I agree with most of your points, but I'm not sure about the validity of the following:

> the racial distribution in US prisons is uncorrelated with that of the general population. Specifically, 37% of inmates are African American, suggesting they may be incarcerated for lesser cause than those of other backgrounds

This statistic could suggest lots of things, I'm not sure why being incarcerated for lesser cause would be the number one. Incarceration is strongly correlated with crime, which itself is strongly correlated with other factors that are also correlated with being African American, e.g. wealth, location

> Judging from exonerations, innocent black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people.

http://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Race_...

The charts in here [0] should alleviate any doubts you had: when it comes to marijuana possession, blacks are indeed arrested at massively higher rates.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/04/the-b...

Please also consider the rates at which different population groups commit serious crimes, such as murder and rape. We are talking about prison populations after all - people convicted of minor drug offenses like possession are a small percent of the prison population.

The publication "Homicide Trends in the United States" by the US Department of Justice has crime data broken down by race, for example. See pages 11 and 12: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf

The data shows that people of different races commit serious crimes such as murder at considerably different rates.

The FBI also publishes crime statistics aggregated by race: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

>In 2008, the [homicide] offending rate for blacks (24.7 offenders per 100,000) was 7 times higher than the rate for whites (3.4 offenders per 100,000)

Wow, why is that so high?

It's complex, and defies simplistic explanations (so don't believe simplistic explanations if you see/hear them).

An attempt at a nuanced explanation (which undoubtedly misses a ton of factors):

Huge disparities in overall wealth and income, coupled with geographic segregation and isolation of a lot of the black population in areas of concentrated poverty, and the associated lack of access to social goods, such as public safety and good schools. The combined effects of poverty/segregation/isolation are specifically reflected in the fact that 78% of homicides involve people who know each other [1]. People who know each other killing each other is a result of the breakdown of community structures that would disincentivize that behavior. There have to be powerful incentives for someone to kill someone that they know, considering that the potential consequences are so severe (incarceration, violent retribution, etc). Often the perpetrators have very little (in wealth, community, etc) to lose, which also increases the incentive.

Another group that are similarly economically poor, Latinos, but due to a different history, have more intact community structures, don't have as high a rate of violent crime.

[1] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf (Table 8)

There are many possible reasons for that besides racism. Blacks are probably more likely to be smoking on the street, carrying weed with them, etc. Also black neighborhoods are policed more heavily due to crime rates so blacks are more likely to be stopped in the first place.

In all likelihood, higher arrests for marijuana of blacks are more due to the above factors than racism, though I’m sure that’s a non-zero factor as well.

To what extent is "marijuana posession" just a proxy for more serious crimes that are harder to prove? Just like Al Capone was jailed for tax evasion...

The statistic by itself might not signal it, but this is definitely part of what's going on, and I don't think anyone seriously questions this.

A good place to start is the Fair Sentencing Act which tried to address the problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act (but, this just address the mandatory minimum triggers, not the fact that African Americans are disproportionately jailed)

Incarceration is directly correlated with race regardless of crime. Minorities get harsher penalties for non violent crimes than Whites.

Edit:

Citation

https://eji.org/news/sentencing-commission-finds-black-men-r...

Why look at the racial distribution? The gender divide is much larger. 93.2% of all of them are men. Are men incarcerated for lessor cause than women?

>After controlling for the arrest offense, criminal history, and other prior characteristics, "men receive 63% longer sentences on average than women do," and "[w]omen are…twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted." This gender gap is about six times as large as the racial disparity

https://www.law.umich.edu/newsandinfo/features/Pages/starr_g...

I'd argue that the privatization of the prison system is a gigantic driver behind increased cost and recidivism. For the same reason as I don't trust dating-services: the product makes less money if it succeeds in it's original purpose. So there will always be the conflict of interest between having a product that works as advertised, and a product that makes more money.

Less than 10% of prisoners in the US are in a privately run facility: https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...

This focuses on comparing data from 2000 and 2016. From the article:

> Since 2000, the number of people in private prisons has increased 47%, compared to an overall rise in the prison population of 9%.

2016 things changed a bit:

> At the federal level, a 2016 Obama Administration policy shift to reduce reliance and ultimately phase out private prison contracts was reversed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in February 2017.

The article also answers whether this has any impact on the justice system:

> Changes in policy at the Department of Justice in 2017 that are likely to increase sentence length and expand prosecutions for drug and immigration offenses may contribute to the expansion of private facility contracting.

I picked that particular article because it wasn't especially kind to my point of view. Nevertheless, the last statement you quoted is speculation and we don't have any data to back it up.

To add perspective, in New Zealand, 50% of prisoners are Maori who make up 15% of the population. Another 11% are Pacific Islander almost double their percentage of the population.

The numbers are so out of whack that it points to some serious systematic issues, even in a country generally assumed to be quite attentive to their indigenous population.

> Specifically, 37% of inmates are African American, suggesting they may be incarcerated for lesser cause than those of other backgrounds.

There are also more men than women in the prison system. Doesn't mean the system is being sexist.

Overlay economic data on the race and the picture will change the story from racism to what I like to call "Being Poor is illegal in the US"

Not quite: have a look at these charts [0]. I believe that such a massive disparity in arrest rates between blacks and whites cannot be explained just by economic factors.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/04/the-b...

Marijuana arrests account for 0.7% of the prison population.

It would be interesting to see the figures for other types of arrest.

Here is a study you might find interesting to add to yours

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/income.html

The article was about California. Here in CA, inmate population has gone down due to prop 47 while costs have increased.

https://reason.com/archives/2017/06/09/prison-unions-punish-...

[..]California is unusual from a national perspective, per the report. Thirteen states have reduced prison populations since 2010, but they've also cut their prison spending by $1.6 billion. Seven states have increased their populations, but have managed to decrease their prison spending, (by $254 million). Fifteen states have increased their prison populations and also increased their total prison spending by a half-billion dollars. California is in an ignominious group of 10 states that saw declines in the prison population since 2010, but which increased spending by $1.1 billion. Furthermore, California's spending increase accounts for more than half of that number. California has by far the costliest system of incarceration in the nation at more than $75,000 per inmate per year—more than triple the average cost of the 18 states with the least-costly rates.[..] [..]The study focuses on the 2010 to 2015 period, and some major prison-related laws—e.g., 2014's Proposition 47, which reduced many felonies to misdemeanors and resulted in further reductions of prison populations—got started toward the end of the study period. Yet, if anything, these disturbing spending trends only accelerated in the ensuing years. "Gov. Jerry Brown's spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 includes a record $11.4 billion for the corrections department while also predicting that there will be 11,500 fewer inmates in four years because voters in November approved earlier releases for many inmates," wrote Don Thompson for The Associated Press. "Since 2015, California's per-inmate costs have surged nearly $10,000, or about 13 percent." That's a whopping increase in a short period of time, and even more amazing given that state just raised gas taxes because it claims to be out of cash.[..]

one would think it's a simple thing to pay private prisons for low rates of recidivism rather than full beds...

The First Step Act [1] is a start towards reducing recidivism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Step_Act

What's wrong with the numbers of recidivism? A criminal is a criminal, he can't help it; I don't know why people think that keeping them locked up could ever fix that. Probably nothing can, maybe medication.

Other countries have proven that this is wrong. The US prison system does not aim for resettlement. It wants revenge. It's left with too many prisoners and abysmal conditions in prisons. Add privatization of prisons to the mix and the situation gets so much worse due to wrong incentives and corruption.

I don't think someone is born a criminal.

If that's the case, its cultural and can be influenced.

It might be environmental factors, I don't know, but certainly by the time someone ends up in prison it's already too late.

This is very provably complete nonsene.

And the 2019 price for most reductionist view of other humans goes to...

I robbed things when I was young. Yet I consider myself successful now and no longer a criminal.

So yes, people change. And fuck your mindset

That's a very bigot reasoning. The most civilized countries in the world (Scandinavia) tend towards the opposite:

- shorter incarceration period: incarceration is useful just for frustrated masses, not for the society

- rehabilitation: if incarceration period is useful to something, that is giving people time and space to restart their lives

Scandinavia is a bad example; that only works when you have a culturally and racially homogeneous society.

Still wrong; Scandinavian countries have high immigration rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Sweden#Current_...

and because of those population changes, the old ways of short incarceration and rehabilitation have stopped working...

2014, NOTE - Before the Great Migration

"With prisoner numbers falling and jails closing, Swedish criminal justice works, says director-general Nils Öberg" https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/26/prison-swede...

2018, A few years AFTER the Great Migration

"Sweden's rapidly filling prisons – capacity has jumped from 85 percent to 95 percent in just four years – is a problem officials had predicted." https://www.thelocal.se/20180712/violence-on-the-rise-in-swe...

"Sweden rape: Most convicted attackers foreign-born, says TV" ... " he SVT programme revealed that in cases where the victim did not know the attacker, the proportion of foreign-born offenders was more than 80%. " https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45269764

you get the picture...

I hope this is not too sensitive to post here on HN, as I know these facts goes against many of the beliefs many of you hold. But why be afraid of facts? They may tell you something you didn't knew before.

The truth is out there.

To me it doesn't demonstrate that incarceration and rehabilitation don't work, it just shows that crime is correlated to misery and ignorance

To me it demonstrates that the trick to have a crime-free society is social and racial homogeneity. Which the US doesn't have.

Do you really think that a crime-free society is possible? And that it's achievable with social and racial homogeneity? That's pretty nazi to me

Do you really think that urban hipsters from Stockholm are culturally similar to rural Swedes? This sounds more like a dog whistle for "non-white". In any case it is a deeply racist view.