"So you are saying we have systematic misanthropy in the justice system?"

I can't tell if you're arguing in bad faith or if you think you're actually being profound here with these socratic challenges.

Men commit and are caught, charged, and imprisoned for many more crimes than women are.

Black men probably commit somewhat more crimes than white men— a fact which can largely be understood in context by examining structural inequalities like not having access to the same schools, community supports, family stability, plus adding in layers of racism and generational trauma, etc etc. But their representation in the corrections system is significantly out of proportion even to this ratio due to factors like racist policing and courts, and compounded by things like the bail system, which pressures the innocent to plead guilty.

These two situations are not really comparable.

Racist policing and racist sentencing seem like they could easily make up for the proportion.

Most white people don't get charged when they are caught commiting a crime, and the ones that do get light sentences that can keep them out of the correctional system

To be honest, I haven't studied it in depth, but I think the point is that it's many factors or potential factors— it isn't a problem which is going to be solved by addressing just one aspect.

3 earnest questions:

* Why is family stability a structural inequality? Families are a unit that largely makes up it's own structure, independent from society.

* What does generational trauma mean? Is this an epigenetic thing?

* "their representation in the corrections system is... compounded by things like the bail system, which pressures the innocent to plead guilty." - Why would black men be more affected by the the pressure to plead guilty when innocent than other races?

Families aren't independent of society; family structures and society at large affect each other in many ways. It's hard to have a stable family unit when a large fraction of men are in jail. It's a feedback loop.

Bail system pressure disproportionately affects people without access to financial resources (and through them legal resources), which are not equally distributed.

> Why is family stability a structural inequality?

Perhaps "structural" is sloppy here, but it is a way that past traumas echo forward across multiple generations. Like, look at the numbers— 64% of black kids in a single parent home in 2019 vs 24% for white kids:

https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in...

Obviously many single-parent families are wonderful and may well be better than an abusive two-parent family, but at a population level, these are kids who are going to grow up to themselves have higher divorce rates and their own kids repeating the pattern.

Regarding the bail system and race, see: "The cash bail system disproportionately impacts people of color, fueling a pervasive problem of structural racism in our criminal justice system. The pretrial population is disproportionally Black and Hispanic and has more than doubled over the past 15 years.1 Black and Hispanic Americans are more likely to be stopped by the police and experience police violence at the time of arrest; they also are more likely to be poor and unable to raise bail funds. The cash bail system also compounds underlying health disparities in access to care that has led to worse outcomes for Blacks and Hispanics compared to white Americans."

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2020/how-cash-bail-sys...

> What does generational trauma mean? Is this an epigenetic thing?

While it can be epigenetic (e.g. descendents of Holocaust survivors having measurably different gene activations and responses to stress), typically it isn't referred to that way. Instead, it refers to social trauma that may be present, and social knowledge that may not be.

For the former, consider a family whose grandfather was unfairly beaten by the police. Furthermore, all of their friends and neighbors have similarly unpleasant stories about their grandparents. Even if the police had behaved absolutely saintly since then, those stories would influence whether somebody reports a theft to the police. Those stories would influence how uncomfortable somebody is when talking to the police, and whether they are viewed with suspicion as a result. And that is the best case scenario, when in reality the police have been far from saintly.

For the latter, consider a family in which not a single person has had college education in the past several generations. A high schooler looks in that family is looking at colleges, seeing how the subjects covered in college match their interests and would lead to a good long-term career. But, they also see the yearly price advertised by colleges, and decide not to go. Because nobody in their family has gone to college, they are unaware that the advertised prices are rarely ever the full price paid, that there are fellowships and scholarships set up for these cases. (Not as good of an example as this would have been 10-20 years ago due to continued increase in education costs, but the point still stands.)

In both cases, even if the original sources of inequality had been completely wiped away (which they haven't), the generational trauma is still there, by no fault of the individuals or the group.

Edit:spelling

This was a counter argument that wouldn’t even cut it in high school.