Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers | Hacker News Reader

Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers

harvardlawreview.org

374 pointsphilrea315 comments

There's all this discussion of these issues, which relate to racism, economic issues, police brutality, crime, etc.

They seem complicated and nuanced and people throw their hands up and say well what can we do. The answer to that question is actually so simple you can say it in four words:

End the drug war.

Someone far more eloquent than me, The Wire creator David Simon, can flesh that out a little:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/rweb/commentary/want-to-fix-ba...

Seconded.

The drug war is a direct consequence of the Warren Court reforms of the 1960s. Equal Protection and Disparate Impact made illegal many local laws and policing methods that had worked to maintain order. Prosecutors needed new tools to get criminals behind bars, hence the war on drugs.

I don't think I've heard this theory before. Can you flesh it out a little bit please?

I found this via Google (which isn't much): https://foseti.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/the-war-on-drugs/

When the author was asked in the comments to expound on the thesis he just provided a link to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Court#Due_process_and_r...

I think the crux is in the last paragraph of that section, although the link to the War on Drugs is not made explicit:

> Conservatives angrily denounced the "handcuffing of the police." Violent crime and homicide rates shot up nationwide in the following years; in New York City, for example, after steady to declining trends until the early 1960s, the homicide rate doubled in the period from 1964 to 1974 from just under 5 per 100,000 at the beginning of that period to just under 10 per 100,000 in 1974. Controversy exists about the cause, with conservatives blaming the Court decisions, and liberals pointing to the demographic boom and increased urbanization and income inequality characteristic of that era. After 1992 the homicide rates fell sharply.

I think it's entirely reasonable that the War on Drugs began as a reaction to rising crime rates.

My two additional bits: I've often heard that the US is a little exceptional in that it approaches the problem of "police doing bad things" by throwing "tainted" evidence out and mostly not holding the police accountable for their actions, whereas other countries allow the "tainted" evidence to stand but then allow some sort of proceeding against the police to address the bad behavior. It seems from my limited understanding that the US approach stands on the Warren Court.

It's interesting that both aspects of the US approach (War on Drugs, shielding the police from liability) are under fire. I wonder if these things are as controversial in other Western countries -- if not maybe the Warren Court really does deserve some scrutiny. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that the Warren Court caused the police protectionism, rather that it tacitly allowed it to persist with frameworks that mostly provide indirect corrective feedback to police misbehavior.

It's not just the Warren Court, the other big problem is witness intimidation and the "don't snitch" ethic makes it very hard to convict people for murder, so drug cases are used as a proxy.

From "Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America":

-----------

This was how Coughlin did his job on many a night. Coughlin couldn’t do much about all the shooters in Southeast who got away with it. But he could enforce drug laws, gang injunctions, and parole and probation terms relatively easily just by driving around and making “good obs”— good observations, cop lingo for catching, at a glance, a bulge under a shirt, a furtive motion of hands. A chase might ensue, and sometimes ended with the cops shutting down whole neighborhoods as the LAPD “airship,” or helicopter, thumped overhead. Coughlin took extra risks to get guns— this was the gold standard.

Coughlin’s methods were guaranteed to look like straight harassment to those on the receiving end. After all, how important was a bag of marijuana in a place where so many people were dying? But Coughlin’s motivation wasn’t to juke stats, boost his department “rating,” or antagonize the neighborhood’s young men. He had seen the Monster, and his conscience demanded that he do something. So he used what discretion he had to compensate for the state’s lack of vigor in response to murder and assault.

This practice of using “proxy crimes” to substitute for more difficult and expensive investigations was widespread in American law enforcement. The legal scholar William J. Stuntz singled it out as a particularly damaging trend of recent decades. In California, proxy justice had transformed enforcement of parole and probation into a kind of shadow legal system, sparing the state the trouble of expensive prosecutions. State prisons, already saddled with sick and elderly inmates, were all the more crammed as a result.

But in the squad rooms of Southeast station, cops insisted that desperate measures were called for. They would hear the name of a shooter, only to find they couldn’t “put a case” on him because no witnesses would testify. So they would write a narcotics warrant— or catch him dirty. “We can put them in jail for drugs a lot easier than on an assault. No one is going to give us information on an assault,” explained Lou Leiker, who ran the detective table in Southeast in the early aughts. To them, proxy justice represented a principled stand against violence. It was like a personalized imposition of martial law.

Leovy, Jill (2015-01-27). Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (pp. 140-141). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

An old story - the gangsters of Chicago were eventually caught on tax evasion. There's some real value to this practice - after all, what ethical problem is there in arresting someone for one crime vs another, if they are guilty of both?

You end up transferring the penalties for more serious crimes onto lesser ones. If you're using jaywalking because you can't do someone for murder, soon enough if you're jaywalking you may as well kill whoever pisses you off while you're about it.

"Maintain order?"

After the violence and racism, a big problem with police is the crappy solution rates to violent and serious property crimes. The Drug War just masks that lack of effectiveness.

Is it your contention that the black cops in Baltimore are racist against black people?

Yes.

Is your contention that the obvious irony of that situation renders it impossible?

If the problem is racism and brutality in law enforcement, I don't think the right response would be "it was better before the 1960s". Law enforcement was racist before the 1960s because the law was explicitly racist then.

Legalize which drugs? Only marijuana, or also crack, heroin, or LSD? If a certain drug causes brain damage and makes its users invalids, who will support them?

I think a cost-benefit analysis needs to be done for each drug.

Other things that make people brain-dead and create invalids include snowboarding and being a pedestrian. Ending the drug war is actually in fact as simple as it sounds.

If only. The War on Drugs is a jobs program. What will all those newly out of work people do? What will all of those local police departments do without the 'easy' money from the government? (I realize that some of them don't need the extra funding and just use it to buy 'toys,' but I'm sure there are other to count on it in their budget)

I'm not saying that it shouldn't end. I'm saying that it is not "as simple as it sounds" and if you try and treat it that way there will be fallout to deal with.

>What will all those newly out of work people do?

Making drugs? Selling drugs? Work in treatment? Work in the new recreational environments setup to take drugs? Increase enforcement of public intox/driving issues? Police elsewhere and other issues?

How do you make that transition though? You don't just fire a bunch of people, cast them to the wind with some sort of hand-wavy explanation about how the "invisible hand" will sort everything out in magical fashion.

If you just cut all of those people loose, then you will have to deal with the fallout of a bunch of angry unemployed people, and their friends/family/etc. In addition to <opposing political party> using it as a "you don't love America" field day.

Honestly, screw those people. They profiteered off of human misery and enslavement and their actions directly and indirectly wrought chaos on communities worldwide.

I know it's a pipe dream, but personally I think anyone involved with imprisoning drug users / dealers should see the inside of a jail cell themselves.

I think it's important in policy discussions to distinguish "simple" and "easy" as concepts. Needless to say, it would not be easy to end and unravel the drug war. As a concept and goal, however, it is a simple decision.

> What will all of those local police departments do without the 'easy' money from the government?

Perhaps they could attempt to solve and prevent crimes involving violence and fraudulent behavior, which theoretically is the reason they exist in the first place.

And the idea that the war on drugs is a revenue-positive endeavor is so preposterous I am not sure how to even address it.

> Perhaps they could attempt to solve and prevent crimes involving violence and fraudulent behavior, which theoretically is the reason they exist in the first place.

You are assuming that they are not doing that currently.

That's correct they are not. David Simon has spoken at length on that exact issue, and it's referenced in the article I linked to quoting him.

Do you have numbers to backup the claim that those other crimes are occurring at a higher rate than the number of arrests/convictions for them? In other words, would every "War on Drugs" arrest translate into a "more useful" arrest if we eliminated the War on Drugs (and refocused on other crimes)? My feeling is that it wouldn't.

From the article:

American police forces deliberately gorge on the excess of 750,000 marijuana-related arrests every year in order to profit from quotas, grants, and civil forfeiture while allowing hundreds of thousands of rape kits to sit untested for years in police warehouses. Only 4% of all American police arrests are for crimes considered “violent” by the FBI, even though those crimes are offered as the justification for enormous public expenditures, wholesale Orwellian surveillance, and every violent aspect of modern policing.

Only mildly related, but this is a massively underrated point: all too many people conflate "simple" and "easy", not just here but in many other things.

You're so right it hurts to read your comments ;-)

Or you could take totally the opposite approach and say that the cost-benefit doesn't need to be done for any of them. They're all drugs (including tobacco and alcohol), and they can all cause issues in different ways. Let's help the people who have problems with them.

Also, you don't need to totally legalize drugs. Though I'd love to see how that might work out.

If at any point your society thinks it needs to wage a war on the way its own citizens choose to behave you might want to take a nice long introspective look at society.

EDIT Additionally the studies have already been conducted in many cases. Asked to conduct a scientific study for your country into effects of various drugs you might find that you just end up being dismissed for presenting the data [0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt

Currently the US spends billions on law enforcement and criminal justice.

Why not spend some of that money on drug treatment and long term care for the few people who'll suffer permanent harm as a result of drug use?

If all drugs where legal then they would be made by commercial organisations, instead of illeagal non-accountable crime organisations. Some people will die, and then those commercial organisations will get thier asses handed to them in a law suit, the industry will find ways to make it safer and accountable for thier own proTection. Instead of the current situation, where very large numbers of people die, and the suppliers murder even more directly with virtual impunity.

If people voluntarily take drugs that make them invalids, fully knowing the risks, what lawsuit would account for that? People still voluntarily smoke now, knowing that there's a very good chance it'll kill them.

It's that people smoke knowing that it will kill them but that's something different. Think about the dangers of illegal drugs - the chemical itself isn't generally the problem, it's the impurities / bad manufacturing.

If you were buying drugs over the counter you wouldn't expect to hit on a batch that contained a poisonous substance. Drug companies would be very careful to make sure that doesn't happen.

Here's a recent case from the UK:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/superman-ecstasy-...

"Legalize it and tax it" has been the mantra, with the taxes earmarked to fund treatment. The latter will never happen, because government cannot help itself from spending whatever money it can on whatever it thinks will buy votes.

And there will still be a market for black market drugs. The legal, high-quality, taxed drugs will be more expensive than the underground variants. People will still make and sell homebrew meth, just as people still make and sell homebrew booze.

This isn't to say that I think we should keep things the way they are. There are many intoxicating substances that cause grievious harm to individuals, families, and society in general and I don't think that any of the illegal ones are worse than alcohol in that regard. And I don't think that getting high or being addicted is a criminal act (though it may lead to things that are criminal, such as stealing, driving under the influence, etc.)

I also think that intoxicating oneself is usually a bad idea, particularly if it's done to escape from or avoid some problem or life situation that needs to be dealt with and resolved. My worry is that legalization will be percieved as endorsement, absent any campaign to highlight the ethical, moral and personal responsibility expectations that people will need to live up to. And we seem as a society to have really gotten shy about teaching that certain behaviors and ways of living can be right or wrong, absolutely.

> I think a cost-benefit analysis needs to be done for each drug.

Actually, no. Soft drugs are not a problem. Opiate addiction isn't addressable with prisons. We know treatment is far more effective and less costly. Other drugs don't have a large social impact one way or another. And on top of all that, disemploying narcs will get a lot of thugs off the streets.

Alcohol? If you did that kind of analysis, you'd be banning alcohol ASAP. Tobacco too.

LSD is effectively non-toxic. It's not addictive. It's less likely to make people do something dangerously stupid than alcohol, which kills thousands in drunken accidents every year. Marijuana is also non-toxic, and generally makes people cautious rather than risk-prone.

I agree that we should end the drug war but you are oversimplifying.

Not really. Much like "end apartheid" or "US out of Vietnam" we are occasionally presented with government policies so clearly unethical or ineffective that they defy oversimplification. The drug war is one such obvious failure.

It is ending. Legalization of marijuana is the start.

Legalizing marijuana is _very_ different from changing the policy on crack-cocaine. Crack is one of the primary issues in lower income/black communities.

A good first step? Absolutely, but it will be another generation before any policy is passed that results in the taxation of other narcotics. The US needs to sell guns to someone...

Right, crack is illegal so they can sell guns. Are you for real?

It is still nuanced in how you do it. For example, what about age limits for drugs? What about adults being banned from getting drugs (say an 18 year old getting alcohol). What about pharmaceuticals being sold without a prescription. What about ensuring safety standards in what was being sold (say ensuring that the crack in the store wasn't cut with anything horrible).

Edit: That said, I do think the argument that even with all this, the argument that legalizing everything now and worrying about the details later is better than keeping it illegal while we work out details does have merit. I'm not convinced it is right, but I'm not convinced it is wrong either.

Yes, but you haven't yet shown it's the root of our struggles with racism, economic issues, police brutality, crime, etc, (which seems to be what you claim in your first post)

The drug war is part of it. But the big thing to fix is income inequality. High income inequality is correlated with higher homicide rate, higher robbery rate, lower civic participation, higher mortality, lower social cohesion and lower well-being in children. So many social problems are strongly predicted by this variable, yet many refuse to consider inequality to be a problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality#Effects

Many consider inequality a symptom/consequence of one's own chosen behavior, not a cause.

(ETA "chosen behavior" clause.)

Indeed, the City of Ferguson's finances relied on the regular fining of its poorest citizens. Basically backdoor taxation.

Not unlike the lottery, which the poor regularly spent their meager pittance on. Taxation of the poor as Lincoln noted.

So can be ban lotteries (and casinos, too) unless participants demonstrate they can afford the losses?

Since you mention it: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/lotterie...

Lotteries are a symptom of the problem of poor financial education. Lottery-funded scholarships are the only way a lot of kids get to college. Ban the lottery, and their parents will blow it on something else. That something else will probably not allocate most of its funding to scholarships.

edit: If this country were rational enough for the solutions proposed in replies, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

You don't need lottery-funded scholarships if you have universal education (as most first world countries do).

The money has to come from somewhere. Taxing innumeracy seems a good start.

> Taxing innumeracy seems a good start.

Taxing based on wealth instead of intelligence just seems more....civilized?

"The measure of a civilization is how it treats its weakest members."

"The measure of a value judgment is whether it is enclosed by quotation marks"

Old saw: if you want less of something, tax it; if you want more of something, subsidize it.

Or, alternately, we should be funding that education by taxing companies who will ultimately be consuming those employees anyways.

>>Not unlike the lottery, which the poor regularly spent their meager pittance on. Taxation of the poor as Lincoln noted.

Not sure if you're trolling. Assuming you aren't, allow me to point out that your analogy is ridiculous. Fines are mandatory: you have to pay them or you face stiffer fines, and even jail. Lottery is completely voluntary. No one is forcing them to play.

Actually, the two are very related. While one is bound by law enforcement and the other is a "voluntary expenditure" they both accomplish the same goal, taxing those who have the least to give.

And while we are involved in a discussion of human psychology. Maybe consider the mental aspects of extreme poverty and you can see that purchasing lottery tickets is not exactly voluntary but a desperate attempt to change the course of an exasperated existence. Just a thought.

For example. Drinking water is voluntary but if you go without water you might get the feeling it's a little more than a choice...

>>Actually, the two are very related. While one is bound by law enforcement and the other is a "voluntary expenditure" they both accomplish the same goal, taxing those who have the least to give.

That's literally the only common thing between them. This doesn't make them "very related." It makes them tangentially related at best.

>>For example. Drinking water is voluntary but if you go without water you might get the feeling it's a little more than a choice...

Wow, so now you're comparing purchasing lottery tickets to drinking water. Amazing.

It'd be funny and practical if money invested in lotteries never resulted in a large win but was later returned to the participant - like a surprise investment scheme.

Sure, but that's not a particularly interesting or useful observation seeing as how one's choices are a result of economic circumstances.

It's usually people who have never been poor that think that.

(I've been poor. I don't think that.)

Same here! I find that when you spend the time to actually inspect this concept of 'chosen behavior', it usually turns out to be much less chosen than it initially seems.

Don't get me wrong, in some ways my opinions on the issue enter the very sensitive topic of genetics. I'm by no means a 'fluffy lefty' who believes education solves everything.

But the mere fact that I need to point that out bothers me. From my perspective, without even getting into genetics and whatnot, the 'chosen behavior' thought in regards to the poor is mostly bullshit. Being poor sucks, and a big part of that is a consequence of the fact that society penalizes poverty. Merit doesn't really enter the equation.

It's a privilege argument. I'm getting very sensitive to privilege issues lately.

I lifted myself out of poverty. I grew up in what southerners call "white trash" (albeit upper middle white trash), and my father was more or less a petty criminal. But I'm well aware that being white, male, smart, and American all contributed heavily to my success. I'm the beneficiary of privilege.

Far, far too many people (and you can see it in this discussion) were born on second base and think they hit a double.

That is a falsifiable statement, you know.

Is there any statistic to show what percentage of today's top 1% earners where born to a bottom 50% family from the previous generation, and viceversa? If less than what you would expect from two non-correlated random variables, this suggest where you start in life has an effect of how far you can go. This does not invalidate your hypothesis, but may suggest that upwards mobility takes more than one generation to lift people from poverty to wealth.

Further more, we can do the same analysis to figure out how many people from bottom 50% families grow to reach 75% percentile or above. I do not know what it would be, but if much lower than expected, that would suggest that upwards mobility is quite limited, invalidating your hypothesis.

> If less than what you would expect from two non-correlated random variables, this suggest where you start in life has an effect of how far you can go.

Where you start in life is not independent of innate traits.

Agreed. But if that's the case, how (or to what degree) can inequality be the consequence of "one's own chosen behavior".

If, for example, things like impulsiveness and self-discipline (cough Conscientiousness cough) have high degrees of heritability, it can be simultaneously true that one's birth place correlates with one's destination and it also be the consequence of one's own chosen behavior. (And to the extent that the environment is equalized and optimal, genetic factors will matter more, not less.)

You seem to be talking about average wealth and social mobility. This is different from inequality, which is about the distance from the bottom to the top.

Some of these results are counter intuitive. For example: There's data to show that the top quartile of earners in low inequality countries live longer than their top quartile counterparts in high inequality countries, even if the high inequality counterparts earn much more both in absolute and relative terms.

Edit: Since this is getting downvoted, here's a talk that spends 17 minutes listing studies showing that this is in fact about inequality, not average income. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ7LzE3u7Bw

Right, I have seen that research before, and I don't think you should be getting down-votes either.

The relevance of social mobility in the discussion was because the GP assumes the correlation that the problems related to inequality/poverty is the result of a third factor that is cause of the other to: personal choices.

My position is that if this is the case, we should be observing strong social mobility in both ways. Surely there are a number of "deserving poor" that started life in a disadvantaged situation but are able to lift themselves out of that by intelligent choices and hard work, as well as there are privileged folks who make enough ill choices and land themselves in trouble.

IF this is not the case, we should adjust the level of agency that people are capable. To what degree is it personal choice able to influence the well being we enjoy in life.

Your environment restricts your available choices and these things are tied back on themselves, so behaviour creates an environment that then influences behaviour. Looking for ultimate causes in current behaviours for social systems that have developed over evolutionary timescales is pretty pointless.

I've never been poor in the terminal sense, but there was a time when I had no money. I wasn't desperate, and I was beginning a career with a lot of promise, but I was also too proud to ask for help from friends or family.

During that time my car broke down, and it would cost $3000 to fix it. This was money I didn't have. The car was otherwise reliable, so overall it would have been a good financial decision to fix the car that would have provided me with more than $3000 worth of transportation amortized over its future useful life.

But that didn't matter, I couldn't afford to fix it.

I did need a car though, or I couldn't get to work. What I could afford was to take out a loan to buy a used car, even though that used car was not as reliable as my previous car and cost more than $3000.

I ended up getting the used car. My decision to do that was based on my need to get to work and keep my job. It was the right decision, but had I had an extra $3000 in cash, the right decision would have been to fix my otherwise reliable car.

People without extra cash are constantly one misfortune away from a downward spiral.

large scale inequality is the symptom of lack of social mobility. If poor people are able to work hard and become rich, there wouldn't be such large difference in wealth.

Inequality starts from inequality of opportunities.

I think it was Warren Buffet who said something along the lines of: if we handled the Olympics the way we handle wealth, we would be looking for the grandchildren of medal winners in the 50's and 60's and sending them to compete today.

In the US, yes. In China, not so much.

For all the correlations which are greatly attenuated in China, it is safe to conclude that inequality is not a significant cause of the corresponding phenomenon; instead, causation goes the other direction and/or a third factor causes both.

Also Edwardian England is a compelling counter-example. Read "The Classic Slum" by Robert Roberts. British society around 1900 was massively unequal and lots of people were desperately poor. But their homicide rates were 100X lower than the rates seen in the contemporary ghetto. The poor working class areas of England during that period had intact families, schools that provided discipline, strict policing, and strong institutions.

It's probably worth noting that the people living in those Victorian slums were largely homogeneous, and also homogeneous with the rest of the culture.

Likewise, the least-diverse states in the U.S. are also at the top of the list for lowest crime-rate.

Since the introduction of capitalism and free market, which marked the start of large income inequality, Chinese society has definitely experienced higher crime rate, lower civic participation, lower social cohesion, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_issues_in_China#Overview

I remember when my home city was still very poor, people treated each other much better. There is a general sense of community and trust. People are always offering a hand to those in need of help, even though helpers themselves are poor. Theft was literally unheard of, let alone more serious crimes.

Looking for simple cause and effect in this field is akin to taking a large recurrent neural network and looking for cause and effect between two neurons firing while not knowing any of the weights or connections.

That isn't even the deepest issue. Yes, minimum wage and social benefits could be increased.

The real culprit is education. Why is it that the poorest neighborhoods have the poorest schools? If you want income inequality you have to flip that upside down and start teaching students what they need to know to have better income. Things like basic finance, how to negotiate, the realities of what jobs pay etc. They should know about student loans, scholarships, government programs, and how to pick a college that will actually pay off as an investment.

Also kids in desolated neighborhoods need to be counseled. They need to learn how to take care of themselves and how to avoid eating nothing but sugar with no fiber since their parent(s) are too exhausted or beaten down or addicted to make a meal that isn't mac and cheese and sprite.

The drug war is part of that. How can kids learn and grow up properly when their families are being put in jail and they are left with no one to provide for them or take care of them while it costs huge amounts of money from the government to imprison them? It is an almost impossible cycle to break out of when the ods are stacked against you.

I'll agree that the drug war is out of control and as a "cure" it's worse than the disease. But people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor. They are committing crimes, and pleading or being found guilty. The problem I have with pieces like the original article are that they are making it sound like we are engaging in a Gestapo-like rounding up of large numbers of minorities for no reason and throwing them in jail.

By blaming the war on drugs we are also completely ignoring the other elephant in the room, and that is the massive breakdown in family structure that has occurred amongst the impoverished.

This is particularly the case for African-Americans but I don't claim that it's a racial thing, directly. It's part of the cycle of poverty. In DC, which is a large focus of the original piece, over half of babies are born out of wedlock. For African Americans it's close to 70%.

With no parents working, and fathers typically absent, children do not learn the behaviors and responsibilities that are required to be a productive and self-supporting member of society. They then perpetuate this in subsequent generations. Our "war on poverty" has, like the war on drugs, been a failure. The poverty rate in 1965 was about 15%, same as today, with trillions of dollars spent.

The war on drugs funds a massive effort to catch and punish drug dealers and users. So of course that happens. The war on poverty rewards disfunctional, irresponsible, and self-destructive life choices.

You get what you pay for.

Asking someone to turn out their pockets and then arresting them because some marijuana is now "publicly displayed" is as close to "no reason" as you're going to get.

Also, if the father is absent, maybe it's because he's in jail, like some scary number of people in the US? Maybe he can't get employment, because he's a felon, like a scary number of people in the US?

The person you replied to is right, ending the war on drugs makes a lot of things, including all the things you list, better. It's a great place to start.

The war on drugs is directly related to what you are talking about.

>>But people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor. They are committing crimes, and pleading or being found guilty.

I'd say that institutionalize/systemic racism in America makes it exceedingly more likely that a minority will end up poor and exceedingly more difficult to get out of ---> poor neighborhoods --> more crime ---> broken window policy ---> problems we've been seeing recently.

Conversely, a rich kid in a wealthy neighborhood(that probably doesn't have police at every corner) could be smoking weed right now. Nobody will notice/care, and even if they did some millionaire parents will make sure things work out for the best. And we know the general demographics of rich neighborhoods. It's not that only minorities commit crimes, but the police are always heavily more present where minorities are often located. It's death of a thousand paper-cuts. Housing discrimination, workplace discrimination, poor neighborhoods with horrid schools, war on drugs, excessive police presence/force. Then when they end up poor & desperate, the police are right there waiting for them to step out of line. "See?! We got him committing a crime!" ...without understanding everything in America that led to the event. And when the police jail/kill these people(often black men), you've potential just taken a father away from a family and there's now a young child without a father... and the cycle almost unavoidably continues.

The war on drugs has been a huge driver of this cycle. End it and I think we will see a change for the better. Won't solve everything, but it'll be significant improvement.

Can we dispense with "minority" and "people of color" when we're talking really about blacks and to a lesser extent hispanics?

This kind of intellectual forgery is why the left (and it's prescriptions) are increasingly viewed with suspicion. Bring yourself to be honest with your words and assessments. Make sure what you say passes the smell test. Otherwise you're just preaching to the converted.

It's not just blacks and hispanics. It's a lot of other hues as well. And that's before asking what "black" and "hispanic" even mean, which is highly contextual to culture.

And anyways, "white" isn't even a color -- which is kind of obvious if you think about it for a second because a dark white person and a fair-skinned white person can be as far apart as a dark white person and a latino person. Rather, white is a collection of socio-economic attributes and their indicators, of which color and other physical indicators are only the most obvious/visible. And not all white people have always been white. See e.g. "How the Irish Became White".

> This kind of intellectual forgery is why the left (and it's prescriptions) are increasingly viewed with suspicion

Tautology. "The left" isn't a thing, other than when viewed with suspicion by "the right".

> Bring yourself to be honest with your words and assessments.

Implying that it's dishonest to use terms like "minority" and "people of color" is a leap that you need to back up to have credibility.

The problem isn't that we're throwing them in jail for no reason. The problem is we aren't throwing non-poor non-minorities in jail for the same reasons.

Most friends of mine regularly do drugs. Even the self made multi millionaires. None of them have been to jail. They aren't subject to the random ass searches like the poor are.

If things were different - if the millionaires were treated with the same suspect, you bet your ass these laws would change.

But they aren't. So the laws stay the same. And that's a problem.

Growing up I lived in a town where there were hippy dealers and there were dreadlock dealers. They both got harrassed pretty evenly and the users I knew also would get stopped and issued summonses for small possession. The police would also confiscate beer in the car, etc. They were nice enough not to cite us for underage drinking, but I think the police were busy with the car thieves and guys testing out the small time illegal arms trade.

So if the police get complaints from neighbors they respond to that. If your rich neighbors tolerate your coke addiction, they don't come knocking. If you have a noisy neighbor who complains they do come knocking. Police respond very much to community complaints, from my experience with them growing up.

Whenever the police came to "bust" activities, it was mostly due to neighbors calling in "suspicious activity" I.e. Underage drinking and weed.

"They both got harrassed pretty evenly" - If you look at the national statistics, this is definitely not the case, so your anecdote unfortunately isn't representative.

E.g. see http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/january_february_2...

"in investigatory stops, a black man age twenty-five or younger has a 28 percent chance of being stopped for an investigatory reason over the course of a year; a similar young white man has a 12.5 percent chance, and a similar young white woman has only a 7 percent chance. And this is after taking into account other possible influences on being stopped, like how you drive. " [in other words, this sample has been corrected for any difference in base-rate of justification for being stopped].

The interesting thing is, profiling like this can be a self-fulfilling prophecy; if the base-rate of drug possession is equal between blacks and whites, but blacks are stopped more often, then there will be a higher number of arrests of blacks per-capita, and it will look like blacks are more likely of committing a crime. This higher crime rate looks like a justification for profiling, when in fact it's just an artifact of the profiling that was done.

[Note I'm not making any claims about the actual base rate of drug possession, just illustrating an effect with an example]

>> it was mostly due to neighbors calling in "suspicious activity" i.e. being black

FTFY

We were middle and lower middle class, a majority non black with a few blacks who acted like other middle class kids in the burbs. So in our case it was "underage drinking teenagers" in places we "should not be".

The laws are terribly flawed, but they do change.

For instance, up until 2010, there was a 100:1 (one hundred to one) disparity between federal criminal penalties for crack cocaine possession vs. powder cocaine possession. Crack possession also carried a mandatory minimum five-year sentence. Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010, reducing the disparity to 18:1 and removing the mandatory minimum. The law is still influenced by the incorrect belief that crack is more dangerous than powder, but the legal system is capable of recognizing and fixing its flaws (even if the fix is partial).

The relative sentencing is about the choice of customer. Crack is cocaine that poor people can afford.

Did you mean "random-ass search", as in searches without reasonable suspicion, or "random ass-search", as in inappropriately adding a body cavity inspection to an otherwise justifiable search?

The fact that I cannot determine this from context may be a problem all by itself.

And while it's true that there is usually a reason for throwing people in jail, that reason is often an arbitrary, capricious, or morally dubious reason. I prefer that people go to jail for doing a specific, non-accidental harm to someone else, rather than doing something that merely offends a moral principle held by someone else.

Get high on a PCP dipper, and you are only hurting yourself. Get high, strip naked, and go out to jump on top of cars, and you might do time for all the auto-body damage, proportional to the cost of repairs. Get high on heroin, and you are only hurting yourself. Share some of your heroin with someone who doesn't know how dangerous it is, who then dies from asphyxiation, and you might go down for negligent manslaughter. Get drunk on alcohol, and you are only hurting yourself. Get drunk, and then try to drive home, taking out 14 mailboxes and one step-down transformer, and you might be doing some time.

...unless you have money, or know the right people. One of my former bosses occasionally mentioned at work that he grew weed inside his house. He probably went months without ever even seeing a cop. No suspicion means no searches, means no evidence, means no prosecution, means no jail. I have known people who drove drunk on at least a weekly basis, and never got cited for it even once. They all either had money or a few cop friends.

It isn't just that the justice system is not enforcing malum prohibitum offenses among that class, but they also look the other way for more serious malum in se crimes. The rich can afford more skillful lawyers. The connected can get the police and prosecutors to back off a bit.

I know someone who quit a prosecutor job because she got tired of putting people in jail for being poor. That's what modern policing is doing. It's packing the prisons with poor people and the jails with the untreated mentally ill. I didn't vote for this. I don't know anybody that would. Yet the people around me keep electing representatives who promise to be "tough on crime" and the "law and order" candidates, without stopping to consider that those people may be inventing new crimes just so they can get tough on them, or that their new laws may encourage more civil disorder.

>> I have with pieces like the original article are that they are making it sound like we are engaging in a Gestapo-like rounding up of large numbers of minorities for no reason and throwing them in jail.

That's actually not how the Gestapo worked. They were very bureaucratic and followed protocol. Their most misused power, according to Wikipedia, was the "protective custody".

> people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor

I just said this elsewhere, but I knew many people in college who used illegal drugs, and none of them were ever locked up (or even searched). When we have a set of laws and we choose to enforce them on some communities but not on others, then we are in fact locking people up just because they are black or poor.

Others have already pointed out that high incarceration and felony rates (in part due to the drug war) have contributed a whole lot to the social patterns that you mention here. I'll agree with you on one thing, though: our social programs today are in a particularly ineffective state with some messed-up incentive structures and still not enough resources to actually solve the problem. I'd much prefer something like a universal basic income to the complicated, market distorting system we have today. (But I still think that getting rid of these programs would be far worse than what we have now, even if the incentive structure would be more straightforward.)

> But people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor. They are committing crimes, and pleading or being found guilty.

The US is locking up very, very large numbers of young black men for minor crimes that people of other races regularly commit -- i.e., for activities that are only crimes when blacks are found to be doing them. Recent studies have shown that whites use more drugs than blacks, and yet are charged far less. Even the sentencing on perceived "black drugs" (drugs more readily available to the poor) such as crack is far more punitive than sentencing for the equivalent cocaine.

For a good book on the subject, see The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. It illuminates, with facts, just how disproportionately our system of laws punishes young black men while young whites are given second and third and fourth chances.

> The problem I have with pieces like the original article are that they are making it sound like we are engaging in a Gestapo-like rounding up of large numbers of minorities for no reason and throwing them in jail.

The reason people are "making it sound like that" is because that's actually what's happening.

Freddy Gray was plucked from a sidewalk, detained, and then killed, for literally no lawful reason.

The context for his story, and the many others like it, is the war on [certain] drugs [when used by some kinds of people] that is current social policy.

This approach to criminal justice appeared at precisely the same time that overtly racist means of policing were outlawed, to accomplish the same goal.

Do you really think it's random happenstance that urban blacks get arrested for experimenting with drugs in a way that suburban whites do not?

Did a country with a few centuries of of legally enshrined racism and violence towards blacks just, you know, stop doing that fifty years ago, suddenly?

Do you know what Ockham's razor is?

Yes these things happen. They should not happen. But they happen in most counties --even homogenous countries. Also, people don't get killed like this everyday, these are exceptions, not acceptable exceptions, but its also not routine as you make it out to be.

The problem is economic and cultural (we allow for guns) so the police take maximum caution, and given the police are the only expression of government in some areas, the negativity falls on them. It's not as if most of the community in a blighted area don't want police - they do, but they also want police to act as if the areas didn't have a violent characteristic. Any area of the world with high crime, be it Russia, china, France, germany, greece will have police act differently in those communities. It's a reaction to the dynamics in such places. It takes effort to overcome and the local Govs typically don't put in the necessary effort.

> Yes these things happen. They should not happen. But they happen in most counties --even homogenous countries.

What homogenous countries with a comparable level of economic wealth have situations that even remotely resemble our mass incarceration and drug war policies?

China is a good example, though they incarcerate less and execute more

A quick glance at the stats suggests the U.S. incarceration rate is approximately 5x higher than China's. That's a big difference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat...

If you do drugs in China, how much you get punishment depends on your skin color and citizenship.

If you are Chinese, you are fucked, with the exception of powerful bureaucrat maybe; but if you are foreigner, you generally get off free, maybe a policeman will give you a stern speech about not breaking law again.

One thing I find funny though, is despite the war on drugs, average Americans, rich or poor, are still doing them, giving police more bodies to send to jail.

> But they happen in most counties

If you meant "countries": no. No other country jails that many people, either compared to its population, or in absolute numbers. Not now, not ever.

The US is not "the land of the free", it's "the land of the jailed".

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"... and I will promplty put those bums in my private prisons where I'll watch them be raped to death.

That should be the quote on the so-called Statue of "Liberty".

We should ask for that statue back.

Oh, there is no question we jail too many people, and we jail rather than treat the mentally ill.

Reform is definitely needed, no question.

What I was saying is that other countries also disproportionately incarcerate their poor. It's not a uniquely American racist thing. Go to Angola, Nigeria, Russia, China, it's no different. Yes, we overdo the incarceration fixes all ills thing, we've got an unhealthy fetish for it, but my point was, the poor everywhere are disproportionately affected.

People seem to take it that I'm okay with that. I'm not, but its not uniquely American and its not a policy to target ethnicities. If America were all white or all black we'd still have a problem of overrepresentation of poor in the system. By overrepresentation I mean normalizing for crimes.

Yes, disproportionately incarcerating the poor is probably universal.

But incarceration-fetish is uniquely American. No other country has ever done that in all of history.

When it is done in such huge numbers it really isn't "law enforcement" anymore, it's just some form of apartheid.

The rest of the world should subject the US to the same kind of shaming that was used against South Africa. But of course, the rest of the world doesn't have the balls to do that, so here we go.

Do you really think it's random happenstance that urban blacks get arrested for experimenting with drugs in a way that suburban whites do not?

It's more complicated than that. Police are actually much more tolerant of open-air/street corner drug-dealing in black ghetto neighborhoods than in suburbia. If you read books or news articles about these neighborhoods, you see that the dealing gets ignored for months and months, or the dealers are harassed and arrested and then right back out on the street later in the day. This would never be tolerated the same way in suburbia. Then what happens is that there is a shooting, or a gang war with many shootings breaks out. Neighbors demand that the police "do something." Since the police do not know who is responsible and witnesses refuse to talk, the police take the path of least resistance and lock up whoever they can on drug charges. I recommend the books "Ghettoside" and "Don't Shoot" for more on these issues.

Do you know what Ockham's razor is?

The elephant in the room is that black ghetto communities do not self-police and have a dire problem of particular senseless and indiscriminate murders. For instance, Ghettoside recounted a story of a 13-year-old, black kid wandering through the back alleys of his neighborhood, stumbling across a gang of older youths, who immediately started shooting at him. That is just insane. Completely insane. And the book is full of examples like that, of street shootings that take out innocent bystanders because the shooter couldn't be bothered to verify that the target was actually in an enemy gang.

If a community does not self-police, then there are two equally bad options: 1) outsiders can impose their own policing, which is always going to be fraught, brutal, and mistake-prone. 2) other communities can just try to contain the problem, ie, they can segregate themselves.

Do you really think things are different in wealthier communities because they "self-police"? Calling the police in a poor neighborhood is dangerous business... not because of gang retaliation, but because of the police themselves. And as you observe, the police generally do nothing about street dealers, and what they do is ineffectual. So why even bother calling them?

Well, in a "wealthy" community, generally the police are members of the community. They live nearby, go to the same schools, etc. So all policing in a sense is self-policing. There is much less of a sense of the police being the "other", and vice versa, the police have less of sense that the population is all "others" and all "savages". When you are an outside police force, you only deal with the criminals, so you it becomes your sense that the entire community is criminal.

Also, I put "wealthy" in scare quotes, because this dynamic also applies to areas like Chinatown or the Hasidic Jew communities of Brooklyn. These communities are not rich, but have low crime rates and rarely involve the police in their disputes, they mostly take care of problems using internal social sanctions.

More generally, "self-policing" means problems are nipped in the bud early before they escalate to crimes requiring the police, and never have a chance to escalate to murders and retaliation killings. Most "policing" is taken care of by families and parents. Growing up, it was normal for one parent to complain to another parent about the behavior of the second parent's child, and the second parent to enforce discipline on their own children. I cannot remember a single time in my neighborhood where we had to call the police on a neighbor. I cannot actually recall a single instance of crime, such as burglary.

This problem, applied racially, leads to an uncomfortable question. If black communities are less effective than white communities at "self-policing", why is that? Is it because of externally imposed social structure issues (the consequences of racism), or is it because of internal nature (blacks are less intelligent and moral than whites)?

You have to start with this raw, painful question. Either you argue for racial inferiority, or you acknowledge that the problems are truly from external rather than internal sources. Once you acknowledge that, complaining about "self policing" sounds like blaming the victim, because it is.

Why is that? Is it because of externally imposed social structure issues (the consequences of racism), or is it because of internal nature (blacks are less intelligent and moral than whites)?

Hypothesis #1: Blacks are the pawns in an ongoing civil war between the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe of American whites. The blue tribe, the left, talks a big game about helping black people, but if you look at what they do, they try to pin all the blame for the plight of black people on lack of education and the racism of the Red Tribe. The blue tribe is mostly interested in using blacks as a voting bank, not on finding the true causes and fixing them. The fixes they do spout, such as education, provide massive wealth transfers to Blue tribe labor unions while doing nothing to fix the problems of broken families and crime. The Red Tribe cares mostly about containment. To the extent they want to fix the problem, it is by funneling money to their own political base, police unions and the prisons. "Tough on crime" attorney generals care a lot more about big drug busts and crack-downs on gangs than on the kind of beat policing that would prevent the crime in the first place. Note that this civil war has been ongoing for 200 years, and turned into a hot war a couple times, once in 1860, again in the late 1960's.

Also, because ghetto blacks never evolved their own indigenous culture, what culture messaging they receive comes through the Blue Tribe institutions. The official story in these institutions is that everything good comes from the government. The story of U.S. history as told as government becoming more progressive, a great president is a president who made some new program to help people. This contrasts to my own upbringing. Growing up in a white suburb, most of what I learned about life came from watching my family and neighbors, where you had lots of crusty older guys serving as role models in how they built their own businesses, did work on their own homes every weekend, took care of their family, etc. I didn't learn right or wrong from school, it came from my mom, family, and peers. School was anarcho-tyranny and Lord of the Flies, even in my wealthy suburb.

Thus in all, the Blue Tribe cultural messaging discourages the black communities from self-organizing to figure out their problems on their own. The Red Tribe policing also prevents this. Potentially, if gangs were allowed to fight it out without any interference, eventually one gang would win and they would set up their own government. But there is just enough policing to prevent that from happening. So the whole community is caught in a trap. Alternatively, the police could seek out the good guys in the ghetto, there are good guys, and deputize them as local officers, who could walk beats and police the street. But the Red Tribe police unions would likely hate this, as there is no way they could pay those officers union wages, it would be seen as taking away from union jobs.

Hypothesis #2: The genetic hypothesis. The evidence for this has been covered elsewhere, for example https://liberalbiorealism.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/first-thi... and https://liberalbiorealism.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/the-likel... and https://liberalbiorealism.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/the-vice-... and https://jaymans.wordpress.com/jaymans-race-inheritance-and-i... and http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_natur... For my own part, if you hold a "preponderance of the evidence" standard, then I would say there is more evidence on the side of there being significant genetic difference in average IQ. I avoided this conclusion for a long time, I did not want to believe it, but I think that avoiding the truth will only make it harder to deal with these problems. I do think that the lower average IQ this makes it harder for black ghetto populations to figure out how to build localized institutions to enforce rule of law, and it makes it harder for these ghetto populations to work around the dysfunctions of the broader political institutions. Also, making the problem worse, is that the most intelligent 20-30% of the black ghetto population escapes the ghetto and lives elsewhere. So the ghettos are continually stripped of the human capital needed to make their local institutions functional. For instance, I was reading on one site that the average IQ in the black ghettos of Baltimore is 75, which is stunningly low.

I don't think that identifying the problem of "lack of self-policing" is blaming the victim, it is just identifying the proximate cause. I don't think blame is constructive framing for fixing anything. My goal is simply to get the truth out there, and it will be up for people working locally to figure out fixes, based on the hard realities of the situation. I certainly don't think that finger-wagging at black people saying "you need to self police" is going to fix anything. But we do need a sort of "five why's analysis" for what has happened ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys ), so that we can fix things. Too often in these debates as soon as you get to one cause that can be pinned on the other tribe, the analysis stops and the blaming begins.

There is a final dark implication to ponder, that neither tribe talks about. Many of these ghettos are actually in prime real estate. South-central LA and Oakland have wonderful climates. Brooklyn, Anacostia, etc, are highly proximate to lots of great jobs. If the crime problem was actually fixed, blacks would be pushed out of these neighborhoods by gentrification very quickly.

I don't really have any great solutions myself. The red versus blue tribal war needs to end. The only way these problems can ever be fixed is at a local level, by people who care about the problem and who are close to the problem. Having outsiders moralize or use these issues to score political points just makes everything worse. But even then, a happy fix is unlikely.

Never evolved an indigenous culture? You've heard rap music, haven't you? Of course it's an indigenous culture... one that the mainstream cultures of the "blue and red tribes" finds alienating and strange. The indigenous culture of the African-American community has, among other things, created the basis of American music for over a century.

To argue that what culture they have is simply handed to them by the "blue tribe" liberals is shockingly ignorant and condescending. Seriously, man, check your privilege there!

Where I think you're on to something interesting is the idea of racial flight. Before the 1960s, blacks simply were not allowed to live in white neighborhoods, no matter how wealthy or successful or talented they were. Black neighborhoods were much more economically integrated, with more role models for kids (although a look into the history of redlining is valuable, something else you touched on. The theft of wealth accumulation via property values and rent is far greater than the petty crimes of burglary and mugging that justify the police state. Look into it, there's been great writing on the subject).

Anyway... come the 1970s, it became socially viable for more successful black professionals and entrepreneurs to move to nicer, safer, more valuable white neighborhoods, and they did so. The more they left, the worse the ghettos got, which drove even more away. This went hand in hand with the rise of the lucrative paramilitary police state, and a massive per-capita increase in black prisoners. So it's much, much more difficult for ambitious and talented young black kids to improve their lot in life today than it used to be - ironic, considering how much better life is for the black middle class.

There are other problems as well. A friend of mine, a successful upper middle class black professional (doctor), has devoted himself to teaching financial literacy to black teenagers. Lack of basic financial literacy is endemic among the poor, and contributes to the ongoing poverty. It's also endemic among black entrepreneurs. He is also working on a side business as a financial advisor and investment counselor for wealthy black individuals. They often invest very poorly, because they distrust the white-dominated financial industry - and for good reason, given the century-long tradition of outright theft and victimization. By putting a black face on sound investing, he can help them grow their wealth more effectively. So think about the impact that deliberate bad financial advice has had economically on the black community.

Your formulation of blue tribe welfare-for-votes versus red tribe police state is entertaining to read, but it is simplistic to the point of being seriously wrong. Look at the deeper issues.

"To argue that what culture they have is simply handed to them by the "blue tribe" liberals is shockingly ignorant and condescending."

I will not deny the charges of being condescending and privileged, though personally I would describe myself as being in advantaged position and having a sense of Noblesse Oblige. I do not appreciate the name calling on your part.

I will not admit to being ignorant, as I am both well-read on this issue and have considerable personal experience. To think is to generalize; to think is to take the raw data from the world and frame it in patterns that make sense. There will always be imprecision in so doing. There will be mistakes around the edges, or places where the point was not phrased perfectly correctly. If you start calling me names every time I make an imperfect generalization, while I am trying in good faith to explain the core dynamics the best that I can, then we cannot have a productive conservation and this will be my last comment.

"Never evolved an indigenous culture? You've heard rap music, haven't you?"

Well, you are underestimating the role of white (liberal voting) producers and merchants of cool in the creation of hip-hop culture, but that is beside the point. Music is only one tiny part of culture.

More important aspects of culture include: messaging about what makes a good life, norms, mores, institutions, messaging and narratives about how to be successful, narratives explaining the way things are and how to deal with problems, etc, are the important part that I am talking about. And yes, there is some indigenous norms that have arisen, and hip-hop culture is more than music. But this culture is very, very recent, and it takes a long time for a culture to evolve to be pro-social and pro-civilization. Hip-hop culture is similar in some way to the honor culture and feuding culture of the old Scotch-Irish, medieval Europe, Homeric Greece, or many other primitive cultures. But the culture messaging and narratives coming down from blue tribe controlled schools and from ministers are very, very real and give a very flawed view of how the world actually works. And that messaging matters a lot when there is the absence of positive role models in the form of people building their own businesses and making it on their own.

I am quite aware of the history of segregation, red-lining, etc. But these do not explain what is going on. Every ethnic group is segregated. That is the definition of an ethnic group. Segregation doesn't explain why black ghettos have so much more crime than the Jewish or Chinese ghettos of old.

"The theft of wealth accumulation via property values and rent is far greater than the petty crimes of burglary and mugging that justify the police state."

You are going to explain yourself, because this is quite backwards.

There were indeed attempts by the WASP's in charge of the American cities to do slum clearance and move blacks out of their existing neighborhoods into the neighborhoods of working class ethnic poles, Irish, and Jews, who did not have the political clout to defend their turf. This has been written about extensively in books like "The Slaughter of the Cities" or "Canarsie".

However, the WASP's plans did not work out at all like intended. In some cases, blacks were pushed out of great real estate to slightly worse real estate. For instance, in Boston, some blacks who lived where the Prudential now is were pushed out toward Roxbury and Dorchester. But the bulk of the action was in blacks moving up from the south, who pushed out working class whites in neighborhoods like Roxbury and Dorchester. If you look at most cities, blacks live in great real estate from a location point of view - it is an easy commute to the central city, often near parks like Fairmount park in Philadelphia or Franklin Park in Boston. I don't know by what metric you can blacks in the Philadelphia area have the worst real estate. Now, the property values are very low. But that is because of the crime. By definition, any real estate occupied by a high-crime tribe is going to have low values, since people don't want to live near crime. This hardly constitutes left by white people.

Your formulation of blue tribe welfare-for-votes versus red tribe police state is entertaining to read, but it is simplistic to the point of being seriously wrong. Look at the deeper issues.

I have read dozens of books and hundreds of articles on the subject, ranging from the very liberal like the "New Jim Crow" or "When Work Disappears" to the more reactionary like "Slaughter of the City." I have spent years living near ghetto neighborhoods, and doing on-and-off volunteering in these neighborhoods. To think is to simplify, thinking is the act of condensing the raw data of the world into patterns and models that we can use. If you have a better model of what is happening, or can make improvements to my model, then make the argument. But I once believed the conventional segregation/red lining/de-industrialization caused all the problems hypothesis, and I now believe that hypothesis to be seriously wrong.

Lack of basic financial literacy is endemic among the poor, and contributes to the ongoing poverty. It's also endemic among black entrepreneurs. He is also working on a side business as a financial advisor and investment counselor for wealthy black individuals. They often invest very poorly, because they distrust the white-dominated financial industry - and for good reason, given the century-long tradition of outright theft and victimization.

While I wish your friend luck, this goes back to the question of intelligence. The deep problem is that someone of 130IQ will always be able to steal from the person of 80IQ. The stealing can take many forms - unfair financial contracts, convincing that buying Nike shoes will make them awesome at basketball, convincing them to vote for politician X, where politician X then funnels money to his own cronies. I'm not sure what can be done about this. It is a very hard problem. I don't know if history has an example of systematic, long-standing, altruism between ethnic groups.

"The theft of wealth accumulation via property values and rent is far greater than the petty crimes of burglary and mugging that justify the police state."

>> "You are going to explain yourself, because this is quite backwards."

Source: http://www.npr.org/2015/05/14/406699264/historian-says-dont-...

There are lots of other sources for this type of information. Ta-Nehisi Coates has a comprehensive explanation in his Atlantic article "The Case for Reparations." Inflammatory title (also long), but well researched.

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case...

> The elephant in the room is that black ghetto communities do not self-police and have a dire problem of particular senseless and indiscriminate murders

s/do not/are not allowed to/

Even Oakland won't allow community policing despite the wishes of the community.

I do believe ams6110's post have some merits.

If you grow up in the ghetto with role models largely being gang members and most your friends have been or are going to jail, it's difficult to grow into a mentality that value education and achievement. It just happens due to historical reasons, especially racism, majority of the ghetto are blacks. This actually perpetuate the unspoken racism, where people consciously or unconsciously associate black people with all the bad things happening in ghetto.

As a counter example, Asian Americans were also highly discriminated against in the past century, immigration from Asia were barred, those who were here cannot acquire citizenship, cannot own land, etc etc. Asians were generally viewed as poor uneducated labours, not too different from blacks. But today Asians are hardly viewed as that, largely thanks to large influx of educated and hard working Asian immigrants in recent years (due to immigration law preference), who changed the public perception of Asians, lifted Asian neighbourhoods from ghetto status and gave positive role model and connections to poor Asian kids (local or immigrants).

Conclusion? Focusing on "helping" visible minority actually reinforce the perception that certain ethnic groups need help. What we need to focus on instead, is to help those in need of help, without regards to skin colors.

"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."

Besides the selective enforcement of laws, most laws themselves discriminate against the poor.

Are you aware the US criminal justice system is oriented towards profiteering on incarceration and hardly or not at all oriented toward rehabilitation? The percent of GDP that the criminal justice system takes up compared to other OECD nations is the smoking gun. Its modern "American-style" slavery.

And if you are wondering how America "outperforms" Europe in GDP growth while lagging in quality of life measures, there you have it. Our GDP is going into military, prisons, cops, financialization, and overpaying for health care. All that counts on the plus side of the GDP ledger.

> They are committing crimes

If you think drug trading and consumption is a crime, you're part of the problem.

> But people are not being locked up just because they are black,

You're ignoring the fact that black people are more likely than white people to be arrested for minor crime; they're more likely to get prison time for similar crimes; etc.

> or poor.

Ferguson etc showed us that small towns used minor traffic violations as a revenue stream. Someone would have a minor, small, traffic violation and get a fine for it. They would then have to decide between taking time off work to pay he fine (and thus lose their job) or go to pay the fine, if they can pay the fine by the time they have too.

Because many people can't afford to pay the fine they end up in jail.

That's pretty much putting people in jail for being poor, and the US does it a lot.

A review of the literature reveals that there is little evidence for racial bias in the US justice system as a whole, though there likely is bias in some local jurisdictions:

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

I was as surprised as you likely will be. The exception is with capital punishment. It looks like black people are more likely to get it than others. But otherwise nationwide crime and punishment statistics look mostly fair.

If a crime is "having drugs" then the war on drugs criminalizes something that maybe shouldn't be criminalized.

If the intent is to help combat drug use then putting a user in prison and ruining his and his family's life doesn't seem like the way to do it. Not to talk about the crime it generates when a business that WILL happen doesn't have any other means to compete than with violence.

There's a great discussion between Glenn Greenwald and former Bush Drug Czar:

https://vimeo.com/32110912 (Janus Forum - Should the US Legalize Drugs?)

I used to think the drug war was the problem. Not anymore. Think about the high-profile police shootings of unarmed black men over the past year. Not a single one of those was over drugs. They were all "walking while black". Ending the drug war would not, on its own, end the "walking while black" problem.

The family structure breakdown among the poor is directly, painfully correlated to the high incarceration rate. Absent fathers are absent because they're in jail, or expect they will be sooner or later, or because they're ashamed because they are unable to provide for their children.

One of my best friends is a doctor in Orlando, who happens to be black. Back during the Trayvon Martin shooting, he told me he would not even drive through Sanford. He didn't feel safe - from the police. In his daily life, he's a key administrator at a large hospital and a radiologist. In Sanford? He's a black man driving a car too nice for him.

That's not about the war on drugs.

> He's a black man driving a car too nice for him. That's not about the war on drugs.

Actually, it kind of is. What's the implicit assumption in that story? Of course, that he's a drug dealer. What would be the pretext for pulling him over and searching his car? To look for drugs.

It really is the cornerstone of policing in 2015, just try to imagine counterfactuals where there was no such thing as illegal drugs and drug dealers and so on and it becomes obvious.

But again, look at the high profile shootings recently. The cops weren't looking for drugs. In all of those cases, they were stopped for basic harassment.

The nice car isn't a reason to pull over the doctor. It's an excuse.

I think you're saying this is not about drugs. That's correct.

That's a distinct statement from saying it's not about the war on drugs. It's definitely about that.

To push it farther, I'm saying the war on drugs is a symptom, not a cause - it's rooted in racism. So it's not about drugs... it's about race.

Yes, the war on drugs is an effect, and racism is the cause. If that's what you're saying then we agree.

But on a practical level, the war on drugs is the means by which institutional racism is most likely to be prosecuted in this country. So to some extent many racist acts are the effect of the racist war on drugs.

Perhaps a distinction without a difference. Clearly our drug policy and racism are deeply intertwined. Many do in fact disagree with that or are ignorant of it.

Yeah. "A nice car like that, looks like a drug dealer" works because he's black. If a white doctor drove his Mercedes through the same down, cops wouldn't make such assumptions.

"The family structure breakdown among the poor is directly, painfully correlated to the high incarceration rate. Absent fathers are absent because they're in jail, or expect they will be sooner or later, or because they're ashamed because they are unable to provide for their children."

The Moynihan report decrying the break down of black families was released in 1965, before the drug war, at a time when incarceration per crime committed was approaching all-time lows.

The incarceration rates in America bottomed out around 1973. At that time, about 63% of black and poor persons lived in a single-female headed household. By 1978, with incarceration rates still within their historical range, the rate was nearly 70% (source Losing Ground by Charles Murray). Family structure breakdown came first, it was not caused by incarceration. It is wishful thinking to believe that if all these men were not locked up they would be upstanding and faithful fathers, the problems go far beyond that.

It sounds like you have a bone to pick with black men. Try reading some recent data: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing...

It's a structural issue and is very hard to fix. Men, everywhere, do what is needed to get sex. If women and the institutions of society do not require a commitment from the man in order to have children, then men will not give such a commitment. Why would they? But traditionally it is the father who restricts access to his daughter, or trains his daughter not to open up so easily. So fatherlessness begets fatherlessness.

If you think fathers control the sexuality of their teenage daughters, you've obviously never raised one!

They used to have a lot more control, now barely any. Hence the rising illegitimacy rates across the board, for all races.

Shared environment still matters a lot. One father has a limited impact on his own daughter. But if the community has lots of fathers, all telling their daughters the same thing, and so your daughter has friends who all view it as low-status to have children at 16, then she will be a lot more likely to wait on having kids until marriage.

But people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor. They are committing crimes, and pleading or being found guilty.

I have a friend, someone that has been my friend for 30 years, who is in prison right now for drugs.

He wasn't incarcerated because he's black. He was incarcerated because he was caught selling marijuana and laundering money.

I, on the other hand, chose a different path in life. I made the decision to not get involved with the things that he was doing. I have no criminal record and I'm every bit as black as he is.

I agree that fatherlessness is the key component here. The best predictor of criminality in young people is the presence of a father in the home. This holds true across racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. The large number of single parent households in the black community has a lot to do with the high levels of crime in the inner cities.

There are two somewhat different problems... high levels of crime, and different levels of law enforcement for equivalent crimes. We have both. Moreover, unequal enforcement contributes to the crime rate. People continually harassed and jailed for petty crimes can't hold steady jobs, so they wind up moving up the crime ladder just to make a living.

> But people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor. They are committing crimes, and pleading or being found guilty.

There've been a number of cases recently where large number of convictions have been thrown in to review because of either evidence of systemic race-based misconduct by law enforcement authorities or systematic falsification of evidence by law enforcement authorities. So, in many cases, either or both the "not being locked up...because they are black" and the "they are committing crimes" part are in considerable doubt.

> By blaming the war on drugs we are also completely ignoring the other elephant in the room, and that is the massive breakdown in family structure that has occurred amongst the impoverished.

The selective targeting for higher penalties an higher prosecution rates for drugs predominantly used in the black community as part of the "War on Drugs" and the correspondingly higher rates of incarceration in that community resulting from it is a directly contributing factor to the "massive breakdown in family structure" in that community (and the war in drugs in general, and the incarceration resulting from it, is likewise a contributing factor to the breakdown in family structure among the impoverished outside of the black community.)

> Our "war on poverty" has, like the war on drugs, been a failure.

Arguably, "like" should be replaced with "in large part due to" in that sentence. The "War on Drugs" largely is a war on the poor. It directly opposes any "war on poverty" (though even as a slogan, much less any substance, the "war on poverty" was largely abandoned shortly after it was announced, and replaced by the War on Drugs.)

Neither drug use nor drug selling is greater among black people than among white people in the U.S. But arrests, convictions, and jail time are all much greater for black Americans -- at every level, more arrests, higher percentage of those arrested convicted, longer sentences for those convicted.

There is nothing wrong with the 'culture' of Black people in America that ending white supremacy can't fix.

> we are engaging in a Gestapo-like rounding up of large numbers of minorities for no reason and throwing them in jail

And that's exactly what you're doing.

Using drugs or selling drugs should not be a reason to put someone in jail.

Tobacco, alcohol or sugar (HFCS) do MUCH more harm to users than illegal substances ever will, and cost much more to society as a result.

> behaviors and responsibilities that are required to be a productive and self-supporting member of society

Define "productive".

If you sell illegal substances at a profit, how aren't you "self-supporting"??

The drug war is a symptom of something more basic: Americans lack compassion. Consider something in the non-drug context: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/georgia-probatio.... You can bring up private prisons and probation companies, but the fact is that these laws have been on the books all along. They were passed by part-time state legislators, who are pretty representative of ordinary people in the state.

"The drug war is a symptom of something more basic: Americans lack compassion."

Really?

http://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic-resources/charitable-gi...

This brings to mind the most famous quote from America's Greatest Poet:

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."

America and Americans (myself included) are full of inconsistencies and contradictions, but then I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a country that couldn't be described similarly to some degree.

My point is that I take issue with Americans being painted with a big, wide brush of "compassionless" when there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Is there perhaps less compassion or concern (in general) directed towards criminals or individuals who are perceived to have engaged in criminal activities, here in the United States? Probably. But implying that such mindset reveals a lack of compassion in toto is ignorant.

In the context of the justice system, I think we tend to lack compassion. Most of the Americans I know (family, etc) seem more intent on __retribution__ and punishing Bad People, rather than compassion. Once someone is a Bad Person (criminal, poor, or even just someone they don't like), compassion seems to go out the window.

And if you are not a Bad Person, there is plenty of compassion. Sounds like a more efficient system than blindly distributing compassion to everyone regardless of merit.

> Once someone is a Bad Person (criminal, poor, or even just someone they don't like), compassion seems to go out the window.

More importantly, being a member of some group that is unliked, often because of the actions of some individual(s) that aren't really general to the group, is enough to make someone a Bad Person in many people's eyes.

Even being supported by a person who is viewed as a Bad Person (potentially for the same reason described in the preceding paragraph) is enough to make a person a Bad Person.

I would argue that most people contribute out of guilt rather than compassion.

[Citation needed]

Not for opinion which "I would argue" flags this as such.

It's probably worth noting that not all charitable giving is compassionate giving. From your link:

>In 2013, the majority of charitable dollars went to religion (31%), education (16%), human services (12%), and grantmaking foundations (11%).2

That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with those donations, it just means they might be to keep the lights on at religious, academic, or arts institutions.

It also doesn't mean that Americans aren't at all compassionate givers... I think we are. It's just that we're also all too often anxious to draw lines about deserving or undeserving, though (criminals, of course, being deserving of punishment rather than charity).

Few in the media have the courage to state the obvious, end the drug war. A call for the end of the drug war irritates too many governmental and private sector interests and points the finger on exactly what is to blame. Bringing up racism, economic issues, police brutality, crime, etc. allows the blame to be spread, appeals to popular sensibilities and muddles the real issue.

I think you have the causality backwards. We have a drug war because we have racism. We don't have racism because we have a drug war. Look up the history of the heroin and marijuana laws... it's depressing.

Like others, I believe that that is one solution, but that a rigorous, objective analysis of policies and the reasons behind why we do things is necessary, and this article presents the problems very well. To shrug off the philosophical roots of the broken system is not ideal.

This is not a race issue. This is an inner city culture problem. Ending the drug war is a first step. But we still have to give these kids something to do. Pay them to go to school.

>This is not a race issue. This is an inner city culture problem.

You realise that racist policies around suburb building and home loans cause the inner cities to be mostly black? White people got cheap home loans to move into nice neighbourhoods. And that's one of the reason people are calling it a race issue.

Oh look, a sweeping claim about evil Whitey being responsible for Everything Bad backed by absolutely no data or evidence. Shocker, that.

It's trivially easy to find these policies.

Here's one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

What makes a white neighborhood more "nice" than black neighborhoods, outside of the crime rate or the people that live there? Why is Roxbury/Dorchester in Boston "less nice" than Saugus? Dorchester has great homes, near a nice park, has great access to the subway that goes downtown. Why is 50th and Baltimore in Philadelphia "less nice" than Norristown? 50th and Baltimore has great parks, great homes, great public transit access to downtown. If it is the people that live there that make a neighborhood good or bad, than to blame segregation or red lining for bad neighborhoods is to beg the question.

I think the portion of the article which deals with simple fines and incarceration based on not being able to pay highlights why it's not quite as simple as end the drug war, although it is probably a good place to start.

I also think there need to be penalties for Prosecutorial misconduct. Just this morning I was listening to the tale of woe regarding Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle on the Dana Gould podcast[1]. Wow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscoe_Arbuckle#The_scandal

Clearly part of it was due to newspapers of the time just flat out publishing lies, but the prosecutor had a huge hand in what happened.

Prosecutors often overreach, even when they are not downright corrupt, and this can lead to destruction of people's lives. There need to be consequences for prosecutors that do this. And if people are to tell me there are laws on the books that cover this, then they need to be enforced a lot more, because don't hear about it happening.

[1] http://www.danagould.com/hot-buttered-shame/

EDIT: added link to Dana's podcast.

> The United States has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prisoners.

This sums it up for me.

I find it disturbing how those two tiny stats "sum" it all up for you, yet you make no mention of the third and elusive stat that makes the biggest difference of all:

"The percentage of criminals in the United States"

Like I said, drawing and inference from the two stats you posted is disturbing because both of those stats say nothing of the actual amount of valid criminals/lawbreakers.

Out of interest, why do you think there are so many valid criminals and lawbreakers in the US?

Among other things, our murder rate is higher than that of most other western nations. Assuming murder rate is a good proxy for other "valid" crimes (it's hard to hide a body), we would expect to have 5x the incarceration rate of the UK or France.

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

The murder rate is that high because of easy access to weapons that make murdering people relatively easy. Shooting someone is a lot easier than knifing someone, point-and-click.

Ummm, no.

IF this was true, we would see a correlation between gun ownership (or access) and murder rates. If anything, the correlation is slightly negative, both in the US and globally.

Where you DO see the correlation is inequality. In US states, using data from wikipedia, I find a 70% correlation between gini coefficients and homicide rates. The same is true globally.

There is a correlation between gun access and homicide rates. "Across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides. These results often hold even when the United States is excluded."

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and...

>> There is a correlation between gun access and homicide rates.

There is a correlation, albeit a negative one:

http://www.theacru.org/harvard_study_gun_control_is_counterp...

The study, which just appeared in Volume 30, Number 2 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (pp. 649-694), set out to answer the question in its title: “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence.”

The findings of two criminologists – Prof. Don Kates and Prof. Gary Mauser – in their exhaustive study of American and European gun laws and violence rates, are telling:

Nations with stringent anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those that do not. The study found that the nine European nations with the lowest rates of gun ownership (5,000 or fewer guns per 100,000 population) have a combined murder rate three times higher than that of the nine nations with the highest rates of gun ownership (at least 15,000 guns per 100,000 population).

For example, Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland’s murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe. Sweden and Denmark are two more examples of nations with high murder rates but few guns.

Where do you get that information? This Harvard review - http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and... suggests a positive correlation between gun ownership and homicide, both nationally and internationally

Per the official numbers, Sweden has the highest rate of rape in the world.

Without knowing exactly what they considered homicide and what they considered a firearm related homicide, these numbers are meaningless. Only a few years ago the CDC released a large study where they choose to define a female forcing a male to penetrate as not being rape, thus resulting in very different statistics about rape than had the definitions been the more common 'non-consensual sex' or such.

He got that information from the source article.

This is especially true when you look at murders and count out suicides. The effect that gun ownership has on murder rates is a separate topic from the effect it has on suicide rates, but many stats conflict the numbers, enough so that I've begun to doubt it being accidental in all cases.

Switzerland for example has liberal gun-ownership laws too, but the murder-rate is by far lower than in the US. This is soley one of many factors...

Switzerland often gets bandied about in these discussions, because people see gun ownership rates and ignore the subtleties. All adult males are required to own and keep a rifle at home (with some minor exceptions). There is no "gun culture" here, people in general are very unenthusiastic and see it as a burden.

In the last 20 years they have stopped giving ammunition to keep with your military rifle, exactly because they started having problems with shootings. Switzerland is the worst possible "example" of gun ownership reducing violent crime.

That's far from clear - even the rate of non-shooting murders is vastly higher than most of the western world (only ~1/2 our murders are done with firearms).

Along the same lines of reasoning as yours, approximately 1/2 our murders are committed by black Americans, and the proportion of people who are black are well correlated with murders. So one could equally well say that the murder rate is high because of the presence of black people. Would you endorse this conclusion? If not, why not?

(Let me emphasize I'm not endorsing the conclusion I derive here - I simply plan to repeat whatever argument jaquesm has against the above conclusion back at him w.r.t. guns.)

Every prisoner in the US is a convicted criminal under US law. The amount of criminals outside of US prisons could then be speculated to be much higher than in other countries because the US criminalizes more things than other countries. Determining the number of criminals outside of prison then becomes a hard task since you can't use the state supplied numbers if you want to do a fair comparison between countries. It could also be that an equal amount of things are criminalized in other countries, but not punishable by prison sentence.

Note however that this is wild speculation, just things you have to take into account.

Not every prisoner. There are also prisoners awaiting trial, and prisoners held for contempt of court.

In the United States, there are 487,000 incarcerated awaiting trial [1].

[1] http://www.americasquarterly.org/aborn-prisons

> "The percentage of criminals in the United States"

Not sure how this is really an additional fact. If you defined criminals in the sense of "criminals as defined in the US", you have almost by definition a direct correlation to the number of prisoners.

BTW, here in Germany we also have politicians who think that Europe's criminals concentrate in Germany. Probably every country has some people believing that all criminals come to them. The difference between countries is how much influence those voices have.

The point I'm making is that it's implicit that they are "not" criminals by virtue of there being such a huge discrepancy. This needs to be addressed in a clear, and concise manner instead of making sweeping generalizations about the discrepancy.

Who is 'criminal' is fairly arbitrary in many cases. Say you sell some hash to a friend. Legal in some states, can lead to 30 years in some others, generally not a huge crime in the sense of harming others.

Find me one specific example of a person in state or federal prison for small time marijuana dealing or possession. No other crimes involved. Doesn't happen.

Often, the DA will structure a plea bargain on drug or weapons posession (over a long list of more serious charges) because those are very easy to prove.

This idea that the prisons are full of good guys caught up in the system is detached from reality. Most guys doing hard time are guilty of about twenty other things that they haven't been prosecuted for.

Three strike laws in certain states can result in long prison sentences despite relatively minor crimes being committed - including simple possession - http://www.lao.ca.gov/2005/3_strikes/3_strikes_102005.htm#cr... justice system

Furthermore black offenders receive sentences that are longer than white offenders - http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873244320045783044...

And white people are significantly less likely to be arrested for drug possession, despite usage rates being fairly similar - https://www.aclu.org/news/new-aclu-report-finds-overwhelming...

A prisoner deserves to be sentenced for the crime they were convicted of, not for any possible crimes that we think they may have committed. To behave otherwise is completely antithetical to a society that supposedly values justice

So no, prisons aren't "full of good guys", but they're full of people serving sentences that are longer than any rational policy would dictate who have been prosecuted in a system that has been shown time and again to have deep issues with bias and inequality.

Not to mention the violence and overcrowding endemic in the prison system. It should be a source of national shame that it has continued this long without real reform.

> white people are significantly less likely to be arrested for drug possession, despite usage rates being fairly similar

This is an oft repeated lie. Blacks use narcotics at well over double the white rate. Claims that rates are similar are based on surveys, as opposed to test data.

Anyway, you are missing the point here that prosecutors know exactly who they're convicting. Sentences now are almost all plea bargains. They get serious criminals to plea out on narcotics charges rather than go to court and face the full set of charges and a 25 year sentence. They don't even bother prosecuting some kid with some drugs. This is how the system works. It may be problematic, but it's not as broken as naive people assume.

You point to data (not really, no sources) You ignore alcohol usage entirely. You generalize the behavior of all prosecutors, without data again. And you seem think you are not naive and that in some way the system is "working"...

System works to what end ?

You should probably edit your original post, because this point is not at all clear from that post.

Unfortunately, it's not letting me.

In Europe, as well, there's a significant and rising problem of crime associated with migrants from the Middle East and Africa, right?

If controlled for factors such as social status, income, education statistics indicate that migrants are neither more nor less criminal than germans - a fact that I personally do not find surprising. Certainly there's now more crimes in absolute numbers since there are more migrants, but well - that's not surprising either. We also do have sufficient "european" crime to around, the mafia, east european gangs breaking into flats etc, and on top we have sufficient amounts of good old german crime - we're good at tax evasion, cheating on libor rates etc. All in all I'm not afraid that migrants will push german criminals out of their jobs.

The point here is that the justice system is not just, that there are too many criminals not because we're a nation of people who like to do bad things, but because the system profits from making criminals out of people. If you believe that the system for imprisoning people is just, then I'd really like to hear your thoughts on this question:

Why are Americans so criminal? More than Iran, China, Russia, Syria, Saudi Arabia.... Why is it that Americans can't follow the rules? What is wrong with them?

Of course that assertion is absurd because, at its foundation, that logic gets very racist very fast.

The fact that it is mostly a for profit business helps a lot.

Only 8.4% of US prisoners are in privately owned prisons:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#Development_3

I suspect wider cultural reasons rather than just simple corruption - though that no doubt plays a part.

It's not just private prisons, it's the correctional officer unions too. They benefit greatly from large prison populations.

I found this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Correctional_Peace_O...

So they lobby to increase prison terms and to "enforce current drug laws". I suppose they should have the right to do that, but it still seems a bit odd to me!

>enforce current drug laws

That reads to me like it could mean "outlaw medical marijuana."

Yes, they do have a right to do that. NAMBLA also has that same right. I also have the right to call them both a cancer to society.

There are about 1/2 million correctional officers in the US:

http://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/correctional-offic...

So they might be able to have quite some impact by lobbying and voting as a block, but they are not a big enough body to swing votes against a meaningful majority.

(your link states that union has ~31,000 members, California had about 17.5 million registered voters in the Nov 2014 election)

Which is still greater than the ideal of 0%.

Private prisons are only part of the revenue generated from the war on drugs. Civil forfeiture is a huge income stream for local and federal. They basically wait for the drug dealers to sell their drugs and then catch them with the money and take it. Some police departments allot for 35% or more of their annual budget to come from civil forfeiture. Add to that the amount of federal money received to fight the war. Also fines and fees. There is a lot of money changing hands and jobs being created by prohibition.

That can be a very misleading number.

8.4% owned, how many are not privately owned have services/goods/staff provided in large part by private companies?

There's always someone who makes this comment, and I'll say the same thing I said before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8562814

"Land of the free"

African-American males are 0.25% of the world's population, but 10% of the world's prisoners.

Black men also commit violent crimes at much higher rates than the rest of the population. Most people are in jail for a good reason. I suggest reading a recent essay "The Smart Way to Keep People Out of Prison" by Megan McArdle.

Yet, how many of those black men were arrested under "fitting the suspect description" and then forced into pleading guilty out of fear for a longer sentence? Also, did you read the article or just come directly to the comments?

It seems as if you're saying violent crime is a function of race (crazy talk) instead of class status (arguable).

Is it possible that, due to race-income inequalities in America, that black males are also more likely to have low/no income at the same "much higher rate"?

The icky point is when you start looking at crime as a function of not just SES but also culture. A lot of people have a hard time nuancing culture from race even though a well traveled person would easily see the difference.

1) men commit violent crime at much higher rates than women. Why? 2) sexism? stupidity? Or perhaps "being male" (higher testosterone levels) 3) males who self-identify as black have about 15% more testoterone (courtesy of that racist institution, the National Institutes of Health)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3455741

4) is is really so crazy that a population with higher testosterone levels tends to be be bigger, and when they indulgent a violent proclivity, the outcome is more severe than when, say, a japanese women gets upset at the flower shop?

I don't know man... I looked at the numbers. It seems like the violent crime thing is being somewhat overstated here. For example, murder. So... even if we assume that black males committed EVERY murder in the US last year. (I realize they didn't, but I wanted to look at the numbers in a fashion as favorable to your view as possible.) Anyway, even if we assume they committed EVERY murder... that would still only be less than 0.01% of black males committing murder in a year. That would mean that well over 99.99% of black males could not possibly have been involved in a murder. The statistics are similar for crimes like grand theft, rape, attempted murder etc etc etc. All very violent. (Well ... maybe not grand theft... but the fbi had it on the list and, full disclosure, I cut and pasted from fbi dot gov.)

Point is... in any given year, black males seem to go to prison or jail at a MUCH higher rate than their violent crime participation rate would warrant. There is probably a reason behind this that is perfectly legal. I think the questions are... what are some of those legal reasons ? And, are those legal reasons "just" ? I think those are reasonable questions.

I don't know if it is correct and I certainly think it is a horrible positive feedback loop, but it appears that people with prior convictions are much more likely to get convicted and do jail time. So if you get in trouble as a kid, you're much more likely to get the book thrown at you for minor offenses as an adult.

I thought juvenile records were not used to determine sentences of convicted adults. Is that true?

Unfortunately, this is almost certainly a result of institutional racism through America's history. NPR has an pretty interesting interview regarding this:

http://www.npr.org/2015/05/14/406699264/historian-says-dont-...

"Only 4% of all American police arrests are for crimes considered “violent” by the FBI, even though those crimes are offered as the justification for enormous public expenditures, wholesale Orwellian surveillance, and every violent aspect of modern policing." source: TFA

When it comes to the disparity in non-violent arrests, remember that whites are more likely to abuse drugs than blacks

http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/07/study-whites-more-like...

when you control for socioeconomic status.

That statement is intellectually lazy at best. It is factually correct, but it wholly misses the context of the fact. And that is the centuries of slavery, the decades of Jim Crow, and other policies that have systematically deprived opportunity and framed/define crime to be an African-American tendency. I'd really recommend you read a couple of pieces by Ta-Nehisi Coates [0] before you make up your mind either way. Regrettably, I've argued your point of view before, but it simply shifts the burden of proof and contextualization to the under-privileged and oppressed.

[0]: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case...

White males are [X percent of the world population], but like 99% of the world's billionaires. Success and punishment aren't evenly distributed due to innate corruption/advantages built into The System.

How do we fix inequality? Companies run american prisons now, companies control elected officials, and voters are manipulated by basic psychological tricks to keep voting against their own interests (vote GOD, not basic human rights!). That's just one issue among 50 other giant issues america/world is currently failing at "doing the right thing" towards.

OK I feel compelled to tell you that the 99% white billionare thing is incorrect. USA does have the most billionares but they are not all white and also China is currently in the #2 spot with India in #4.

Also if you are referring to the proplem of private prisons I do agree it's probably not a good thing but since less than 1/5 of prisons are privately run I don't think it is the main cause of the problem.

Yes, only 1/5 of the prisons, but it could still be that they wield a lot more influence than that figure suggests. There aren't very many lobbying for the imprisoned, so an organized private lobby of even a small number of private prisons might be enough to shift the scales significantly.

This. Before we can fix anything that requires a majority of the nation's participation, we need awareness and acknowledgement that racial inequality is deep rooted in the American psyche. A lot of posters even here on HN seem to think race is irrelevant or a minor point.

In my opinion, it's about drugs and cultural undertones that drugs are permissive, that you can be the "druggie guy", and to some, it's hip and cool. I blame the intelligentsia.

Try the scenario when you're in a low income family with an addict. This very easily leads to a vicious cycle - eventual arrest and incarceration. That's one less person coming home with a paycheck. That's a family growing up a generation with a criminal.

And our culture doesn't shame (rightfully) the selfishness of doing drugs - it's ramifications on families. Instead, we blame cops, we blame the government, the privileged roll eyes and think being soft, sympathetic and compassionate will help.

Whatever the solution we want to take to crime - and however hip Ivy League law students make going soft on this and that - our culture needs to recognize criminal acts are inherently selfish, not cool.

If the system was concerned about helping the families of addicts, or even lessening the suffering in society, it would be impossible to make an argument that jailing a non violent drug offender (destroying their family, preventing them from getting a job in the future, inflicting them with mental trauma, probably infecting them with hep-c) is beneficial. That kind of trauma would drive most people further into despair and drug use.

I do wonder how and why we're supposed to get people into treatment if drugs aren't illegal- "Hi citizen I noticed you're enjoying a legal activity with deleterious long term effects. Please take this pamphlet with a list of treatment centers and voluntarily enroll." It's worked so well with tobacco and alcohol.

It has worked out with tobacco, quite well.

http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/trends/cig...

Alcohol problems have seemed to take a downward trend in recent decades as well. Although it looks like pregnant women are drinking more!

http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/Social/Module1Epidemi...

> The United States has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prisoners.

This sums it up for me.

Here in the United States, we do have issues with the justice and penal systems. But these number alone do not paint the full picture.

In other countries, if you're convicted of a crime you may have a body part cut off. You may be executed. Or you may simply "disappear". In any of these cases, you're not considered a prisoner.

> In other countries, if you're convicted of a crime you may have a body part cut off. You may be executed. Or you may simply "disappear". In any of these cases, you're not considered a prisoner.

But are those really the countries you would like the USA to be compared with?

Right or wrong, when it comes to incarceration and execution rates, we are compared with these other countries.

> In other countries, if you're convicted of a crime you may have a body part cut off. You may be executed.

You can be executed in the US, too. In fact, the US executes more people per year than anyone but China and a handful of countries in the Middle East.

So adding the possibility of execution into the comparison doesn't actually make the US look better.

"So adding the possibility of execution into the comparison doesn't actually make the US look better."

Apples and oranges. Consider this report: http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/10/world/amnesty-international-de...

In 2012, the US executed 43 people. The number of executions in China? Believed to be in the thousands.

How did the condemned in the United States die? Here's the breakdown: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/methods-execution . Note that all of these individuals were afforded appeals and legal representation.

Some of the other countries? Maybe no trial at all. Maybe a completely rigged trial. Appeals? Doubtful but short. Time between being charged with the crime and execution? Perhaps days, as opposed to years in the United States. The method of execution? Anything goes; in North Korea the Kim regime has become especially creative here, dropping mortars and using AA guns to kill prisoners.

Is the U.S. justice system faulty? Yes. Can one make a compelling argument against the death penalty? Probably. Can an honest argument be made that the United States and China (let alone some of the other countries on the list) are even in the same league? Doubtful.

> Can an honest argument be made that the United States and China (let alone some of the other countries on the list) are even in the same league?

No one is in the same league as China with regard to the death penalty (so the "let alone" is backwards, there), but leaving aside China and handful of Middle Eastern countries the United States is far out in the "heavy use" of the death penalty compared to every other country on Earth.

So you probably don't want to bring up the "in some countries, criminals might get killed instead of imprisoned" in a discussion of how the US is worse on imprisonment than every other country on Earth, because, compared to all but a handful of the ~200 countries on the planet, adding in consideration of the death penalty on top of incarceration exacerbates rather than mitigates the ways in which the US is worse.

In the US, back in 2007, I met some dutch guys, aged 20 and 21, the 20 y/o just spend a night in jail because he was drinking in a bar. He didn't even realize, back home he was drinking legally for over 4 years (and for drinking before the age of 16 there was no real punishment). We had a good laugh, "they must have a lot of jails here" we said.

Lately the government is becoming more firm here (the Netherlands) as well. Beer drinking is now legal only from age 18 and up and serving minors is punishable by law now, a bar owner pays 1360 euro the first time but may risk closure of the establishment. Drinking in private is never punishable. For public drinking (but not for being drunk) the fine is 90 euros, 45 when below age 16. If you are sick from alcohol you will never be punished as it may be inhibiting for seeking help.

In the US if you go to the hospital for alcohol related symptoms and you are under 21, you are essentially guaranteed to get an arrest ticket for underage drinking.

Yes this is inhibiting for seeking help.

[edit] See replies, this isn't universally true.

There may be some jurisdictions in the US where this is true, but it doesn't seem to be generally true. As this kind of thing is a matter of state law and local agency practice, there probably is no valid generalization one way or the other on the level of "in the US".

For the 3 towns in 3 different states I have lived in, this is true. I accept that this is a very small number of data points.

In some states, it's only the purchase and public consumption of alcohol that's prohibited for those under 21; and consumption on private property and/or under the supervision of parents/guardians is expressly allowed.

I've been "stopped and frisked" in France before, and it didn't seem out of the ordinary at the time. I just assumed random identity checks was part of the police's job. So I wonder how other countries' laws compare to the U.S. when it comes to random checks like this.

And of course, it happened maybe twice in my life, not a couple times a week.

> And of course, it happened maybe twice in my life, not a couple times a week.

In France, that depends mostly of your shade of skin.

> In France, that depends mostly of your shade of skin.

Well, it mostly depend if you live in a sensible district or not. It happens that mostly Arab and black people live in sensible district because they are poorer than the normal average french people. And (relative) poverty is the source of a lot of social problems.

I don't say there is no racism in France too, there is. But it is more indirect, like people trying to avoid looking at black people, or people who prefer helping the white guy instead the black one at school is another example.

I think you mean "sensitive." "Sensible" is a value judgement about a person or course of action and how much "sense" they possess.

'Sensible' is a false friend in English for French speakers, and vice versa.

Thank you, this is indeed what I wanted to say! (I'm still learning english ;) )

Those random identity checks are only legal if they are performed under particular circumstances establishing the risk of breach of the public order (for example around a protest or in such situations). Theoretically they cannot be based on the appearance of the person being controlled.

This means it is not legal for a police officer to control your identity unless they have established this risk of public disorder.

Of course, as a white person living in mostly affluent neighborhoods, I have not even been controlled once in my life. The experience of my friends of "north african descent" on the other hand, has been quite different.

I don't think that is entireley true. While the Schengen-Zone (EU border agreements) has established that there are no physical borders, where you have to show an id, there is a 50km (maybe more maybe less I don't know exactly) zone around those borders, where Identity checks are permitted. Police is allowed to control your identity in those zones if they have a "reasonable cause" to think yo may be an illegal immigrant...

Of course "reasonable cause" can (and usually will) mean, that if you happen to have the "wrong" skin-tone, hair-color etc. you will be controlled. The Police justifies this racial profiling with "experience" and "statistics" (at least in Germany)

In theory, they can't do that here in the US either.

> Border Patrol, nevertheless, cannot pull anyone over without "reasonable suspicion" of an immigration violation or crime (reasonable suspicion is more than just a "hunch"). Similarly, Border Patrol cannot search vehicles in the 100-mile zone without a warrant or "probable cause" (a reasonable belief, based on the circumstances, that an immigration violation or crime has likely occurred).

> In practice, Border Patrol agents routinely ignore or misunderstand the limits of their legal authority in the course of individual stops, resulting in violations of the constitutional rights of innocent people. These problems are compounded by inadequate training for Border Patrol agents, a lack of oversight by CBP and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the consistent failure of CBP to hold agents accountable for abuse. Thus, although the 100-mile border zone is not literally "Constitution free," the U.S. government frequently acts like it is.

https://www.aclu.org/constitution-100-mile-border-zone

The justification is not "experience" and "statistics". The justification is that it works well. Just like the language of an email can help identifying spam, skin color can help identifying illegal immigrants. I would say that 99% of all spam I receive is written in English, whereas about 80% of my personal emails are in German. Thus, even though there is nothing wrong with that language in general, English words can be used as one factor of many to help identifying spam.

> I would say that 99% of all spam I receive is written in English, whereas about 80% of my personal emails are in German.

You're missing some important numbers here for this to be meaningful: Base rates.

If you're getting 10 spam emails per month, and 99% of them are in English, but you're receiving 1000 legitimate personal emails per month, and 20% of them are in English, that's a total of 210 English emails on average per month. In this case, while technically true that an email written in English is more likely to be spam than an email written in German, it's also such a very poor indicator that you'd be better off using another indicator entirely.

On top of that, you've only pinpointed two categories out of many more possible categories of emails. What if someone is getting 50 spam emails per month, 5 job offer emails per month, 10 updates relevant to their profession per month, 100 professional emails per month, and 50 personal emails per month, and the English:German ratios for those are all 99:1, 9:1, 4:1, 1:1 and 4:1 respectively? Suddenly just "this email is written in English" isn't all that important anymore.

Base rates are very, very, very, super important when discussing stats like these.

That's why I said "one factor of many". If you have ten factors like that and combine them, you'll get an excellent spam filter. That's how Bayesian spam filters work. They combine a number of factors that are not very significant on their own, but using all of them adds up.

IIRC, in Austria, police CAN ask you about your name and home address at any time, and they can even bring you to the police office if they don't believe you and you don't have an ID to prove it. Even though we don't have an "Ausweispflicht" like Germany, having an ID with you can be a good thing in this situation.

They are not allowed to search you without a reason (In theory. I heared that they might just say "I think I smelled cannabis" and then they have a reason.)

Disclaimer: IANAL, and maybe I got some details wrong.

"Ausweispflicht" in Germany only means you have to own an id card or passport, not that you must carry it all the time.

Yes, that is true. Interestingly most Germans I know don't even know that, and think everyone has to carry an ID with them. This is really a common misconception.

IIRC in the Netherlands they introduced an ID carrying requirement for anyone over the age of 17 or thereabouts. Makes things less complicated in case of having to check your age when buying alcohol, or when you get pulled over for whatever reason, or even when you get into an accident and need to be identified.

Same thing happened to me in Bangkok. Police stopped our taxi, ordered us all out on the street, searched our pockets (presumably for drugs) and then let us go.

The taxi driver made no indication that it was anything abnormal.

I completely agree that we overcriminalize things and imprison far too many people in the U.S. I'm 100% on-board with this. It's our shame the way we treat non-violent offenders. A disgrace.

But guys, nothing is ever 100% one way or the other, no matter how much you support it. So you have to look at differing points of view -- unless the objective is just to have a good rant.

Here are the things that come to mind reading this:

- Yep, highest incarceration rates ever. Also violent crime has been dropping to unheard-of lows and the country is safer than it ever has been

- Prisons are not about justice or reform. [insert really long discussion here]. Political systems exist and function for political reasons. Therefore the prison system is made and maintained to keep society together. They don't put the guy who killed you friend in the electric chair because of justice. They do it so you don't kill him yourself, or have a lifelong vendetta against both him and the system.

- This piece is written by a lawyer. Do not expect it to fairly talk about all of the options. It's invective; well-written, emotional, powerful invective. The goal is to make you turn off your brain and feel a certain way. Treat it as such.

- Although this is targeted at lawyers, whatever failings there are? Most likely a result of judges and elected officials -- in other words, the public. If the public wants something, and it wanted harsher sentencing, it gets it. That means changes need to occur with the electorate, not elite legal minds

- If the system is broken, it's broken. Toss out all of that racism stuff, it's a red herring. People shouldn't have their civil rights abused because it's the wrong way to run a country, not because they're a member of an oppressed minority. If you want to win this fight and fix things, toss out every other issue aside from fixing the system. Sure, use various things like incarceration rates among blacks as an argument, but only very carefully. If this is a true problem affecting everybody (and I believe it is), then don't attach yourself to one particular cause or the other. That's just an easy way to lose the discussion.

We desperately need to fix things, but that's only going to happen if we make both impassioned and dispassionate arguments -- and only if we understand the terms at stake. I'm not sure this article helped any, but it damned sure made me angry at how broken things are.

The racism is not a red herring, it's the primary driver for the electorate demanding that the system be broken in the ways it is. It's used to argue that the victims of the system deserve it, and thereby to prevent change.

Pretending that racism is the main problem with inner city poor actually contributes to the problem. Not all poor in the city have the same outcome. Victimology is crippling. If nothing I do is my fault, because racism, then why would I not do whatever I feel like, consequences be damned? It is white people's fault, right?

Ignoring the disingenuity, if racism (e.g., redlining, gerrymandering, selective use of semi-legal police procedures, etc.) hasn't led to the current disparate state of affairs between races in America, then what has, pray tell?

"Racism" isn't merely a buzzword or an excuse if it's actually a historic and ongoing phenomenon.

I think racism plays a part, but there are are factors to consider as well, including victimology. The current way we are approaching race in america seems to be part of the problem.

We seem to be telling people of certain races that they are born disadvantaged, that they are somehow second-class citizens and not fully responsible for their actions or outcome of their life. We then distribute aid and provide services based not only on economic or educational status, but also on race, and we form organizations to benefit members of that race. We become outraged when their rights are violated (but no so much when the rights of members of another race are).

I don't think we'll truly eliminate racism in our society if we continue to focus on race the way we are. Instead we need to care just as much about the rights (or the violations of those rights) of a black man as we do a white man (or any other race). Race needs to not be considered when creating programs to benefit the poor or uneducated. After all, shouldn't a poor white man be just as entitled to our compassion and assistance as an equally poor black man?

Martin Luther King said "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." For me, that cuts both ways. Not only should we not be judged unfairly in a court of law or be treated different by police because of the color of one's skin. It should be a non-factor in determining any sort of benefit or assistance as well.

The reason blacks growing up poor in this country suffer bad outcomes isn't because they're told that they're victims by well-meaning social programs. It's because they're treated like criminals and given very few opportunities to achieve something better.

They may not tell them that directly, but when you consider someone's race in giving aid, aren't you telling them that they are disadvantaged because of their race?

We should be focusing on helping someone because they are poor, because they are unjustly treated like criminals or because they have few opportunities to succeed, not because they are black or of a certain race.

But the aid isn't itself racial. That's a myth.

Have you ever had to apply for any sort of public assistance? The process is tremendously slow, complex, and bureaucratic, driven largely by layers of demands for proof that the aid is actually necessary. The basic takeaway of this process for the person in need isn't feeling like a victim, but rather feeling like society assumes you're a lazy thief.

You say its a myth, but then don't provide not explanation as to why. I guess I don't understand how race-restricted aid isn't racial. By restricting assistance, scholarships and other aid to a particular race aren't you in essence saying that you care more about helping people of a certain race than you do about helping people of other races?

If a person is in the same circumstances, economic or otherwise, as another person, why should I only give aid to one of those people based on their race? How would restricting a scholarship to white students be less racist than restricting a scholarship to african-american students?

I'm saying that there isn't any race-restricted aid. You're saying there is. You're wrong about that. Feel free to prove otherwise.

And sure, you can bring up some scholarship as an exception that proves the rule (I wonder how Daughters of the American Revolution scholarships fit?). But that's a very weak argument. I'm talking about the welfare state in general, and it is pointedly not about race.

I didn't mean to imply that there was government sponsored aid that was race-restricted. There definitely is for scholarships[1] and affirmative action policies for admission to schools or specific programs in those schools. (although that's not necessarily monetary aid)

Some quick googling shows results of what appears to be private organizations solely focused on providing assistance to african americans or people of african descent. [2]

[1] - https://www.scholarships.com/financial-aid/college-scholarsh... [2] http://www.diversitybestpractices.com/news-articles/20-afric...

Think about how circular this is... you're now arguing that the problem is a sense of victimization brought on by racially-driven aid in the form of college scholarships. So your victims have already succeeded in finding their way out!

There are excellent arguments that the welfare state structure is a significant cause of racial inequality. But your "teaches them to be victims" argument is not one of them.

A much more interesting and defensible argument would be that the welfare state in its current incarnation punishes people for getting off of welfare. If the "reward" for finding a job is to take away aid on a 1:1 basis, why would getting a job be a good idea? Another interesting angle is the fact that minimum wage is not sufficient to keep a family out of poverty - especially when you throw in the costs of transportation and child care associated with a job.

To find the racial problem, look at history. When the welfare state first came into existence, racism had kept the black community in deep poverty, so poverty was already unevenly distributed. Since the welfare system merely treats the symptoms rather than the causes of poverty, the disparity has continued. And the disparity is driven not by welfare, but rather by institutional racism.

There was a great photo by a trio of black artists at the Henderson protests. It was a black woman dressed as a slave, a shirtless black man wearing a noose, and a black man in an orange prison jumpsuit, standing together - the history of institutional racism in America.

My main argument actually is that I think racism will continue until we eliminate race from our decisions, positive or negative and treat and value each other as members of the human race, regardless of one's skin color.

The problem is, a substantial (and potentially growing) segment of the population doesn't agree with you.

If racism is _the_ problem, why does it produce perfectly antipodal outcomes for different "people of color"? i.e. Asians are economically ascendant (surpassing whites on most metric), while blacks, well... you get the idea.

Rubbing the amulet of "structural racism" so much has entirely debased the term.

Are you really equating the plight and histories of Asian-Americans and African-Americans in America over the past 3 centuries? You can do that with a straight face?

Hint: one history includes codified discrimination until ~50 years ago and legal enslavement until ~150 years ago and the other one doesn't. Well, I'll give you that Asian Americans faced codified discrimination into the 20th century, but don't overlook the "antipodal" patterns of how each ethnic group came to be in America.

Hint 2: Asian Americans came over, at a minimum, in indentured servitude.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_history

I must point out that, by insisting on tying this to race, this discussion has quickly degenerated into "Who's been discriminated against the most?" which has exactly nothing to do with whether or not the criminal justice system in general is screwed up. Most all of us agree that something must be done. Do you want to gather together to fix it, or spend time in endless identity politics? I mean, even if you're "right", Who cares? Isn't the goal to make a change for the better?

Quod Erat Demondstrandum.

Your suggestion that there is a tenuous connection between the problems with our criminal justice system and racism is laughable. The connection is self-evident and unavoidable.

@rmxt may or may not be right, personally I think he is, but stating outright that segregation (within living memory) has "exactly nothing" to do with the current state of criminal justice is clearly a hasty statement... that given a moment to think about I'm sure you'd take back, right?

...and if he is right, then the reason why he's right will be useful for solving the problem. It's pretty tough to solve a problem when you don't understand what caused it.

By the way, dismiss identity politics at your risk. It might be uncomfortable to talk about, but it underpins a lot of current affairs: crime, Russia, Gamergate, ISIS.

Recommend reading this. It's long, but worth every painful line: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/good-men-project/why-its-so-ha...

- Violent offenders represent 53% of the population of state prisons and 7.9% in federal prisons [1]. So what's everybody else doing there? Also, it's necessary to present evidence that our unheard of incarceration rates are what actually casued violent crime to drop to unheard-of lows. Some people have proposed, for example, that the most compelling reason for the drop in violent crime in the US was attributable to lower levels of lead exposure in children of the 70s and 80s, due to the elimination of lead from gasoline and paint.

- [edit: I misread what you were saying here, the point about the death penalty is a non-sequitur on my part] Your second point isn't one I would disagree with but, but I don't think your example is a particularly good one: there is ample evidence indicating that the death penalty does not serve as a particularly strong deterrent. For example, murder rates in the US are actually lower in death penalty states, and have been since the 90s.

- "That means changes need to occur with the electorate, not elite legal minds." The author never asserts the legal profession is the only thing that can reform our broken criminal justice system. However he points out that the legal services we have now are vastly inadequate to the job of protecting the rights of most Americans caught up in the criminal justice system, and that part of the reason so many people are incarcerated is that they recieve little-to-no represenatation. Furthermore: "even apart from the millions of pending criminal cases for which people are not being provided a well-resourced and zealous attorney, every one of the thousands of unlawful stops, searches, home raids, beatings, taserings, shootings, and arrests that take place every day forms the basis for a freestanding constitutional civil rights suit. A quiet tragedy of the legal system is that these rampant daily violations are almost never litigated."

The broader point he is making is that the criminal justice system is only able to grind through tens of thousands of lives each day becuase those involved in it--and that includes lawyers and judges--are commited to keeping that system well-oiled and functioning. "Imagine a world in which lawyers stood ready, en masse, to use their skills and training and intellects to vindicate these constitutional rights every day. Such a social movement of lawyers would dramatically alter the nature of the legal system and our society. The system of modern policing, which depends on callous indifference to vindicating basic rights, would crumble at our simple willingness to hold it to its own formal rules. We can do it, but only through massive collective action to act on our professional and moral values."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_Sta... [2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w13097.pdf

>This piece is written by a lawyer. Do not expect it to fairly talk about all of the options. It's invective; well-written, emotional, powerful invective. The goal is to make you turn off your brain and feel a certain way. Treat it as such.

>Invective: Denunciatory or abusive expression or discourse

I vehemently disagree and think you insult the paper. It's well written, attempts to describe logical inconsistencies in how we approach our reasons for punishments, and what the legal profession might be able to do to fix it. It turned my brain up, not down, and it makes me think more about logical underpinnings of our justice system. I haven't been spoon-fed, and you also insult readers who might feel they got something honest out of the paper.

As others have said, racism is not a red herring. The racially disparate effects of the broken justice system is an essential reason why we all should care about this issue. Middle class whites as a rule do not experience the justice system as the malevolent oppressor poor blacks do. Racism and classism explain that disparity and answers the question, "Why should I care?" for those who do not have first hand experience with these issues. It places the issue in the its proper context: the long, plodding struggle of blacks for equality in America.

> the country is safer than it ever has been

This is only true if you exclude from "the country" all the prisons where people are routinely raped and stabbed.

Also, even if it were true, the important question is: what caused it, and could that result be achieved with other means? How do other safe countries address the problem?

Most of the prison stabbings are included in violent crimes stats. I guess some rapes may not be, though. Rape in prisons is surpassing non-prison rape (which is almost nonexistent) but it's not routine either - 10x higher rate per person-year is still a pretty low rate (needless to say: we the public should be willing to pay a pretty high price to stop a single violent rape - say, $50k)

A recent article on HN made me realise that the U.S. might be on the right track for fixing this. The article was called Game Theory's Cure For Corruption Makes Us All Cops [0]. The solution is in your pocket.

Imagine a city where police commit blatant traffic violations and never ticket one another. The authorities could decrease power inequalities by developing an online system in which all citizens are able to anonymously report dangerous drivers. Anyone who received too many independent reports would be investigated – police included. This sounds almost laughably simple, and yet the model indicates that it ought to do the trick. It is, after all, essentially the same system used by many online communities.

[0] http://aeon.co/magazine/society/game-theorys-cure-for-corrup...

The article mentions but does not address the point of altruism. Nobody wants to be a stool pigeon singing to the police on someone they know, even if it's anonymous. The result is that the set of enforced laws is a strict subset of the set of laws that the majority of people would find reasonable. That's why we create police forces in the first place- to be our better selves. The war on black America needs to end, but simply democratizing enforcement isn't the way to do it.

asanagi, you are unfortunately "hellbanned", which means no one can see your post unless they are logged in and have "showdead" turned on.

>It is, after all, essentially the same system used by many online communities.

Of course what actually happens if you report a moderator (or even just a friend of a moderator) is that the report will get thrown out on a technicality, and then you'll get banned over a minor infraction you may or may not have committed half a year ago.

PS: Big shout-out to all my buddies who are Not Here To Build An Encyclopedia.

That is the nicest and most readable typography I've seen for a long-form article on the Web.

> myths that the most serious types of crime affecting our society are the kinds of violent crimes that police patrolling the streets supposedly fight and that entire poor communities are “high-crime areas.”

...

> An intellectually rigorous system would, for example, study in great detail the connection between hundreds of billions of dollars in financial fraud and tax evasion and millions of easily preventable deaths, not dramatically reduce every year the resources devoted to fighting crime committed by the wealthy.

I'm glad when they said how over-policed some areas are that they also pointed out how we don't police other areas at all and the effect of those other areas, like white-collar crime, are HUGE.

The article stressed injustices based on race and geography. It touched less on differences of injustices based on class. I don't think it mentioned sex at all. Since I applied to volunteer with the Innocence Project -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocence_Project -- I've become much more aware of how what we all know, which is how much more men are targeted and jailed.

I volunteered because after seeing a documentary on the project I felt compelled to do something. The innocent people the project freed spent an average of 13.5 years in jail -- completely 100% innocent. My taxes are paying for the system this piece described.

You can do something to change the system too.

Edit: a quick search for the question below on differences in sex for the same crimes -- "Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases" http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2144002, which I found in "Men Sentenced To Longer Prison Terms Than Women For Same Crimes, Study Says" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/11/men-women-prison-se..., which has links to other research too.

I'm sure there are some disparities in the way men and women are prosecuted and sentenced, but doesn't the bulk of the difference in incarceration by sex come from the difference in criminal behavior by sex?

There is an insidious reason driving our incarceration rates: prisons rent inmates to corporations as contract workers for pennies an hour. With guarantees of the number of inmates they will be supplied. Follow the money. Follow the money. Follow the money.

I don't think that's the main cause (for-profit jails and police/prison-unions are surely primary), but the argument does work - incarceration costs the public far more than it could save in suppressed wages, but the companies that benefit don't care about that.

This article was a great read; it made me feel awful.

> ... we’re starting to have symposia in which people talk about whether everything will be better if we give police more money to buy cameras for their lapels.

This was my mindset--that with more accountability, police will shape up. However, this article highlighted this solution as a symptomatic treatment.

I wonder how we could help address this major problem technologically?

So when get over the depression of observing this system in action and the desire to leave the US I feel the desire for action. This problem of over criminalizing and over incarceration must be reversed and corrected. I refuse to live in a country like this unless this is corrected.

There is a question no one ever seems to ask anymore, "Does the punishment fit the crime?"

I guess the best you can do is hopethat you know the laws for the area you live in. The u.s. has so many laws that are different across states and also so many laws that are enforced arbitrarily.

Some states you only have to verbally identify yourself to police. Some states you're required to show I.d. if requested. Some states you can decline a breathalyzer and other states you cannot.

And if you know the law then you should exercise your rights to the limit of the law. Of course they keep passing new laws to push the limits in the other direction. And I don't think anyone wants to be a test case for throwing out a bad law in the courts.

The problem is similar here in Switzerland with the exception that there are fewer laws and that the federal government has very little power (unlike the u.s. With its strong federal laws). For example, here in one canton you can grow 2 marijuana plants for your own use while in another canton you will go to jail for even a small amount of marijuana.

That's all very well, but it turns out the armour of righteousness is poor protection against getting shot in the back by a policeman, who subsequently plants his excuse on your body. Coppers prepared to do that are hardly going to listen to people claiming their rights are being violated.

I dread the day that standard plod in the UK carries a firearm.

Well I guess the good news is that the UK police seem pretty adamant that they don't want to be armed on normal duty.

Except with tasers: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/09/police-federati...

It's important to know one's rights, but I think that's by no means the best we can do. For starters, we can support organizations like the Equal Justice Initiative (http://www.eji.org) or the author of TFA's org, Equal Justice Under Law (http://equaljusticeunderlaw.org) that are working to both defend indigent defendants and fundamentally reform the criminal justice system.

Beyond that, I think that there is a lot of opportunity to advocate around these issues on the state and local level right now. Whatever you think of bodycams for police, you have to admit that in light of recent events they're going to become dramaticaly more common. That's just one example of how a crisis can provide a great opportunity for advocacy, and ultimately change. That's not to say that we will be able to make fundamental change quickly on this very difficult issue. But it is to say that there are paths forward, and I would invite people who care to dive in.

There's this widespread misconception that there are things the police can't do to you because some text somewhere says so.

In reality, it's just a question of what they want to do, and whether they can get away with it. For example, if an officer insists on seeing your ID even if the rulebook says you don't have to show it, he can escalate until he gets his way.

A police officer can saw off your leg and feed it to some crocodiles if he wants to, and no one's looking or filming.

But of course, this misconception is central to the belief in "the rule of law", which keeps us misguidedly comfortable with the fact that there's a bunch of guys in blue costumes who can abuse you as they please, confiscate all your cash, shoot your dog, or just ruin your life on a whim.

There's a saying among cops, "You may beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride." In other words, they can harass you all they want, with impunity. "Oh, he was innocent? Well, darn."

Yep, and we're guilty of whatever bullshit crime they accuse us of, until we somehow prove we're not.. from jail, after having all our accounts seized.

That's why I support things like dash cams and cameras on police officers themselves - if they're not trustworthy, they need to be monitored and harshly dealt with.

They're never dealt with harshly though. Their idea of a punishment is a paid vacation (=suspension), after which the thug is free to do his thing again.

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