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Comment by notdonspaulding | Hacker News Reader

Justice is what happens when people are held accountable for the wrong things they've done.

Nothing about justice requires that punishment be meted out in strict accordance with the demographic breakdown of a population except insofar as wrong things are done in strict accordance with the same demographic categories.

Maybe you're assuming that to be the case, but I don't think you'll find any evidence to support such a claim.

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Justice should be blind in terms of punishment. Easy show systemic racism by looking at the number of African Americans in jail for drug offenses for drug when comparing across races. Drug use by race is relatively consistent in terms of percentage. I would consider that a big problem with our justice system.

My understanding is those "usage rates" are uniform only if we look at "used in last year", but ignore "used in last week" metrics where they diverge (according to Bureau of Justice Statistics). SSC did a pretty good deep dive on race and the criminal justice system, that covers this and other things such as underreporting, below:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-...

Exactly. If black people disproportionately are in prison, maybe that's just justice.

uh...

This is called "affirming the consequent."

Exactly. If men are disproportionately in prison, maybe that isn't justice.

Why is it ok for 'spaulding to just shut down the argument as "nothing about justice requires that punishment be meted out in strict accordance with demographic breakdown" but suddenly a fallacy when I insert an actual demographic? I knew it would make people upset because well if we're talking about men then no defense is necessary, no woodruffw to the rescue with "affirming the consequent", but if black people cue up the folks with the torches.

Nobody has torches out. I'm just pointing out that 'spaulding has made a strictly correct observation. You could have responded to it with an equally valid and interesting observation ("we have ample social evidence that criminalization is gendered"), but you chose to be inflammatory instead.

It's not justice, but the same phenomenon. If certain group has a larger tendency to commit crimes, and you have limited time and resource to look for crimes, it's overall more effective (arrest more people and perhaps prevent more crime) to disproportionately target that certain group. Men and blacks do in fact proportionally commit more crime than women and other races, but less so than the rate of incarceration suggests. There are only two ways to prevent this: being super effective and checking everything (police state), or being less effective and arrest less criminals for taking extra steps to arrest in just proportion (there are legit reasons to want this, e.g. it'd be terrible for society if for example white women had the sensation they could commit any crime without punishment. But to what degree is that extra effort worth it?).

Or maybe it's not? It completely depends on your prior. I, for one, am not entirely convinced that racism disappeared without a trace in 1964.

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