the myth of American Justice

Paschendale said:

While the application of police power is hardly equally distributed between urban blacks and suburban whites, the fact is still that most people who are arrested and tried are actually guilty. Poor, urban blacks are far more likely to be arrested in the first place (for using crack, let's say), whereas a white person in a pretty suburb will likely never be caught for using coke. There aren't nearly as many cops on the lookout for white kids using drugs, despite the fact that drug use is actually slightly higher among whites than blacks.

It's fine to be pissed about this, and rightful to be so. But at least correctly understand the problem. Young black males are not being convicted of crimes they have not committed. They are simply far more scrutinized than whites who are committing equivalent crimes. No one is arresting the white kids in the first place, because the public outcry is based on the false notion that drug use is a black thing.

Of course, the answer isn't to simply arrest more white kids. It's to stop with the whole prohibition of drugs nonsense entirely. And to present actual facts instead of a false narrative that demonizes blacks.

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bhug said:

11.10.18 the myth of american justice -- that only the guilty get arrested, charged, and incarcerated. More than 846,000 black men were incarcerated in 2008, according to US Bureau of Justice estimates reported by NewsOne. African Americans make up 13.6 percent of the US population according to census data, but black men reportedly make up 40.2 percent of all prison inmates. The arguments and rationalizations that have been trotted out in support of racial exclusion and discrimination in its various forms (e.g. denying colourds citizenship was deemed essential to the formation of the original union) did not form the US into an egalitarian democracy. More black men were disenfranchised due to felony convictions in 2004 than in 1870, "the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race," the number of blacks who are incarcerated has surged, mainly due to a single law enforcement policy... the War on Drugs, a war waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color; ref1 that crime-fighting measure "is a big part of the reason that a black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. ref2 Hundreds of thousands of black men have disappeared into prisons and jails, locked away for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed by whites. The war on drugs has not been aimed at rooting out drug kingpins or violent drug offenders, rather it has been focused overwhelmingly on low-level drug offenses, like marijuana possession -- the very crimes that happen with equal frequency in middle class white communities. In 2005, for example, four out of five drug arrests were for possession and only one out of five were for sales. Most people in state prison for drug offenses have no history of violence or significant selling activity. Nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests in the 1990s -- the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war -- was for marijuana possession, a drug less harmful than alcohol or tobacco. In some states, though, negroes have comprised 80 to 90 percent of all drug convictions. This is The New Jim Crow. People of colour are rounded up -- frequently at young ages -- for relatively minor drug offenses, branded felons, and then relegated to a permanent second-class status in which they may be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and subjected to legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. There are more blacks under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

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Paschendale said:

While the application of police power is hardly equally distributed between urban blacks and suburban whites, the fact is still that most people who are arrested and tried are actually guilty. Poor, urban blacks are far more likely to be arrested in the first place (for using crack, let's say), whereas a white person in a pretty suburb will likely never be caught for using coke. There aren't nearly as many cops on the lookout for white kids using drugs, despite the fact that drug use is actually slightly higher among whites than blacks.

Click to expand...