It’s exactly the point I made; that in the US there is a distinction between prisons and jails, so when the ACLU refer to people in jail they are talking about only a part (and the smaller part) of those locked up. Meanwhile the people in prisons have all been convicted.
I wouldn’t expect @Banquet_Bear to have known this, since he’s not American, but I have no idea how many Americans would be similarly misled by this phrasing. Are these technicalities widely known by ordinary people?
Why? You want them to be “woke”?
/s
To be more serious: The ACLU clearly does know the difference between Jail and Prison, their point though is that the differences in outcomes coming as a result from the race of the people in jail or prison, is a thing that needs to be changed. (Besides the income inequality)
And yes, those points from the ACLU were a thing before “woke” was a thing.
Yes, but his broader point remains true.
I’m sure they do, and they undoubtedly phrased it this way deliberately in order to get a bigger headline figure. Plus I bet the average person doesn’t know, or at least wouldn’t remember while reading, that ‘jail’ does not encompass all, or even the majority, of those incarcerated. Many will have the same misunderstanding BB did, and all will come away with the impression that it’s a bigger fraction than the reality.
I don’t expect ordinary people to know the technical details on every issue, however, it provides a lot of scope for media, government and organisations to manipulate the public without telling a single lie.
Whether or not this is so, there’s no point debating with anyone who ignores arguments and evidence and continues to insist they’re right, especially over a simple misunderstanding.
Is it ‘frighteningly large’? The best estimate I can find for the total percentage of pre-trial inmates in the US is 23.3% - that’s a heck of a lot less than 62%, but still much higher than I would have guessed before looking into the question. But I have no idea what is normal in this area, so I googled figures for some other countries:
(*The UK government doesn’t release crime stats for the whole country, I suspect because the NI figures would have made them look really bad during the Troubles.)
The US is hardly a standout here - the latter 3 countries seemingly have a far more serious issue with pre-trial detention than America.
I picked Anglosphere countries because they have similar legal systems, but looking at a few others really doesn’t suggest the US is doing unusually badly in this area. The ACLU figure ‘lacks context’, as the fact checkers say.
Having said that, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a need for reform. Cash bail is not necessarily the best way of handling it - if it doesn’t take a defendant’s income into account, it’s very obviously unfair. Perhaps it would be better to allow judges to refuse bail altogether if there is good evidence the person may abscond or commit further crimes such as intimidating witnesses, while granting it no cash required to most defendants. And/or use measures like electronic monitoring that can help mitigate these issues without locking people up. Besides that, overburdened courts seem to be a major cause of these high numbers in every country. Wide use of plea bargaining in the US is presumably a response to this, but as already mentioned, it comes with considerable downsides. Is there any real solution to backlogs other than more funding for courts?
Uh, read it again, they don’t hide that they are talking abouth both Jail and Prison, I think this is a case of trying to see a difference when they are not, on the whole and in their sites, making a difference.
I mean: Talking about a difference. Not making it be different subjects.
I get the feeling this ACLU talking point, that they are not doing this right, is very close to condescendingly trying to teach grandma ACLU how to suck eggs.
The truths right-wingers are highlighting are not hidden in the conspiracy theory sense. The videos they publish aren’t fake. The stories aren’t lies, though they may be ‘missing context’ as the fact-checkers put it (but so too are many from liberal/mainstream media). The published scientific research and government statistics they link to are available to all, they simply aren’t highlighted by the mainstream media if they contradict liberal/leftist beliefs. The information may be buried on page 10 or 20 of a pdf as were the stats on crime victimisation I cited earlier, but it’s still published by the government or other credible sources.
Here’s an example that made an impression on me: a RW site linked to a sympathetic article about a prisoner who was fighting for rights for other inmates. Then it linked to the official court records of the truly heinous crimes this person committed. I became rather less sympathetic to the prisoner’s woes, but more importantly, I felt deceived by the original article. The author didn’t technically lie, but they deceived me into feeling sympathy for someone who based on their actions is evil/psychopathic.
Now in this thread @Banquet_Bear linked to an ACLU article listing 3 sympathetic profiles of criminals, with similarly minimal details given about their crimes, and I can’t help wondering what they aren’t telling us. Maybe there is nothing more to it and their treatment is exactly as unfair as it sounds, but I no longer trust journalists or activists to tell the whole truth. These stories no longer gain the wholehearted sympathy and outrage they once would have. Who’s fault is that?
As for affirmative action, the debate is shrouded in ignorance. There are any number of left-wingers on social media ready to earnestly 'splain to you that it’s just choosing between two equally qualified candidates, or reaching out to marginalised communities to get more applications. Look into it and it becomes apparent that this is not the truth. The court case on AA revealed large racial disparities in SAT scores among students admitted to Harvard. There are also large racial disparities in MCAT scores and grades between students accepted to medical schools in America, and data from the University of Michigan Law School among other sources showed almost no overlap in admission standards for black and white applicants: white students with a 5% chance of being admitted had the same scores as black students with a 90% chance. There is plenty of evidence to show universities are giving large preferences based on race, have fought to continue doing so, and when forced by law to stop immediately adopt workarounds like automatically admitting the top 10% of students in each school and encouraging a heavy emphasis on diversity and overcoming adversity in admissions essays.
I don’t think many of these people would change their minds if they knew the truth: first they say it’s not happening, then they say it’s good that it is. But they would have a much better understanding of what is really going on and why others might legitimately object.
So, Haitian immigrants are hunting, killing and eating people’s pets?
I dunno what RW stories you are seeing but I saw their terrible lies about Covid, about Harris, about Biden, about the economy, about trans people, about the border, about crime…Oh hell i could just go on and on.
Check out Fact-checks | PolitiFact sometime
That last one if from Mike Johnson- you might have heard of him. and it gets a 'pants on fire" lie rating.
That’s surprising, since I gave two examples in my post that are relevant to issues already discussed in this thread. Why not address them instead of bringing up unrelated things?
Because you failed to make it clear your comments were confined to only those examples. Further, you failed to provide links to the stories you gave as examples.
Did you become less sympathetic to the fight for the rights for other inmates?
I do see the argument about affirmative action. But I am not sure what other story DT is talking about? The ACLU story about three criminals?
But
seems to indicate that most, if not all RW Videos or Social media posts arent lies.
And, you know, the liberals are not entirely a fan of affirmative action , and the example given by DT talk about SAT or MCAT scores- and such scores have shown to have only minor relevance as to how well a student will do in college. How about grades? Admission thesis? References?
And how about now discussing what issues I brought up? The endless lies by RWingers.
After thinking about this: it didn’t change my view that the state has a duty to keep inmates safe from each other and provide for their needs. Being beaten or raped by other prisoners is not supposed to be part of the punishment, and it’s not acceptable to ignore this, let alone gloat about it and condone it. But it did remind me that the majority of people are in prison for good reasons, and it is supposed to be a punishment. They shouldn’t get privileges the average poor person can’t afford, and I think we owe it their victims not to make prison too comfortable.
Plus it reinforced the fact that a person can be vulnerable in some ways, but still be a danger to others. This is obvious, but seems to often get forgotten in eg. arguments about the homeless or mentally ill.
What “privileges”… wait, let me use the first word used, rights were being fought for?
Here’s a relevant quote from a recent Freddie deBoer article:
I strongly disagree with that quote. He insists that we all really know what “woke” means. Yet, he does not actually give a definition. Why is that?
As far as “no one knows what woke is,” I’m just exhausted at this point.
Not as exhausted as the people that have been using the word and understanding its meaning for a fucking century.
The continuing insistence that there is no definition of woke is simply a matter of people trying to hide their own politics from public review. That is to say, it’s an act of weakness.
The continuing insistence that the folks using “woke” as a pejorative have no definition of woke is simply a matter of those people trying to hide their own politics and bigotry from public review is the act of weakness.
“Woke” is now on the long list of words, that the definitions of, the woke are very aware.
Thugs, Canadians, DEIs, and a long list of others that everyone understands are dog-foghorns for what you really want to say . . . nigger.
Canadians?