For those still contending black people are not punished more for the same crime as a norm...

[Fenixgoon]

There are numerous studies that show black people go to prison at a FAR HIGHER rate for drugs than white people. You can look at any number of Google results or Duckduckgo results or just look at the raw numbers broken down on sites like FBI.gov. We are talking like 5-8 times more black people in prison (proportionately) than white people.

You can also look at numerous studies and estimates on how many people use drugs by race. Usage rates are almost identical between black and white people with the exception that white people typically use a slight amount more (albeit within the margin of error). This holds true across multiple drug categories, as well as usage, possession, manufacturing, sale, and transportation of drugs. Given the NON disparity between drug crimes between blacks and whites, even a 50% higher rate of black people in prison should be offensive to a society that claims to treat races equally. We're talking more like a 500% disparity. Even the person most turned off by slogans like "Black lives matter" should be appalled at these numbers and should be able to see the need for slogans like this in a society that doesn't value black lives the way it claims to.

Why does this matter? The long term effects of jailing a large portion of a community's young men are devastating. Despite those tear-jerker movies you've seen where prison makes the main character into a better person, prison does not make people better. Statistically, you are more likely to be violent, less likely to get a good paying job, more likely to be on drugs, and less likely to become educated if you have been to prison.

If you want to devastate a community and leave them mired in violence and poverty, you take away their opportunities in life, or you at the least make the opportunities VERY difficult to achieve. You make it so they lose their freedom, lose their loved ones, lose their opportunity to get student loans, lose out on the ability to get MOST jobs out there, and leave them hopeless and suffering from long term emotional problems from the abuse they experience in prison. And you make sure NOT to do those things in other (white) communities. That's where we are right now. And you can further compound it by condescendingly blaming them for where there are at in life despite the fact that you would never force these consequences on your own children.

I read a statistic that you'd have to put about 500,000 white men in jail RIGHT NOW just to have the same percentage of white male drug users in prison as black male drug users. That would be devastating to the future of these men and their communities. What is worse than living next door to a druggie? Living next door to a druggie who just got out of jail after 4 years and has PTSD, no hope of an education, no hope of a decent job, and is still a druggie since prison rape doesn't cure addiction. We just made that guy a worse human being and then released him into the community.

1000% this. and the effects are generational. so any children that person has or will have will also be affected. go figure that some of the biggest indicators for economic and academic success are 1) the economic status of your parents 2) having a two-parent household (which is impossible if 1 is imprisoned).

i liken our current situation to white people getting to invest 400 years ago. freed slaves got to start investing in 1865, then jim crow came around and destroyed or devalued those investments over the next 100 years. so now we're in the present day, and white folks have had 400 years of compounding interest and growth, while black communities have barely had any. and then we wonder why white families have an average net worth 10x that of black families. it's pretty easy to connect the dots once you begin to see the systematic oppression of a community.

the worst part is that it really has only damaged the country. it's not a zero-sum game. we all lose. the amount of human and intellectual capital and cultural development that we've missed out on is beyond depressing.

 

[HomerJS]

1000% this. and the effects are generational. so any children that person has or will have will also be affected. go figure that some of the biggest indicators for economic and academic success are 1) the economic status of your parents 2) having a two-parent household (which is impossible if 1 is imprisoned).

i liken our current situation to white people getting to invest 400 years ago. freed slaves got to start investing in 1865, then jim crow came around and destroyed or devalued those investments over the next 100 years. so now we're in the present day, and white folks have had 400 years of compounding interest and growth, while black communities have barely had any. and then we wonder why white families have an average net worth 10x that of black families. it's pretty easy to connect the dots once you begin to see the systematic oppression of a community.

the worst part is that it really has only damaged the country. it's not a zero-sum game. we all lose. the amount of human and intellectual capital and cultural development that we've missed out on is beyond depressing.

Well said. Recently there were survivors of the Tulsa race massacre in court and we can't even agree to compensate them and their families.

 

[Dave_5k]

A good place for actual numbers without opinion.

Some Black intellectuals believe that culture and perceived socioeconomic status, not necessarily nature, are the primary cause of much of the imbalance. This, coupled with the Law of the Instrument are a bad combination. I know this won't sit well with the forum, and its affirmation bias, but it's worth a shot to put actual numbers out there for people to discuss as they see fit.

FBI — Table 67

One baseline example is arrests for drug abuse violations- where we know from multiple independent studies that illicit drug usage rates, on average, are nearly identical for black and white Americans. Yet blacks are arrested twice as often per capita from that FBI data (and an even higher relative arrest rate if you back out white hispanic from the overall white category)

Socioeconomic status undoubtedly plays a role in the probability of arrest, but police and the FBI don’t collect that data, so extremely difficult to isolate that as a variable. One inaccurate simplification might be to assume only those in poverty are actually arrested. And therefore argue there is no racial bias, as black poverty rates - at more than double that of whites - could be used to explain the discrepancy in arrests.

I would argue it is almost certainly a combination of both racism and economic status, but given the extreme and unequivocal discrepancies in racial stop and search rates by police, far less an economic factor.

 

[Pipeline 1010]

1000% this. and the effects are generational. so any children that person has or will have will also be affected. go figure that some of the biggest indicators for economic and academic success are 1) the economic status of your parents 2) having a two-parent household (which is impossible if 1 is imprisoned).

This is a huge point. White conservatives love to point out that the black community needs to have 2 parent households and ask why aren't the fathers sticking around and why can't the fathers provide for their children. BECAUSE WE TOOK THEM AWAY AND JAILED THEM IS WHY. How do you start/maintain/provide for/nourish a family when you were thrown in jail at age 19 for something we didn't jail your white friend for? How are you going to provide for a family when you can't get an education or a decent job or even vote? Is your girlfriend gonna stick around and wait for drug-jail boyfriend to get out of prison for 4 years and be unable to provide? Would YOU???

Furthermore, because we turn non-violent people into violent people in prison (this is statistically measurable), and then let them out into their community, it increases violence within that community. Increased violence leads to more policing. More policing leads to disproportionate jailing. The cycle perpetuates itself and as long as we jail non-violent people and turn them violent, there is no way to break that cycle. You are asking an entire race to overcome obstacles that you would never willingly place in the way of yourself or your loved ones. What the hell do you THINK is going to be the outcome? It is predictable. If you WANT to wreck a community this is how you can do it and how you can keep it permanent.

i liken our current situation to white people getting to invest 400 years ago. freed slaves got to start investing in 1865, then jim crow came around and destroyed or devalued those investments over the next 100 years. so now we're in the present day, and white folks have had 400 years of compounding interest and growth, while black communities have barely had any. and then we wonder why white families have an average net worth 10x that of black families. it's pretty easy to connect the dots once you begin to see the systematic oppression of a community.

Damn I never even considered the growth/interest portion of the equation. I never even got past the "can we let them have a chance to just start" part. This is depressing. Beyond depressing. We need to end the war on drugs and treat addiction as a medical issue instead of a criminal issue like Portugal did with MASSIVE, undisputed success. It could mean an end to a violent black market (please see the reasons for and outcomes of ending prohibition of alcohol), an end to a staggeringly disproportionate imprisonment of young black men, and the ability of black communities to finally pursue what the rest of us can: life, liberty, and happiness.

 

[Pipeline 1010]

One baseline example is arrests for drug abuse violations- where we know from multiple independent studies that illicit drug usage rates, on average, are nearly identical for black and white Americans. Yet blacks are arrested twice as often per capita from that FBI data (and an even higher relative arrest rate if you back out white hispanic from the overall white category)

They are jailed at a rate of 5-8x. Not 2x. But yeah, 2x would be bullshit, too. 5-8x as much is reaching bullshit depth levels that make you think it is intentional and systemic.

Socioeconomic status undoubtedly plays a role in the probability of arrest, but police and the FBI don’t collect that data, so extremely difficult to isolate that as a variable. One inaccurate simplification might be to assume only those in poverty are actually arrested. And therefore argue there is no racial bias, as black poverty rates - at more than double that of whites - could be used to explain the discrepancy in arrests.

I would argue it is almost certainly a combination of both racism and economic status, but given the extreme and unequivocal discrepancies in racial stop and search rates by police, far less an economic factor.

When you consider that a community of people gets imprisoned for something at a massively higher rate than another community despite committing the crime at the same rate, the only possible outcome is that community will stay poor and violent. There isn't a question of whether black communities are poorer or not. There is not a question of whether black people are punished by imprisonment at a far higher rate that white people who abuse drugs at the exact same rate. We already know they are. For whatever reason...racism...wealth...honestly it doesn't matter. It HAS TO STOP. The problem is that if we keep this up, those black communities with continue to remain poor and continue to be arrested more and jailed more and be more violent and we maintain the cycle and those communities will be mired in hopelessness forever.

The only way I see to break that cycle is to quit jailing young black men for drugs at a massively higher rate than we do white people. This shouldn't be a controversial opinion. Since we have already decided we aren't going to do this, we need to end the war on drugs. We have asked the police nicely to stop over policing black communities and they have refused. Treat addiction like a medical issue and not a criminal issue. Stop ruining so many young black lives for no reason....it's not like prison even cures addiction.

End the war on drugs, divert spending from punishment to treatment, and watch your addiction rates tank. It's not magic. Watch your violent black market dry up and murder rates drop. Watch there be fewer druggies, fewer overdoses, fewer kids using drugs, lower disease spread (HIV, hepatitis, etc...), lower taxes (since treatment is far cheaper than incarceration), and less gun violence (up to 60% of gun violence is directly or secondarily related to the war on drugs and that lucrative, violent black market). The only people I can see who would oppose this are the openly racist crapheads who LIKE keeping the black communities down, or the people whose jobs are dependent upon having a thriving prison market going (prison guards, cops, swat teams, judges, DAs, prison vendors, etc...).

 

[SMOGZINN]

Watch your violent black market dry up and murder rates drop.

I completely agree with your entire post. There is one caveat to this though. We can't set the tax rate on as high as states are so far doing.
Yes, tax it and regulate it, but not to the point that the black market has plenty of room to undercut the legal sales. That is what is going on with marijuana.
On the other hand, if we legalize it nationally we could start treating the black market as a tax issue, and let the IRS handle it non-violently.

 

[maluckey1]

The numbers for drug use may not be accurate. I don't put any faith in self-reported data when discussing illegal activity. It's anecdotal at best, and totally unreliable for any metric.

Are Police Racially Biased in Marijuana Arrests? - The Crime Report

That being said, the apparent breakdown of support for low-income communities is pretty visible and you don't need to be a scientist to see it. Access to public libraries, grocery stores, schools, vocational education and other services may be limited.

School choice? Vocational schools? Locations for vocational schools are rarely near underprivileged neighborhoods and you either need a car, or long bus ride to get there. Who in the hell has time to ride a bus for an hour each way to class, then go to a job (or babysit/watch their kid) and then do homework?

Addressing even one of the "triple evils" also affects the others. A good place to start to rectify the disparity.

The King Philosophy - Nonviolence365® - The King Center

 

[Pipeline 1010]

I completely agree with your entire post. There is one caveat to this though. We can't set the tax rate on as high as states are so far doing.
Yes, tax it and regulate it, but not to the point that the black market has plenty of room to undercut the legal sales. That is what is going on with marijuana.
On the other hand, if we legalize it nationally we could start treating the black market as a tax issue, and let the IRS handle it non-violently.

Absolutely. Marijuana black markets are still flourishing in some states where it has been legalized but the taxes and red tape placed in the way of starting/maintaining a dispensary have made the black market profitable. Don't doubt for one moment that this was intentional. It was predictable, but the politicians did it anyway. It's almost like they WANT the black market to exist. It would have been EASY to set the tax rate to a reasonable amount that could be disruptive to the black market. It wouldn't have hurt a single person.

 

[Dave_5k]

The numbers for drug use may not be accurate. I don't put any faith in self-reported data when discussing illegal activity. It's anecdotal at best, and totally unreliable for any metric.

While a double blind randomized study would be ideal, there are independent unbiased sources that provide good data sets - one example is drug testing after traffic fatalities, which consistently have shown drug usage rates are actually higher for white drivers. Sample size of over 100,000 dead drivers

Positive drug tests by race, excluding alcohol:

Positive drug test trends in fatally-injured drivers in the United States from 2007 to 2017 - Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy

Background The last two decades have seen tremendous changes in the U.S. environment surrounding drugs. Driving under the influence of drugs is a growing public health hazard. The present study examined trends in drug involvement in fatally-injured drivers in the U.S. Methods Data were drawn...

substanceabusepolicy.biomedcentral.com

 

[Pipeline 1010]

The numbers for drug use may not be accurate. I don't put any faith in self-reported data when discussing illegal activity. It's anecdotal at best, and totally unreliable for any metric.

When multiple studies involving self-reported data ALL produce similar to identical results, that helps alleviate the concern of self-reported data. When other types of data gathering then ALSO agree then you need to at least consider that this data is probably trending toward accurate. White people die from illegal drugs at a higher rate. See the chart above...white people in fatal accidents have a higher rate of illegal drugs than black people. Literally every study of any type I've ever seen suggests white people use drugs at about the same rate (or a little higher) than black people. The only reason I can see for someone to consider it unreliable is that they just don't want to believe it in the first place and it doesn't matter what data they see.

Furthermore, when comparing rates of black people who are in jail for drugs vs white people, we see that black people are in jail at a FAR FAR higher rate than white people. The actual number varies by definition of "in jail for drugs", but we can be confident that a nice, round number would be 6 times the rate of white people. Given that white people consistently admit using drugs at the rate of about 10% + or -, we would have to accept that 60% of all black men/women/children in America use drugs in order to accept that it is fair for 6x as many black people are in jail for drugs as white people.

At this point it is just fucking ridiculous to accept that things are OK the way they are and that America offers equal opportunity to black people and that black lives truly do matter. You have to be either solidly racist, your job/income depends on punishment of black people, or some combination of both.

 

[DaaQ]

White people do more drugs than black people period, anecdotal evidence, but I live in a poor white community currently, and also live in Detroit metro area.

Never been ripped off by a person of color, but have been by white POS's

 

[HomerJS]

A follow-up on the OP. If you are black and commit the same offenses as white people you are fucked
Is it racism or justice? The legal tangle behind a Black woman's six-year sentence for voter fraud. (msn.com)

 

[Lezunto]

I really cannot believe why so many who live in the United States cannot see the differences in how Black people are treated by police, district attorneys and of course, judges who oversee criminal cases.

Because the differences are right in front of everyone.

The following is a treatise from a lawyer who has been battling our unjust and unfair Justice system. The opinion appears on the Brennan Center for Justice Website.

Yes, Blacks are treated more harshly by the Justice system

 

[m8d]

I really cannot believe why so many who live in the United States cannot see the differences in how Black people are treated by police, district attorneys and of course, judges who oversee criminal cases.

Because the differences are right in front of everyone.

The following is a treatise from a lawyer who has been battling our unjust and unfair Justice system. The opinion appears on the Brennan Center for Justice Website.

Yes, Blacks are treated more harshly by the Justice system

When the deck is stacked in your favor since the founding of this country. Why would you give two shits what happens to POC.

 

[HomerJS]

Kim Potter only gets 2 years in prison for accidently killing Duante Wright. The judge disrespected Wright's family getting emotional because Kim Potter had to go to prison, while the family sat stunned in the courtroom

Black Somali cop gets 5 years for accidently killing a white woman. He originally was sentenced to 12 years
Ex-Minneapolis police officer sentenced to 57 months in fatal shooting of Australian woman | Reuters

Same crime black man gets 2.5x the sentence.


As a reminder 2 black women who accidently voted got 5 and 6 years respectively. Accidently voting while black is punished 2.5x the rate as white people accidently killing black people.

 

[Pohemi]

Update, hopefully she'll be tried and sentenced (if necessary) a bit more fairly this time:

Tennessee woman sentenced for voter fraud gets new trial

A Memphis woman sentenced to prison for illegally registering to vote while on probation will get a new trial on that charge.

apnews.com

 

[HomerJS]

Update, hopefully she'll be tried and sentenced (if necessary) a bit more fairly this time:

Tennessee woman sentenced for voter fraud gets new trial

A Memphis woman sentenced to prison for illegally registering to vote while on probation will get a new trial on that charge.

apnews.com

While white people who fraudulently voted for Trump for a few days or probation.

Do we have equal justice in our CJS??