[ams6110]

I'll agree that the drug war is out of control and as a "cure" it's worse than the disease. But people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor. They are committing crimes, and pleading or being found guilty. The problem I have with pieces like the original article are that they are making it sound like we are engaging in a Gestapo-like rounding up of large numbers of minorities for no reason and throwing them in jail.

By blaming the war on drugs we are also completely ignoring the other elephant in the room, and that is the massive breakdown in family structure that has occurred amongst the impoverished.

This is particularly the case for African-Americans but I don't claim that it's a racial thing, directly. It's part of the cycle of poverty. In DC, which is a large focus of the original piece, over half of babies are born out of wedlock. For African Americans it's close to 70%.

With no parents working, and fathers typically absent, children do not learn the behaviors and responsibilities that are required to be a productive and self-supporting member of society. They then perpetuate this in subsequent generations. Our "war on poverty" has, like the war on drugs, been a failure. The poverty rate in 1965 was about 15%, same as today, with trillions of dollars spent.

The war on drugs funds a massive effort to catch and punish drug dealers and users. So of course that happens. The war on poverty rewards disfunctional, irresponsible, and self-destructive life choices.

You get what you pay for.

[sbov]

The problem isn't that we're throwing them in jail for no reason. The problem is we aren't throwing non-poor non-minorities in jail for the same reasons.

Most friends of mine regularly do drugs. Even the self made multi millionaires. None of them have been to jail. They aren't subject to the random ass searches like the poor are.

If things were different - if the millionaires were treated with the same suspect, you bet your ass these laws would change.

But they aren't. So the laws stay the same. And that's a problem.

[enraged_camel]

The laws are terribly flawed, but they do change.

For instance, up until 2010, there was a 100:1 (one hundred to one) disparity between federal criminal penalties for crack cocaine possession vs. powder cocaine possession. Crack possession also carried a mandatory minimum five-year sentence. Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010, reducing the disparity to 18:1 and removing the mandatory minimum. The law is still influenced by the incorrect belief that crack is more dangerous than powder, but the legal system is capable of recognizing and fixing its flaws (even if the fix is partial).

[beat]

The relative sentencing is about the choice of customer. Crack is cocaine that poor people can afford.

[mc32]

Growing up I lived in a town where there were hippy dealers and there were dreadlock dealers. They both got harrassed pretty evenly and the users I knew also would get stopped and issued summonses for small possession. The police would also confiscate beer in the car, etc. They were nice enough not to cite us for underage drinking, but I think the police were busy with the car thieves and guys testing out the small time illegal arms trade.

So if the police get complaints from neighbors they respond to that. If your rich neighbors tolerate your coke addiction, they don't come knocking. If you have a noisy neighbor who complains they do come knocking. Police respond very much to community complaints, from my experience with them growing up.

Whenever the police came to "bust" activities, it was mostly due to neighbors calling in "suspicious activity" I.e. Underage drinking and weed.

[theptip]

"They both got harrassed pretty evenly" - If you look at the national statistics, this is definitely not the case, so your anecdote unfortunately isn't representative.

E.g. see http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/january_february_2...

"in investigatory stops, a black man age twenty-five or younger has a 28 percent chance of being stopped for an investigatory reason over the course of a year; a similar young white man has a 12.5 percent chance, and a similar young white woman has only a 7 percent chance. And this is after taking into account other possible influences on being stopped, like how you drive. " [in other words, this sample has been corrected for any difference in base-rate of justification for being stopped].

The interesting thing is, profiling like this can be a self-fulfilling prophecy; if the base-rate of drug possession is equal between blacks and whites, but blacks are stopped more often, then there will be a higher number of arrests of blacks per-capita, and it will look like blacks are more likely of committing a crime. This higher crime rate looks like a justification for profiling, when in fact it's just an artifact of the profiling that was done.

[Note I'm not making any claims about the actual base rate of drug possession, just illustrating an effect with an example]

[pyrocat]

>> it was mostly due to neighbors calling in "suspicious activity" i.e. being black

FTFY

[mc32]

We were middle and lower middle class, a majority non black with a few blacks who acted like other middle class kids in the burbs. So in our case it was "underage drinking teenagers" in places we "should not be".

[logfromblammo]

Did you mean "random-ass search", as in searches without reasonable suspicion, or "random ass-search", as in inappropriately adding a body cavity inspection to an otherwise justifiable search?

The fact that I cannot determine this from context may be a problem all by itself.

And while it's true that there is usually a reason for throwing people in jail, that reason is often an arbitrary, capricious, or morally dubious reason. I prefer that people go to jail for doing a specific, non-accidental harm to someone else, rather than doing something that merely offends a moral principle held by someone else.

Get high on a PCP dipper, and you are only hurting yourself. Get high, strip naked, and go out to jump on top of cars, and you might do time for all the auto-body damage, proportional to the cost of repairs. Get high on heroin, and you are only hurting yourself. Share some of your heroin with someone who doesn't know how dangerous it is, who then dies from asphyxiation, and you might go down for negligent manslaughter. Get drunk on alcohol, and you are only hurting yourself. Get drunk, and then try to drive home, taking out 14 mailboxes and one step-down transformer, and you might be doing some time.

...unless you have money, or know the right people. One of my former bosses occasionally mentioned at work that he grew weed inside his house. He probably went months without ever even seeing a cop. No suspicion means no searches, means no evidence, means no prosecution, means no jail. I have known people who drove drunk on at least a weekly basis, and never got cited for it even once. They all either had money or a few cop friends.

It isn't just that the justice system is not enforcing malum prohibitum offenses among that class, but they also look the other way for more serious malum in se crimes. The rich can afford more skillful lawyers. The connected can get the police and prosecutors to back off a bit.

I know someone who quit a prosecutor job because she got tired of putting people in jail for being poor. That's what modern policing is doing. It's packing the prisons with poor people and the jails with the untreated mentally ill. I didn't vote for this. I don't know anybody that would. Yet the people around me keep electing representatives who promise to be "tough on crime" and the "law and order" candidates, without stopping to consider that those people may be inventing new crimes just so they can get tough on them, or that their new laws may encourage more civil disorder.

[beat]

I used to think the drug war was the problem. Not anymore. Think about the high-profile police shootings of unarmed black men over the past year. Not a single one of those was over drugs. They were all "walking while black". Ending the drug war would not, on its own, end the "walking while black" problem.

The family structure breakdown among the poor is directly, painfully correlated to the high incarceration rate. Absent fathers are absent because they're in jail, or expect they will be sooner or later, or because they're ashamed because they are unable to provide for their children.

One of my best friends is a doctor in Orlando, who happens to be black. Back during the Trayvon Martin shooting, he told me he would not even drive through Sanford. He didn't feel safe - from the police. In his daily life, he's a key administrator at a large hospital and a radiologist. In Sanford? He's a black man driving a car too nice for him.

That's not about the war on drugs.

[CPLX]

> He's a black man driving a car too nice for him. That's not about the war on drugs.

Actually, it kind of is. What's the implicit assumption in that story? Of course, that he's a drug dealer. What would be the pretext for pulling him over and searching his car? To look for drugs.

It really is the cornerstone of policing in 2015, just try to imagine counterfactuals where there was no such thing as illegal drugs and drug dealers and so on and it becomes obvious.

[beat]

But again, look at the high profile shootings recently. The cops weren't looking for drugs. In all of those cases, they were stopped for basic harassment.

The nice car isn't a reason to pull over the doctor. It's an excuse.

[CPLX]

I think you're saying this is not about drugs. That's correct.

That's a distinct statement from saying it's not about the war on drugs. It's definitely about that.

[beat]

To push it farther, I'm saying the war on drugs is a symptom, not a cause - it's rooted in racism. So it's not about drugs... it's about race.

[CPLX]

Yes, the war on drugs is an effect, and racism is the cause. If that's what you're saying then we agree.

But on a practical level, the war on drugs is the means by which institutional racism is most likely to be prosecuted in this country. So to some extent many racist acts are the effect of the racist war on drugs.

Perhaps a distinction without a difference. Clearly our drug policy and racism are deeply intertwined. Many do in fact disagree with that or are ignorant of it.

[darkroasted]

"The family structure breakdown among the poor is directly, painfully correlated to the high incarceration rate. Absent fathers are absent because they're in jail, or expect they will be sooner or later, or because they're ashamed because they are unable to provide for their children."

The Moynihan report decrying the break down of black families was released in 1965, before the drug war, at a time when incarceration per crime committed was approaching all-time lows.

The incarceration rates in America bottomed out around 1973. At that time, about 63% of black and poor persons lived in a single-female headed household. By 1978, with incarceration rates still within their historical range, the rate was nearly 70% (source Losing Ground by Charles Murray). Family structure breakdown came first, it was not caused by incarceration. It is wishful thinking to believe that if all these men were not locked up they would be upstanding and faithful fathers, the problems go far beyond that.

[pyrocat]

It sounds like you have a bone to pick with black men. Try reading some recent data: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing...

[darkroasted]

It's a structural issue and is very hard to fix. Men, everywhere, do what is needed to get sex. If women and the institutions of society do not require a commitment from the man in order to have children, then men will not give such a commitment. Why would they? But traditionally it is the father who restricts access to his daughter, or trains his daughter not to open up so easily. So fatherlessness begets fatherlessness.

[beat]

If you think fathers control the sexuality of their teenage daughters, you've obviously never raised one!

[darkroasted]

They used to have a lot more control, now barely any. Hence the rising illegitimacy rates across the board, for all races.

Shared environment still matters a lot. One father has a limited impact on his own daughter. But if the community has lots of fathers, all telling their daughters the same thing, and so your daughter has friends who all view it as low-status to have children at 16, then she will be a lot more likely to wait on having kids until marriage.

[CPLX]

> The problem I have with pieces like the original article are that they are making it sound like we are engaging in a Gestapo-like rounding up of large numbers of minorities for no reason and throwing them in jail.

The reason people are "making it sound like that" is because that's actually what's happening.

Freddy Gray was plucked from a sidewalk, detained, and then killed, for literally no lawful reason.

The context for his story, and the many others like it, is the war on [certain] drugs [when used by some kinds of people] that is current social policy.

This approach to criminal justice appeared at precisely the same time that overtly racist means of policing were outlawed, to accomplish the same goal.

Do you really think it's random happenstance that urban blacks get arrested for experimenting with drugs in a way that suburban whites do not?

Did a country with a few centuries of of legally enshrined racism and violence towards blacks just, you know, stop doing that fifty years ago, suddenly?

Do you know what Ockham's razor is?

[darkroasted]

Do you really think it's random happenstance that urban blacks get arrested for experimenting with drugs in a way that suburban whites do not?

It's more complicated than that. Police are actually much more tolerant of open-air/street corner drug-dealing in black ghetto neighborhoods than in suburbia. If you read books or news articles about these neighborhoods, you see that the dealing gets ignored for months and months, or the dealers are harassed and arrested and then right back out on the street later in the day. This would never be tolerated the same way in suburbia. Then what happens is that there is a shooting, or a gang war with many shootings breaks out. Neighbors demand that the police "do something." Since the police do not know who is responsible and witnesses refuse to talk, the police take the path of least resistance and lock up whoever they can on drug charges. I recommend the books "Ghettoside" and "Don't Shoot" for more on these issues.

Do you know what Ockham's razor is?

The elephant in the room is that black ghetto communities do not self-police and have a dire problem of particular senseless and indiscriminate murders. For instance, Ghettoside recounted a story of a 13-year-old, black kid wandering through the back alleys of his neighborhood, stumbling across a gang of older youths, who immediately started shooting at him. That is just insane. Completely insane. And the book is full of examples like that, of street shootings that take out innocent bystanders because the shooter couldn't be bothered to verify that the target was actually in an enemy gang.

If a community does not self-police, then there are two equally bad options: 1) outsiders can impose their own policing, which is always going to be fraught, brutal, and mistake-prone. 2) other communities can just try to contain the problem, ie, they can segregate themselves.

[beat]

Do you really think things are different in wealthier communities because they "self-police"? Calling the police in a poor neighborhood is dangerous business... not because of gang retaliation, but because of the police themselves. And as you observe, the police generally do nothing about street dealers, and what they do is ineffectual. So why even bother calling them?

[darkroasted]

Well, in a "wealthy" community, generally the police are members of the community. They live nearby, go to the same schools, etc. So all policing in a sense is self-policing. There is much less of a sense of the police being the "other", and vice versa, the police have less of sense that the population is all "others" and all "savages". When you are an outside police force, you only deal with the criminals, so you it becomes your sense that the entire community is criminal.

Also, I put "wealthy" in scare quotes, because this dynamic also applies to areas like Chinatown or the Hasidic Jew communities of Brooklyn. These communities are not rich, but have low crime rates and rarely involve the police in their disputes, they mostly take care of problems using internal social sanctions.

More generally, "self-policing" means problems are nipped in the bud early before they escalate to crimes requiring the police, and never have a chance to escalate to murders and retaliation killings. Most "policing" is taken care of by families and parents. Growing up, it was normal for one parent to complain to another parent about the behavior of the second parent's child, and the second parent to enforce discipline on their own children. I cannot remember a single time in my neighborhood where we had to call the police on a neighbor. I cannot actually recall a single instance of crime, such as burglary.

[beat]

This problem, applied racially, leads to an uncomfortable question. If black communities are less effective than white communities at "self-policing", why is that? Is it because of externally imposed social structure issues (the consequences of racism), or is it because of internal nature (blacks are less intelligent and moral than whites)?

You have to start with this raw, painful question. Either you argue for racial inferiority, or you acknowledge that the problems are truly from external rather than internal sources. Once you acknowledge that, complaining about "self policing" sounds like blaming the victim, because it is.

[darkroasted]

Why is that? Is it because of externally imposed social structure issues (the consequences of racism), or is it because of internal nature (blacks are less intelligent and moral than whites)?

Hypothesis #1: Blacks are the pawns in an ongoing civil war between the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe of American whites. The blue tribe, the left, talks a big game about helping black people, but if you look at what they do, they try to pin all the blame for the plight of black people on lack of education and the racism of the Red Tribe. The blue tribe is mostly interested in using blacks as a voting bank, not on finding the true causes and fixing them. The fixes they do spout, such as education, provide massive wealth transfers to Blue tribe labor unions while doing nothing to fix the problems of broken families and crime. The Red Tribe cares mostly about containment. To the extent they want to fix the problem, it is by funneling money to their own political base, police unions and the prisons. "Tough on crime" attorney generals care a lot more about big drug busts and crack-downs on gangs than on the kind of beat policing that would prevent the crime in the first place. Note that this civil war has been ongoing for 200 years, and turned into a hot war a couple times, once in 1860, again in the late 1960's.

Also, because ghetto blacks never evolved their own indigenous culture, what culture messaging they receive comes through the Blue Tribe institutions. The official story in these institutions is that everything good comes from the government. The story of U.S. history as told as government becoming more progressive, a great president is a president who made some new program to help people. This contrasts to my own upbringing. Growing up in a white suburb, most of what I learned about life came from watching my family and neighbors, where you had lots of crusty older guys serving as role models in how they built their own businesses, did work on their own homes every weekend, took care of their family, etc. I didn't learn right or wrong from school, it came from my mom, family, and peers. School was anarcho-tyranny and Lord of the Flies, even in my wealthy suburb.

Thus in all, the Blue Tribe cultural messaging discourages the black communities from self-organizing to figure out their problems on their own. The Red Tribe policing also prevents this. Potentially, if gangs were allowed to fight it out without any interference, eventually one gang would win and they would set up their own government. But there is just enough policing to prevent that from happening. So the whole community is caught in a trap. Alternatively, the police could seek out the good guys in the ghetto, there are good guys, and deputize them as local officers, who could walk beats and police the street. But the Red Tribe police unions would likely hate this, as there is no way they could pay those officers union wages, it would be seen as taking away from union jobs.

Hypothesis #2: The genetic hypothesis. The evidence for this has been covered elsewhere, for example https://liberalbiorealism.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/first-thi... and https://liberalbiorealism.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/the-likel... and https://liberalbiorealism.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/the-vice-... and https://jaymans.wordpress.com/jaymans-race-inheritance-and-i... and http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_natur... For my own part, if you hold a "preponderance of the evidence" standard, then I would say there is more evidence on the side of there being significant genetic difference in average IQ. I avoided this conclusion for a long time, I did not want to believe it, but I think that avoiding the truth will only make it harder to deal with these problems. I do think that the lower average IQ this makes it harder for black ghetto populations to figure out how to build localized institutions to enforce rule of law, and it makes it harder for these ghetto populations to work around the dysfunctions of the broader political institutions. Also, making the problem worse, is that the most intelligent 20-30% of the black ghetto population escapes the ghetto and lives elsewhere. So the ghettos are continually stripped of the human capital needed to make their local institutions functional. For instance, I was reading on one site that the average IQ in the black ghettos of Baltimore is 75, which is stunningly low.

I don't think that identifying the problem of "lack of self-policing" is blaming the victim, it is just identifying the proximate cause. I don't think blame is constructive framing for fixing anything. My goal is simply to get the truth out there, and it will be up for people working locally to figure out fixes, based on the hard realities of the situation. I certainly don't think that finger-wagging at black people saying "you need to self police" is going to fix anything. But we do need a sort of "five why's analysis" for what has happened ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys ), so that we can fix things. Too often in these debates as soon as you get to one cause that can be pinned on the other tribe, the analysis stops and the blaming begins.

There is a final dark implication to ponder, that neither tribe talks about. Many of these ghettos are actually in prime real estate. South-central LA and Oakland have wonderful climates. Brooklyn, Anacostia, etc, are highly proximate to lots of great jobs. If the crime problem was actually fixed, blacks would be pushed out of these neighborhoods by gentrification very quickly.

I don't really have any great solutions myself. The red versus blue tribal war needs to end. The only way these problems can ever be fixed is at a local level, by people who care about the problem and who are close to the problem. Having outsiders moralize or use these issues to score political points just makes everything worse. But even then, a happy fix is unlikely.

[r00fus]

> The elephant in the room is that black ghetto communities do not self-police and have a dire problem of particular senseless and indiscriminate murders

s/do not/are not allowed to/

Even Oakland won't allow community policing despite the wishes of the community.

[analyst74]

I do believe ams6110's post have some merits.

If you grow up in the ghetto with role models largely being gang members and most your friends have been or are going to jail, it's difficult to grow into a mentality that value education and achievement. It just happens due to historical reasons, especially racism, majority of the ghetto are blacks. This actually perpetuate the unspoken racism, where people consciously or unconsciously associate black people with all the bad things happening in ghetto.

As a counter example, Asian Americans were also highly discriminated against in the past century, immigration from Asia were barred, those who were here cannot acquire citizenship, cannot own land, etc etc. Asians were generally viewed as poor uneducated labours, not too different from blacks. But today Asians are hardly viewed as that, largely thanks to large influx of educated and hard working Asian immigrants in recent years (due to immigration law preference), who changed the public perception of Asians, lifted Asian neighbourhoods from ghetto status and gave positive role model and connections to poor Asian kids (local or immigrants).

Conclusion? Focusing on "helping" visible minority actually reinforce the perception that certain ethnic groups need help. What we need to focus on instead, is to help those in need of help, without regards to skin colors.

[mc32]

Yes these things happen. They should not happen. But they happen in most counties --even homogenous countries. Also, people don't get killed like this everyday, these are exceptions, not acceptable exceptions, but its also not routine as you make it out to be.

The problem is economic and cultural (we allow for guns) so the police take maximum caution, and given the police are the only expression of government in some areas, the negativity falls on them. It's not as if most of the community in a blighted area don't want police - they do, but they also want police to act as if the areas didn't have a violent characteristic. Any area of the world with high crime, be it Russia, china, France, germany, greece will have police act differently in those communities. It's a reaction to the dynamics in such places. It takes effort to overcome and the local Govs typically don't put in the necessary effort.

[CPLX]

> Yes these things happen. They should not happen. But they happen in most counties --even homogenous countries.

What homogenous countries with a comparable level of economic wealth have situations that even remotely resemble our mass incarceration and drug war policies?

[lsniddy]

China is a good example, though they incarcerate less and execute more

[analyst74]

If you do drugs in China, how much you get punishment depends on your skin color and citizenship.

If you are Chinese, you are fucked, with the exception of powerful bureaucrat maybe; but if you are foreigner, you generally get off free, maybe a policeman will give you a stern speech about not breaking law again.

One thing I find funny though, is despite the war on drugs, average Americans, rich or poor, are still doing them, giving police more bodies to send to jail.

[CPLX]

A quick glance at the stats suggests the U.S. incarceration rate is approximately 5x higher than China's. That's a big difference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat...

[bambax]

> But they happen in most counties

If you meant "countries": no. No other country jails that many people, either compared to its population, or in absolute numbers. Not now, not ever.

The US is not "the land of the free", it's "the land of the jailed".

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"... and I will promplty put those bums in my private prisons where I'll watch them be raped to death.

That should be the quote on the so-called Statue of "Liberty".

We should ask for that statue back.

[mc32]

Oh, there is no question we jail too many people, and we jail rather than treat the mentally ill.

Reform is definitely needed, no question.

What I was saying is that other countries also disproportionately incarcerate their poor. It's not a uniquely American racist thing. Go to Angola, Nigeria, Russia, China, it's no different. Yes, we overdo the incarceration fixes all ills thing, we've got an unhealthy fetish for it, but my point was, the poor everywhere are disproportionately affected.

People seem to take it that I'm okay with that. I'm not, but its not uniquely American and its not a policy to target ethnicities. If America were all white or all black we'd still have a problem of overrepresentation of poor in the system. By overrepresentation I mean normalizing for crimes.

[bambax]

Yes, disproportionately incarcerating the poor is probably universal.

But incarceration-fetish is uniquely American. No other country has ever done that in all of history.

When it is done in such huge numbers it really isn't "law enforcement" anymore, it's just some form of apartheid.

The rest of the world should subject the US to the same kind of shaming that was used against South Africa. But of course, the rest of the world doesn't have the balls to do that, so here we go.

[smtddr]

>>But people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor. They are committing crimes, and pleading or being found guilty.

I'd say that institutionalize/systemic racism in America makes it exceedingly more likely that a minority will end up poor and exceedingly more difficult to get out of ---> poor neighborhoods --> more crime ---> broken window policy ---> problems we've been seeing recently.

Conversely, a rich kid in a wealthy neighborhood(that probably doesn't have police at every corner) could be smoking weed right now. Nobody will notice/care, and even if they did some millionaire parents will make sure things work out for the best. And we know the general demographics of rich neighborhoods. It's not that only minorities commit crimes, but the police are always heavily more present where minorities are often located. It's death of a thousand paper-cuts. Housing discrimination, workplace discrimination, poor neighborhoods with horrid schools, war on drugs, excessive police presence/force. Then when they end up poor & desperate, the police are right there waiting for them to step out of line. "See?! We got him committing a crime!" ...without understanding everything in America that led to the event. And when the police jail/kill these people(often black men), you've potential just taken a father away from a family and there's now a young child without a father... and the cycle almost unavoidably continues.

The war on drugs has been a huge driver of this cycle. End it and I think we will see a change for the better. Won't solve everything, but it'll be significant improvement.

[millermp12]

Can we dispense with "minority" and "people of color" when we're talking really about blacks and to a lesser extent hispanics?

This kind of intellectual forgery is why the left (and it's prescriptions) are increasingly viewed with suspicion. Bring yourself to be honest with your words and assessments. Make sure what you say passes the smell test. Otherwise you're just preaching to the converted.

[nmrm2]

It's not just blacks and hispanics. It's a lot of other hues as well. And that's before asking what "black" and "hispanic" even mean, which is highly contextual to culture.

And anyways, "white" isn't even a color -- which is kind of obvious if you think about it for a second because a dark white person and a fair-skinned white person can be as far apart as a dark white person and a latino person. Rather, white is a collection of socio-economic attributes and their indicators, of which color and other physical indicators are only the most obvious/visible. And not all white people have always been white. See e.g. "How the Irish Became White".

[richmarr]

> This kind of intellectual forgery is why the left (and it's prescriptions) are increasingly viewed with suspicion

Tautology. "The left" isn't a thing, other than when viewed with suspicion by "the right".

> Bring yourself to be honest with your words and assessments.

Implying that it's dishonest to use terms like "minority" and "people of color" is a leap that you need to back up to have credibility.

[dragonwriter]

> But people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor. They are committing crimes, and pleading or being found guilty.

There've been a number of cases recently where large number of convictions have been thrown in to review because of either evidence of systemic race-based misconduct by law enforcement authorities or systematic falsification of evidence by law enforcement authorities. So, in many cases, either or both the "not being locked up...because they are black" and the "they are committing crimes" part are in considerable doubt.

> By blaming the war on drugs we are also completely ignoring the other elephant in the room, and that is the massive breakdown in family structure that has occurred amongst the impoverished.

The selective targeting for higher penalties an higher prosecution rates for drugs predominantly used in the black community as part of the "War on Drugs" and the correspondingly higher rates of incarceration in that community resulting from it is a directly contributing factor to the "massive breakdown in family structure" in that community (and the war in drugs in general, and the incarceration resulting from it, is likewise a contributing factor to the breakdown in family structure among the impoverished outside of the black community.)

> Our "war on poverty" has, like the war on drugs, been a failure.

Arguably, "like" should be replaced with "in large part due to" in that sentence. The "War on Drugs" largely is a war on the poor. It directly opposes any "war on poverty" (though even as a slogan, much less any substance, the "war on poverty" was largely abandoned shortly after it was announced, and replaced by the War on Drugs.)

[DanBC]

> But people are not being locked up just because they are black,

You're ignoring the fact that black people are more likely than white people to be arrested for minor crime; they're more likely to get prison time for similar crimes; etc.

> or poor.

Ferguson etc showed us that small towns used minor traffic violations as a revenue stream. Someone would have a minor, small, traffic violation and get a fine for it. They would then have to decide between taking time off work to pay he fine (and thus lose their job) or go to pay the fine, if they can pay the fine by the time they have too.

Because many people can't afford to pay the fine they end up in jail.

That's pretty much putting people in jail for being poor, and the US does it a lot.

[throwawcontro3]

A review of the literature reveals that there is little evidence for racial bias in the US justice system as a whole, though there likely is bias in some local jurisdictions:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-m...

I was as surprised as you likely will be. The exception is with capital punishment. It looks like black people are more likely to get it than others. But otherwise nationwide crime and punishment statistics look mostly fair.

[ZeroGravitas]

Asking someone to turn out their pockets and then arresting them because some marijuana is now "publicly displayed" is as close to "no reason" as you're going to get.

Also, if the father is absent, maybe it's because he's in jail, like some scary number of people in the US? Maybe he can't get employment, because he's a felon, like a scary number of people in the US?

The person you replied to is right, ending the war on drugs makes a lot of things, including all the things you list, better. It's a great place to start.

[aasarava]

> But people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor. They are committing crimes, and pleading or being found guilty.

The US is locking up very, very large numbers of young black men for minor crimes that people of other races regularly commit -- i.e., for activities that are only crimes when blacks are found to be doing them. Recent studies have shown that whites use more drugs than blacks, and yet are charged far less. Even the sentencing on perceived "black drugs" (drugs more readily available to the poor) such as crack is far more punitive than sentencing for the equivalent cocaine.

For a good book on the subject, see The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. It illuminates, with facts, just how disproportionately our system of laws punishes young black men while young whites are given second and third and fourth chances.

[Steuard]

> people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor

I just said this elsewhere, but I knew many people in college who used illegal drugs, and none of them were ever locked up (or even searched). When we have a set of laws and we choose to enforce them on some communities but not on others, then we are in fact locking people up just because they are black or poor.

Others have already pointed out that high incarceration and felony rates (in part due to the drug war) have contributed a whole lot to the social patterns that you mention here. I'll agree with you on one thing, though: our social programs today are in a particularly ineffective state with some messed-up incentive structures and still not enough resources to actually solve the problem. I'd much prefer something like a universal basic income to the complicated, market distorting system we have today. (But I still think that getting rid of these programs would be far worse than what we have now, even if the incentive structure would be more straightforward.)

[fromtheoutside]

>> I have with pieces like the original article are that they are making it sound like we are engaging in a Gestapo-like rounding up of large numbers of minorities for no reason and throwing them in jail.

That's actually not how the Gestapo worked. They were very bureaucratic and followed protocol. Their most misused power, according to Wikipedia, was the "protective custody".

[isaacremuant]

If a crime is "having drugs" then the war on drugs criminalizes something that maybe shouldn't be criminalized.

If the intent is to help combat drug use then putting a user in prison and ruining his and his family's life doesn't seem like the way to do it. Not to talk about the crime it generates when a business that WILL happen doesn't have any other means to compete than with violence.

There's a great discussion between Glenn Greenwald and former Bush Drug Czar:

https://vimeo.com/32110912 (Janus Forum - Should the US Legalize Drugs?)

[kramarao]

"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."

Besides the selective enforcement of laws, most laws themselves discriminate against the poor.

[bambax]

> we are engaging in a Gestapo-like rounding up of large numbers of minorities for no reason and throwing them in jail

And that's exactly what you're doing.

Using drugs or selling drugs should not be a reason to put someone in jail.

Tobacco, alcohol or sugar (HFCS) do MUCH more harm to users than illegal substances ever will, and cost much more to society as a result.

> behaviors and responsibilities that are required to be a productive and self-supporting member of society

Define "productive".

If you sell illegal substances at a profit, how aren't you "self-supporting"??

[jrochkind1]

Neither drug use nor drug selling is greater among black people than among white people in the U.S. But arrests, convictions, and jail time are all much greater for black Americans -- at every level, more arrests, higher percentage of those arrested convicted, longer sentences for those convicted.

There is nothing wrong with the 'culture' of Black people in America that ending white supremacy can't fix.

[dismal2]

The war on drugs is directly related to what you are talking about.

[nickbauman]

Are you aware the US criminal justice system is oriented towards profiteering on incarceration and hardly or not at all oriented toward rehabilitation? The percent of GDP that the criminal justice system takes up compared to other OECD nations is the smoking gun. Its modern "American-style" slavery.

[Zigurd]

And if you are wondering how America "outperforms" Europe in GDP growth while lagging in quality of life measures, there you have it. Our GDP is going into military, prisons, cops, financialization, and overpaying for health care. All that counts on the plus side of the GDP ledger.

[LordKano]

But people are not being locked up just because they are black, or poor. They are committing crimes, and pleading or being found guilty.

I have a friend, someone that has been my friend for 30 years, who is in prison right now for drugs.

He wasn't incarcerated because he's black. He was incarcerated because he was caught selling marijuana and laundering money.

I, on the other hand, chose a different path in life. I made the decision to not get involved with the things that he was doing. I have no criminal record and I'm every bit as black as he is.

I agree that fatherlessness is the key component here. The best predictor of criminality in young people is the presence of a father in the home. This holds true across racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. The large number of single parent households in the black community has a lot to do with the high levels of crime in the inner cities.

[beat]

There are two somewhat different problems... high levels of crime, and different levels of law enforcement for equivalent crimes. We have both. Moreover, unequal enforcement contributes to the crime rate. People continually harassed and jailed for petty crimes can't hold steady jobs, so they wind up moving up the crime ladder just to make a living.

[Eleutheria]

> They are committing crimes

If you think drug trading and consumption is a crime, you're part of the problem.