

This ultimately led to the "3/5 compromise": slaves counted as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of apportioning house representatives.

Now, fast forward to the federal abolishment of slavery, the 13th amendment. It explicitly says "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." So it is very squarely placing prisoners in the same historical context as slaves, and they were thought of and reasoned about as such.

So in the end, it seems straightforward to me that the state of slavery and prisons in America deliberately reduces the representation of black people. This is by design. While it does effectively increase the representation of women, there's far less of an argument to be made that it's an intentional feature of the system.

NOTE: In checking these sources, I discovered that the 14th amendment (actually the 14th this time) says that voters who have become ineligible to vote shouldn't be counted towards your representation. Maybe it was superceded by a later amendment?

SECOND NOTE: Here's an NPR article mentioning the prisons-count-as-population-for-representation concept: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/12/31/761932806...

The implication of your comment is that there is something inherent in black people that makes them more likely to end up in prison. Are sure you want go down that road?

One could rephrase your comment like this:

The implication of your comment is that there is something inherent in males that makes them more likely to end up in prison. Are sure you want go down that road?

That‘s the point I‘m trying to make.

Testosterone perhaps?

Are you arguing that communities should be allowed to artificially inflate their voting population with non-voting prisoners? Do you think that's just and fair?

I do not care about details of US election laws. For what‘s worth, no, I do not believe communities should be able to inflate their voting population like that, but I have literally never heard of this topic ever being an issue anywhere else in the world. So that‘s like me asking „Do you think that it‘s fair that kids have free from school on carnival days“? You wouldn‘t care about this super-localized societal micro-issue either, assuming you‘re from the US and not Brazil.

OP provided two links for context, both of which were clear about being about the US prison system.

You've picked an odd subthread to take your stand in then, since that's explicitly the topic of the post you are replying to.

Looking at the U.S.A., it seems obvious to me that the following four things are true:

- Males commit more crimes than females

- Males are more easily, and longer incarcerated than females on the same evidence.

- Blacks commit more crimes than whites

- Blacks are are more easily, and loner incarcerated than whites on the same evidence

“careful?”, I'll be frank that I smell the stench of U.S.A. culture war identity politics where facts that should obvious to everyone are not examined on their veracity, but on “What team might the messenger be playing for?”. — what is there to be “careful” about what seems to be the obvious?

Bear in mind that judicial punishment in most countries, regardless of skin colour, generally involves a prison system of one sort or another.

This is not simply a US thing, nor is it a racial thing. This discussion is far broader than that.

Bear in mind that the criminal incarceration system in this country in its founding documents is constructed to create an involuntary labor force.

> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/

that provision doesn't necessarily imply maliciousness though. for instance, allowing for prisoners to be required to do work for the jurisdiction, and usually for the prison itself, while incarcerated. it's not unreasonable to expect prisoners to work off their debt to society in some manner (better yet if it develops the useful skills and experience at the same time).

but where that goes wrong is when prisoners are working for private interests for slave wages (i.e., food and shelter) and the difference being pocketed by said private interest rather than going to pay for said incarceration.

The 21st century EU Charter of Fundamental Rights is interpreted similarly:

> For the purpose of this article the term "forced or compulsory labour" shall not include: (a) any work required to be done in the ordinary course of detention imposed according to the provisions of Article 5 of this Convention or during conditional release from such detention; (b) any service of a military character or, in case of conscientious objectors in countries where they are recognised, service exacted instead of compulsory military service; (c) any service exacted in case of an emergency or calamity threatening the life or well being of the community; (d) any work or service which forms part of normal civic obligations.

https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/5-prohibition-sl...

See earlier 1953 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) Article 4 at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/European_Convention_for_the_P...

This doesn't invalidate the point, it reinforces it. It's a system that continues, rooted in the structural foundations of the governments of historically colonial/slave-trading powers.

It's not exactly surprising to see an exemption carved out for it in European documents.

It's indeed lamentable that we live in a society where forced community and military service is considered necessary. But it's a tad myopic to believe such constitutional exceptions are rooted in "colonial/slave-trading powers". You're pushing a narrative that just doesn't fit the facts. Just because penal systems were coopted to further discriminatory ends doesn't mean these exclusions are intrinsically rooted in Jim Crow or colonialism. Such a misdiagnosis is a recipe for failure in reform--both regarding specific, discriminatory abuses, and more general abuses that arise from the fact these exceptions are far more deeply and universally rooted in global human civilization. Show me a single country that doesn't impose incarceration, for example? (Incarceration isn't usually an enumerated exclusion simply because, for whatever reasons, it's more typically understood that incarceration or similar deprivation of rights is implicitly excluded from any enumerated right granting freedom of movement. Indeed, the labor as punishment exclusion is presumably more common precisely because societies happen to be more self-aware about the conflict given the relatively recent history in the West abolishing slavery and servitude.)

Right, but the parent's point is that this aspect skews representation quite a bit. (I'm not sure of the constitutionality) but one option would be to not count prisoners or non-voters when tallying up representatives. My understanding is that Canada allows people in prison to vote--this would solve it more simply. I also understand the jurisdiction for someone in prison is their address prior to being incarcerated--which sounds like an even better solution.

I know it's SOP to strip voting for felons. It's been enough of a challenge to restore voting rights in many areas, but there are other ways to address this problem and basically incentivize this.

Prison gerrymandering is a triple-whammy in a sense. Not only is the prisoner stripped of their right to vote, the [likely white] community where the prison is located is allowed to count the prisoner in their census for the purposes of allocating resources at every level of government AND the community where the prisoner is from loses a Census taker.

I recently heard someone describe it as an echo of the three-fifths compromise. I also hadn't realized HR1 and other bills look to be making progress at getting rid of the practice:

https://www.congress.gov/amendment/116th-congress/house-amen...

Black Americans are 0.5% of the population of the world, but fully 8% of its prisoners. Race is certainly relevant when you're talking about the US.

Now do crime stats

Poor people commit more crimes.

We made sure black people were poor by enslaving them and then systematically discriminating.

We white people owe the descendants of slaves reparations. Inequality gets worse over generations, not better.

Mormons were prosecuted too. Kicked out of Missouri. They GTFO'd and trekked west and established new settlements. Jews also have a history of prejudice, yet they seem to always leave their next generation better off.

At some point people just have to fight for what's theirs in this world, not always gonna be someone to help us up.

That view is unreasonable and those are deeply incomparable examples.

Yeah, that's really not so different from being sold naked in irons at slave auctions for centuries. Also similar is the way everyone can identify jews by the star on their foreheads, and mormons by the bright glow of their genitals.

The Mormons kicked out of Missouri were free people before and after. They had access to all kinds of resources, were allowed to get an education, own land, accumulate wealth and (with limited exceptions) vote, etc.

Meanwhile basically all Black people in America were enslaved for the next 30 years, millions died under slavery and millions were suddenly freed and given nothing. "Separate but equal" wasn't even for another 30 years and segregation & Jim Crow were another 70 years after that!

By the time Black people were reasonably allowed to participate in US society, politics & business they had been forcibly held back in the only ways to get ahead (accumulating education, land and money) by hundreds of years.

Yes. Any wealth accumulation even by free Black communities was repeatedly undermined and destroyed.

The bombing of Black Wall Street (Greenwood-Tulsa) is the most infamous example: the only air bombings to be set upon the continental United States were a campaign of racial terror.

Numerous examples exist of freedman communities being completely eradicated using public works projects. Entire towns flooded when it came to decisions to create dams and neighborhoods bulldozed when the interstate expressways were run through cities.

https://twitter.com/ericabuddington/status/13752633634716549...

> the only air bombings to be set upon the continental United States were a campaign of racial terror.

They weren't the only aerial bombings in the continental US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing

By income level, ignoring race.

Now adjust for context.

I just did, and you didn't like it :)

Race Realism is widely discredited bullshit, thanks

Hahahaha

That begs the question entirely. Only the people convicted of a crime make up the relevant crime statistics.

People who aren't arrested and convicted don't show up in crime stats, so crime stats and punishment stats are identical. You're begging the question.

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