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