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Comment by axiosgunnar | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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...

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%.

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?

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...

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.

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.

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

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?

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