| > We have millions of black people incarcerated Give how important this subject is, it's important to not invent facts. Your core statement is false and off by at least four fold. There are roughly half a million black people in prison at all levels, not millions. That destroys your setup by debunking the extreme exaggeration. However given it is an important subject, we shouldn't stop there, let's examine the situation. There are around 1.2m-1.3m people in state prisons, 500k-600k in local jails and 200k in federal prisons. Roughly 1.9-2.1m total across all jails and prisons at all levels. Several hundred thousand of those people are processing through the system, awaiting trial, etc. at any given time. Roughly one million of those people are there due to rape / sexual assault, murder, assault or robbery. As of 2016, 339,000 hispanics were sentenced to either federal or state prison; 439,000 whites; 486,000 blacks. That's from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (no figures for local jails). Over the last decade black people saw a decline of roughly 120k people in prison at those levels, white people saw a decline of about 60-70k, hispanic figures were steady. Can you explain what part of society forces people to rape and murder - whether hispanic, white, or black? I grew up poor, most of the people I knew growing up were relatively poor or very poor, many with broken homes and absent parents, I'd like an education on this. I never saw anything related to social oppression forcing people to rape and murder. There are a lot of societies with enormous oppression, corruption and poverty, which lack high murder rates and high violent crime rates. China is one example of that and there are several others in Asia. Eastern Europe has also had many examples of that over the last several decades. Russia has a murder rate about ~8-12x worse than China along with far higher violent crime rates, despite the two countries being at similar levels economically per capita and both having oppressive political systems. What's the difference? Russia has a much worse culture of tolerating and encouraging violence and murder. I've known a lot of poor people, the only difference I've ever seen between poor people that were violent and poor people that were not, is culture and it was always a choice. |
Keep in mind that China has a heavy incentive to lie about their prison population and/or play games with the definition of "prison population"; after all, it's important that a harmonious society has few people who break laws (implying a low prison population). Eastern Europe under Communism faced a similar cost/benefit structure.
Therefore, as they have an incentive to cover that up, it's safe to make the assumption that the real numbers are likely significantly higher.