Not disagreeing with you, but adding: some of the ones who were convicted may have been Black people who were convicted when a white person wouldn’t have been convicted; or Black people who were charged with the crime in the first place when a white person wouldn’t have been charged, and therefore couldn’t possibly have been convicted.
The underlying point is that taking either the percentage charged with crimes or the percentage convicted of crimes by members of any given group as evidence that members of that group commit that percentage of crimes assumes that the process by which people are charged, at a minimum, isn’t biased either for or against people of that group. If whether somebody gets charged is the result of a biased process, then neither statistics of who’s charged nor statistics of who’s convicted are reliable, because the group of who’s convicted is selected from the group that got charged. If both stages of the process are biased, then the statistics of who’s convicted are even less reliable than the statistics of who got charged.
In addition, regardless of any racist bias by the police, the conviction is often decided by a jury. If the people in the jury are racist, they are probably more likely to view a minority in a less flattering light. They probably already have assumptions that minorities commit more crimes. For things where they have to make a judgement call, they’ll probably tend to come to a guilty verdict than innocent.
PSA: One way to fight this bias is for woke people to get on juries. If you’re sitting in the jury, you have the power to help ensure the defendant is not unfairly convicted.
If you read the very long story in my recent post, i have an example of exactly that. A Black guy who was arrested and convicted of a crime he didn’t do because he was Black and the cops wanted to steal his car.
Sadly, it’s often a plea bargain. The man in my story never saw a jury. I doubt a jury would have convicted him. (I mean, he eventually testified to a grand jury. We speculated on whether he’d ever get compensated for the car the police stole. It wasn’t at all clear there was even a process for that to happen.
Bullshit. I was replying to a point you brought up with evidence you were wrong. Now despite several people explaining it to you, you’re attacking me instead of admitting it.
That’s terrible. I’ve heard before that the US has some awful laws allowing police to seize property, sometimes even of people who haven’t been convicted of anything. Also that in some towns, the police raise money by setting ridiculous or confusing speed limits, and then place speed traps to catch people passing through. I agree these laws need to be reformed, and it should go without saying that police corruption needs to be addressed. What I’m against is counterproductive policy based on ‘wet streets cause rain’ reasoning. Allowing rampant crime also causes harm! Crime has victims, direct and indirect, and they too often seem to be forgotten in progressives’ quest to reduce incarceration.
No more replies for now. Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah everyone.
Sadly, i don’t think his case was all that remarkable, except that the police ended up being prosecuted. You really can’t just look at the conviction rate of Black men in America and assume they are committing tons of crimes.
I regretted writing this line almost immediately. It makes sense for parents to talk to their kids about the police, and give advice on how to deal with them. Being killed by lightning strikes is rare, but we still tell kids how to avoid it. And though police killing unarmed people of any race is very uncommon, having to deal with the police is not, and it’s important to avoid trouble, especially when some police are corrupt. However, fearmongering over the chances of being killed is likely to do more harm than good, since scared people often freeze up, lash out, or try to run away, all of which greatly increase the risk of a bad outcome in a tense situation. Parents of white kids should probably give them some version of this talk too: white men are not that much less likely to be killed by police than black men, and certainly a lot more than women of any race.
Exactly so. Everyone in prison has been convicted of something, 7/10 people in jails have not. There are more people in prisons than in jails, so at any given time a majority of the people locked up have been convicted. (Specifically of the crime they are being imprisoned for; I expect prisoners in jails are fairly likely to have previous convictions.)
You weren’t seeing a random selection of cases, were you? Your time as a juror gave you a vivid insight into the reality of police corruption, but isn’t going to tell you how common it is - you were only looking at those where corruption is alleged (and I’d assume there is some kind of filtering such that you only see the more credible allegations).
Sure, but the National Crime Victimisation Survey, which asks people if they have been a victim of a crime, also shows that black people are overrepresented (at double their population percentage) as offenders in violent crimes (excluding murder for obvious reasons). Plus, the way people act in the real world also suggests these crime rate differences are real. Americans routinely talk about avoiding bad or dangerous neighbourhoods because of crime, and dismiss the idea of living in them out of hand. And these neighbourhoods are generally poor, or minority, or both. Poor areas in the UK have worse crime, and black and Hispanic Americans are generally poorer than white ones, so it would be pretty surprising if they didn’t commit more crime.
Another serious issue, since it’s likely innocent people are coerced into pleading guilty, or risk getting a worse punishment in the process of proving their innocence. Is the problem volume of cases, or are courts just significantly underfunded?
Yes you were, as I showed. If you are going to simply ignore evidence and triple down on your incorrect claims, I don’t see any point responding to you further.
No more late nights; I’ll reply to Ulfreida and about AA when I get chance.
It’s not just likely, it’s a well-known problem with the US criminal justice machine. A substantial fraction of the people in death row are found to be innocent (usually it’s the wrong guy) because few people are willing to plea guilty to a murder they didn’t commit, even when the result of not accepting a plea is likely to be worse.
I think our adversarial justice system is part of the problem. I think racism is part of the problem. I’m sure there are other issues, as well, that I’m less aware of.
…I wasn’t just talking about “the chances of being killed.” This isn’t what parents are talking to their children about. Yes: there is a chance of being killed. But also one out of every three Black boys born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime as compared to 1 out of every 17 white boys. This isn’t “fearmongering.”
But they are VERY MUCH less likely to end up trapped in the industrial prison complex.
I wasn’t wrong, and you didn’t show anything.
The distinction between “prisons and jails” is not “evidence”, and it made no material difference to anything I said. I didn’t make any incorrect claims.
My definition of “woke” is it’s a term coined by powerful money interest to distract the masses from anything that actually matters like wage stangnation, the destruction of their environment, and the continued evisceration of the middle class.
I’ve yet to hear one politician run on this platform. It’s a non issue, a totally arbitrary and meaninless word. It’s used primarily to turn middle class people of different races, ethnicity, and sexual orientation against each other.
There’s no way to legislate “wokeism” because it’s a made-up word with no real substance or way to quantify it. You can’t put your finger on it. It’s completely invisible and unassailable. It’s whatever you want your political adversaries to believe in order to gain leverage in support of powerful money interests… and stupid people are easily distracted from anything that matters.
It’s the second sentence that confuses me–is there a cite for that sentence that I missed? If so, could you, or someone else who saw it, repost it?
I can imagine circumstances where it’s true, despite what @Demontree posted later. Consider a scenario like this:
a) 100 people went to jail last year.
b) 90 of them never faced trial.
c) Of those 90, 30 were released almost immediately on bail. The remaining 60 couldn’t pay, so they stayed in jail for an average of a little less than two weeks each–meaning that at any given point, two people were in jail due to lack of bail.
d) of the 10 who went to trial, 8 were convicted, and stayed in jail or prison for the rest of the year.
If you survey the jails at any point, you’ll find that 80% of the people there were convicted. But if you look at the total number of people who spent time in jail, you’ll find that nearly 90% of them spent time in jail because they couldn’t afford jail.
I don’t know if this dynamic (inability to pay bail affects a vast number of people for a short time period) is true–but it would account for the difference between the claims.
Right. I questioned that second sentence, and offered the same possible way it could have been true (less explicitly than you) but I’ve never seen it claimed before, and certainly never seen data to support it.
I will say that whether or not it’s true, the larger question of whether Black boys have reason to fear racist policing is sadly answered, “absolutely”.
I remember when Connecticut put in place measures to reduce racial profiling in traffic stops, the first reported that there had been a significant decrease in the disparity between white and black/hispanic drivers stopped.
Then it was discovered that they had beef falsifying the data to identify more drivers as white. Inadvertently of course.
Thank you. I’m not sure that that cite supports precisely what you said (“the majority” of 62% of people in jail may not be “most of” the people locked up), but at that point it’s a quibble over a side-issue. Overall, cash bail is a super fucked up system, and in a society that’s historically and systematically denied wealth to Black families, it’s undoubtedly a contributor to the racially disparate number of Black people locked up.
In fact, it contradicts exactly what he said, because “jail” is a small enough subset of “locked up” that 62% of jailed people is a minority of “people locked up”.
But if he replaced “majority” with “a frighteningly large fraction”, what he said is completely true. And again, the broader point stands.