No no. fuck that shit.
each japanese american interned in our federal concentr… happy camps during WW2 needs to be compensated far more than the 1.6 billion they received.
let’s up the compensation rate to 100 billion dollars per day of incarceration. after all, there’s no price for human rights.
Jim Crow was a bit more expansive than segregation in restaurants, water fountains, and trains cars. Poll taxes and literacy tests were specifically created to disenfranchise black voters and are included under the broad umbrella of Jim Crow.
Listen, I’m not advocating that there be affirmative action in jury selection. I’m pointing out that the relationship between all-white juries and acquittals in the US Courts isn’t a casual one. It’s a real, bona-fide phenomenon.
A person is innocent until proven guilty in a fair trial. Defendants that were denied a jury of their peers didn’t get fair trials. Whether the defendant was actually innocent is irrelevant. Every defendant deserves a fair trial.
The murderers of Emmett Till were given a “jury of their peers”. So obviously they were fairly aquitted. No doubt that the jury was unbiased, and the trial was completely fair.
But disenfranchisement and segregation were two seperate issues. You also had the black codes, which restricted black employment; miscegenation laws, which outlawed interracial relationships; redlining, which restricted where blacks could live and start businesses; and lynching, which was terrorism directed against blacks. There were several distinct (I’m tempting to say seperate but equal) methods used to discriminate against blacks. This was why civil rights was not just a battle - it was more like a war being fought on multiple fronts.
Since the question was about people currently in prison, laws that went out of effect before anyone now serving a sentence was tried seemed to be irrelevant.
And while there were no officially segregated schools in New York, there were de facto segregated schools. Though it was only three blocks from the beginning of a predominantly black neighborhood, my elementary school had maybe one black person in it. My junior high may have had none - I’d have to check my yearbook to see. I’m hardly saying Northerners were angels.
I do not believe they are as separate as you think. They were all designed to ensure that white supremacy reigned and that blacks continued to stay in their “proper” place. Permitting blacks to participate in civil government was not conducive to maintaining white supremacy.
But as legal issues (and we are talking about laws) they were seperate. A court ruling which overturned segregation in public restaurants, for example, would have no effect on voting.
How many black people convicted of crimes under Jim Crow are still in prison?
As legal issues they certainly are separate. However I brought it up because of something you said.
Laws that fall under the auspices of Jim Crow include more than just segregation as they include laws designed to disenfranchise black voters, limit the mobility of blacks, keep them from sharing the same facilities as whites, etc., etc., etc. You are wrong that Jim Crow laws had nothing to do with the disenfranchisement of blacks.
Odesio
Jim Crow obviously isn’t an official term. But it generally refers specifically to segregation laws not just any law that discriminated against blacks. You can generalize the term to include black disenfranchisement but you could also generalize the term further to include laws that discriminated against hispanics or asians or native americans.
I have family members that lived under a similar system under Imperial Japan and there simply isn’t enough money in the world to make up for what happened. How do you compensate a woman for getting raped? How do you compensate a man who spent his entire life in forced labour in Siberia for throwing rocks at Japanese soldiers? You don’t. There is simply not enough money in the world.
I’m not saying “just get over it” but compensation in these cases can never make you whole, the most they can do is give you enough to get your life back together. I am firmly against lump sum payouts to guys who spent the last 40 years of their life in jail, they’ll burn through it faster than MC Hammer and their life will suck again. I think annuities work a lot better and I think that anything more than a few million dollars is exorbitant unless you can prove they would have earned more during their time in jail.
But most importantly, I think these folks deserve closure. They deserve to see the people who bore false witness against them go to jail for perjury. They deserve to see the judges that ignored due process defrocked.
Then why not eleventy jillion dollars for every second spent in prison? At some point you are throwing money at an issue that cannot be resolved with money.
In the South, yeah, ALMOST all of them. Even if they were guilty, they generally got longer sentences than their white counterparts, plea bargains were generally less generous than they were for their white counterparts, public defenders generally cared less about the fates of their black defendants than their white defendants.
I think the OP goes WAAAAAY over the top on the whole compensation issue but lets not whitewash the south under Jim Crow. It wasn’t just some black folks getting their feelings hurt because people were calling them nigger. It was real institutional prejudice and injustice that manifested itself in the justice system.
I think the whole “billions in compensation” argument is a bit far fetched but since when did we think taht keeping innocent men in jail was a good idea because the cost of a trial was too high.
I think this is the biggest problem people have with your OP. You made up numbers without really thinking about it.
Batson v Kentucky was decided in 1986, 25 years ago. Race is STILL a factor in convictions and prison terms. The conviction rate among black defendats is significantly higher than similar white defendants. The prison sentences are longer. The parole rate is lower. We are closer to being fair but we’re not there yet just because we have a black president.
For example, Alan Crotzer spent 24 years in jail for robbing a liquor store and was denied compensation after he was exonerated.
I remember a florida case where a promising college bound black high school football player got 10 years in jail for getting blow job from a 16 year old white girl.
Despite all appearances, the constitution was in fact “on the books” back then, the problem is the statute of limitations, its almost never that long except in the case of murder and rape.
Jim Crow was not a consequence of too much government, it was a consequence of too much racism. It took government at the federal level to stop it.