Hacker News Reader

Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com