This has been stuck in my head for a while and I can’t shake it. As much as I want to sit here and say that the Reagan administration had no purpose to lock up black people in mass quantities to overtly oppress them, I feel that the years just line up too conveniently.
My line of thinking is that the US allowed the crack cocaine epidemic to reach its heights on purpose - if not started the fire itself with its allowance of the Nicaraguans to ship cocaine to LA and Miami (where crack starts, conveniently). These were both in early '85, essentially happening at the same time. From there, using “crack down on crime” as their guise, they institute the three strikes rule to lock up as many minorities as they can. Almost literally every budget item that would combat drug use sees a huge inflation to combat this (and creating a bigger market for law enforcement suppliers). Moreover, the first private prisons pop up in 1984, right before this all explodes.
From there, their horrible reactions to increases in inner city poverty and crime that Johnson tried to tackle (unsuccessfully, I’ll add), screwed just about every minority who was trying to get a job in a post-Jim Crow era just as all the jobs starting shipping overseas. This sets up inner-city African Americans to continue the cycle of poverty.
Someone tell me if this is completely illogical and too conspiratorial. I know it’s a giant stretch to say men in smoke-filled rooms planned all this out ahead of time as a replacement for Jim Crow, but it’s hard to deny that’s how everything ended up whether they did it in purpose from the beginning or not. Any insights into this?
We start with an assertion for which there is no evidence. There’s a lot of evidence that free societies have piss all chance of stopping contraband from getting into the country regardless of whether they want to or not, and given the large amount of effort we expended trying to stop it the onus would be on someone saying we deliberately let it in.
The three-strikes laws all started in Washington State in 1993, followed by California in 1994. By this point Ronald Reagan had not been governor of California in many years, and was in fact deeply afflicted by Alzheimer’s. He had been out of the White House since January of 1989. So the idea that Ronald Reagan is behind three strikes laws, which started in Washington (but really the one in Cali gets the notoriety of being the reason a lot of other States adopted it) some four years after he had left the Presidency (a position that has no authority to craft Washington criminal law) is basically abject nonsense.
The only thing you may be confused about is in 1984 the Sentencing Reform Act was passed, which eliminated parole in the Federal prison system and resulted in Federal sentences being much longer than they were before. However the majority of prisoners have been and always have been State prisoners.
Yes, the spending on the drug war did go up. The first private prison dates back to right after the American Revolution. They appear throughout American history. “Modern” private prisons did start in 1984, in Tennessee. However they’ve never represented a large portion of the total prisons. Right now they house about 8.4% of the entire prison population.
You’re greatly over-simplifying a complex period in American history and ascribing social ills that were essentially intractable to deliberate government action, specifically Federal government action.
Yes, you are being conspiratorial. The private prison thing is a total red herring, there are problems with private prisons but it’s a relatively small industry and I’ve never seen any links between politicians in the Federal government (namely Reagan and George H.W. Bush) who really promulgated the modern drug war and the private prison industry. Now if you want to talk Bush entanglements, Papa Bush does have a lot of those with defense contractors. But private prison business? Not that I’ve seen. Private prisons are small potatoes compared to defense contracting anyway.
At a state level there has been instances of private prison companies getting involved in politics in dirty ways. But there’s also been instances of State governments banning private prisons. To me that suggests plain old fashioned society, where people jockey for getting what’s theirs and fight it out in the ugly way that we do things. It seems the opposite of any national level, directed conspiracy.
If it was some grand cartoonish conspiracy, it was not a very good one. I mean, all people have to do to not succumb to it is not get convicted of a crime three times. Doesn’t sound like that difficult a thing to do if you put half your mind to it.
Yes it is. Don’t commit the crimes and you’ll be fine.
Whilst there’s reason to believe that black people are more likely to be convicted of crimes they did, in fact, commit than others, there’s no evidence that innocent blacks are being unjustly targeted. Not an ideal situation, obviously, but not one where innocent people are suffering, contrary to the absurd claims you keep making.
When black parents spend more time in prison than white ones for the same crimes, then plenty of innocent people are suffering – chiefly, their children. When black people are targeted for stop and frisk, or for traffic stops, or for other special attention based on nothing more than their race (and the perception of additional danger that their race brings), that increases legitimate resentment and makes it more likely that something could go wrong – and means their kids are more likely to see cops as the enemy, when they hassle Dad for doing nothing wrong. That’s causing innocent people to suffer.
If your dad’s a criminal, you can hardly blame the system for separating him from you. Put the blame where it’s due - on the criminal.
We went through all this in another thread, and it’s pretty damn clear that it’s simply not happening in an unfair way based on race. But you proved then that you can’t understand statistics, and that you are unable to tell the difference between poverty and race as a driver of the way people are treated.
To take Ferguson specifically, people aren’t being stopped because they’re black. They’re being stopped for having illegal cars, or for jaywalking, or for petty theft. They are then either found to have outstanding warrants, or to be carrying illegal substances in plain sight. Both utterly stupid situations to be breaking the law in.
Right – black people should just accept that society is going to treat them unfairly and punish them more severely than white people for the same crimes. I’m sure things would be much better if black people just accepted that they deserve such treatment because they’re black.
It’s not “pretty damn clear” – and there were multiple threads. You abandoned the thread about young black males being 21 times more likely to be shot by police than young white males after I called you out for inventing numbers out of whole cloth.
As we saw in that other thread, this partially explains the disparity in traffic stops but doesn’t totally explain it.
It boggles the mind that you just accept that black people are punished more severely for the same crimes. If this is the case, why would all other aspects of the justice system be expected to be fair? Do you honestly believe that the only part of the justice system that is biased against black people is sentencing? Every other aspect is perfectly fair?
No, I gave up after I showed your arguments to be wrong many times. Perhaps if you bother to learn how statistics work you’d understand. But you, like several others in these threads, seem remarkably resistant to any sort of learning that would challenge your worldview.
I don’t just accept it. I’ve already said, in this very thread, that it’s not the way things should be.
So, are you claiming that other parts of the justice system are, demonstrably, biased? So provide the evidence that black people are less likely to get a fair trial, or that innocent black people are more likely to be wrongly convicted, or really anything that shows that innocent black people are unfairly targeted.
And not the stuff you’ve repeatedly claimed in previous threads that has been shown, by me and many others, to be false.
You made up numbers in that thread and just gave up. No explanation was put forth that explained why the disparity in police shootings was 21 times when the disparity in crime was only 6-9 times. 21 does not equal 6 to 9… not even close. So the cops shoot young black males far more often than the disparities in crime statistics for young black males would “justify”.
You seemed awfully flippant about it. Do you think black people (and others) are right to protest about this?
Absolutely.
I’d be happy to. A huge majority of exonerated convicts (innocent people wrongfully accused) who are freed because of DNA evidence are black.
That’s just not how statistics work. Sorry you don’t understand that, but in all seriousness you should probably try to educate yourself about it.
I’ve stated repeatedly that my main concern is for the treatment of innocent people, and whilst I find the disparity in sentencing worrying if I think about it, I don’t much care. These people are criminals, and I reserve my concern for those who aren’t.
You’re welcome to think that’s a failing on my part. I can certainly understand that, you may even be right. but it has nothing to do with race.
The main thing I get from that is that reliance on eyewitness reports is a bad idea, something that is pretty well known but that many people fail to accept.
Don’t mistake me, the Innocence Project is a wonderful thing, it’s work is invaluable in exonerating those who are innocent - but a project set up to help wrongly convicted black people finding that those it helps are mostly black isn’t evidence in itself of systematic bias.
You keep repeating that I don’t understand how statistics work, but you’ve done nothing to justify this. At some point in the other thread you came up with an unsupported 14 times number, and then doubled it for no apparent reason, but that was all you came up with – a made up number that you then doubled.
If the police shoot young black men 21 times more than young white men, but young black men only commit 6 to 9 times as many crimes as young white men, then that’s a disparity that ought to be explained.
I offered a cite that innocent black people are disparately convicted (and then exonerated by DNA evidence) of crimes.
Why do you think black people are more likely to be exonerated?
Where did you get the idea that the Innocence project is “set up to help wrongly convicted black people”? It’s set up to help wrongly convicted people.
When all you offer is a made up number (14 times) that is doubled for no apparent reason, how could I believe anything else?
Strictly, you offered a cite that black people are disparately exonerated, not one that says anything about conviction rates.
Black people are more likely do be poor than white people, and less likely to afford effective legal representation. It looks to me like a system that is biased against the poor, not necessarily one that is racist.
Which is still terrible of course, the big difference being what needs to be done to fix it. Ensuring high quality representation for all would work.
If that happens, and there’s still a significant difference on racial grounds, then you’ll be right.
Yeah, I’ve just done some reading and that’s not the case. I don’t know if I’d mistaken it for something else, or assumed it based on the stories about exonerating many black people.