[chongli]

I agree with you when it comes to the model: the model should be as accurate as possible. The big question is what to do with the model. The way it's being used now, the model is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. A prediction of high recidivism risk leads to a longer sentence which increases the likelihood of recidivism. This creates a feedback loop which increases real recidivism risk and the model changes to reflect that. If your goal is to reduce crime in society, then this may be a flawed approach.

[hello_marmalade]

Yes but that's not about race, that's about how we deal with crime as a society. These things aren't being unfairly applied to minority communities and that's the point. The system would be working the same way for a non-minority community, and it does, where the economic situation is similar.

That's why the racial angle is a waste of everyone's time and energy. It's not the relevant issue. The more relevant issue is how we deal with crime prevention. Currently, we go with a punishment approach rather than a truly rehabilitative one. This also has a lot to do with economics, and lobbying and private prisons and so on. It's much more complicated than 'everybody's racist'.

[chongli]

The purpose of the term structural racism, instead of just racism, is to distinguish the theory of historical racism and its downstream effects from the category people who hold views of racial superiority.

Besides that, there are plenty of people around today who actually are racist and they are major proponents of punishment-based approaches. If you try to switch to rehabilitation and intervention, they will resist you. They hold views that some races are innately of lower intelligence and have higher criminal tendencies. You aren't going to counteract that pressure by saying "the racial angle is a waste of everyone's time."

[hello_marmalade]

Yes, but what relevance does structural racism have to the model?

That's only true only if you believe the majority of people are racist. I don't.

There's also a number of ways that you don't even have to interact with that argument. You can show that the end results. It's not like we don't already have the studies and statistics that show how to resolve these issues. You can easily say to someone who thinks that way 'ok sure, you go on believing that, but even if you do believe that, there are still better ways to resolve this.'

Also most people are actually pretty receptive to new information if you are capable of packaging it well, and acknowledging their biases without judging them for it.

[chongli]

It doesn't take a majority of people in anything to create a problem. It only takes a concerted effort by a minority and complacency from the rest.

But besides this, we have too many people fighting a tug-o-war over the term racist. Some people want to apply the word to everyone. Other people think it should only apply to literal Nazis.

But again, that's a distraction. The membership in the Nazi party was around 8.5 million in 1945, yet the population of Germany was around 90 million at the time. That's right, less than 10% of the population were Nazis, yet they controlled everything.

[hello_marmalade]

What I'm saying is that the focus on race is counterproductive because it's thoroughly irrelevant to the solution. If you have one group blaming minority failure on their race, and another group saying that the failure is because of racism, the conversation revolves around race. We look to racially based solutions, and miss what's right in front of our nose. We assume that the issue is racial when it's not. That's what I mean by distraction.

The topic should be 'How do we fix crime, recidivism, and poverty?'. Pointing out historical injustice does absolutely nothing. There is no reasonable thing to do if that's your focal point, because the only ways to 'resolve' it is what? Reparations? Making decisions about jail time and release based on race? It's illogical. You'd end up putting people with high levels of recidivism back into a community, only serving to repeat the cycle, because you never actually look at the real problem. The things that cause that recidivism. The things that are actually causing it right now, instead of the reasons that it happens to be black people. If history were different, it could have been anybody. It could have been white people, brown people, any color, any ethnicity. It explains why the people in this situation are black more often than they are not, but it does not explain how we fix the problem.

It is an absolute waste of time, and the real issue is that while we screw around talking about pointless grievances people will continue to go to jail, and die, because we're still not talking about the problem.

Edit: I realized that this wasn't quite a response to your last post, but the relevancy is that you will only get complacency if you're focusing on things that can't really be fixed, or that essentially blame others, but what you can do is draw parallels, and essentially say 'Your issues are my issues too, and we can and should work together on them,' which is also true.