How do we fix inequality? Companies run american prisons now, companies control elected officials, and voters are manipulated by basic psychological tricks to keep voting against their own interests (vote GOD, not basic human rights!). That's just one issue among 50 other giant issues america/world is currently failing at "doing the right thing" towards.
Also if you are referring to the proplem of private prisons I do agree it's probably not a good thing but since less than 1/5 of prisons are privately run I don't think it is the main cause of the problem.
Point is... in any given year, black males seem to go to prison or jail at a MUCH higher rate than their violent crime participation rate would warrant. There is probably a reason behind this that is perfectly legal. I think the questions are... what are some of those legal reasons ? And, are those legal reasons "just" ? I think those are reasonable questions.
http://www.npr.org/2015/05/14/406699264/historian-says-dont-...
Is it possible that, due to race-income inequalities in America, that black males are also more likely to have low/no income at the same "much higher rate"?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3455741
4) is is really so crazy that a population with higher testosterone levels tends to be be bigger, and when they indulgent a violent proclivity, the outcome is more severe than when, say, a japanese women gets upset at the flower shop?
Obviously historical racism is the huge cause here. But you cannot just write off the crime rates due to different policing.
Poor Black neighborhoods are simultaneously over and under policed. Gangs and criminals have free reign and then cops capriously make a show of force.
They are under policed ("guardian" model) and overmuch hostilely occupied by the police ("warrior" model).
They are the places most in need of effective community-oriented policing, and the places that get that kind of policing the least.
To my knowledge, not one of them were ever investigated, searched, arrested, prosecuted, or convicted of a crime. (Well, there was that one guy who had a close call at a border crossing on a trip to Amsterdam.) I can't think of any way in which their behavior would be reflected in formal criminal statistics. But let's not pretend that "crime" of this sort is not rampant among white students on college campuses around the country.
A large fraction of the point here is that criminal statistics reflect who our society chooses to enforce its laws upon.
Crime is a complex system that involves more than just the two axes race and violence.
For those that actually believe the GP might have some ground to stand on, the least they could do is to link to some sources or resources.
I almost always provide links to sources that provide a reasonably analytic angle.
They are generally ignored or misunderstood. Because, you know, (structural) racism.
Lastly, above and beyond any correlation between testosterone and crime, how do you propose to use this information to inform policy decisions? My main gripe in this fantasyland of HBD-speak is that people use this information as "scientific" grounds for enforcing their racist policy predispositions. I'd like to hear where you think you would take this testosterone point, but all too often people (and unfortunately, I get the impression that you are one of them) imply that these few studies are grounds for damning and castigating entire populations because of their perceived inferiority and incorrigibility.
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01918869940...
[2] http://pss.sagepub.com/content/1/3/209.short
EDIT for posterity: I would like to point out that you posted your cousin/uncle link upthread after I posted my GP comment above. I wouldn't have made as strong a comment had I seen links or sources.
Your previous reply sounded a lot like those "you are not allowed to say this" stuff that does a lot of harm, because it suffocates discourse.
So thanks for posting a factual follow-up, we need more of those and less of the political correct group-think dismissals.
Ex: "Melanin is positively correlated with crime. <Insert some unsubstantiated purely conjectural causal explanation about how melanin effects the psyche>" is exactly the same argument, and is (I hope obviously) damn racist.
The study cited also doesn't say what you think it does, and your misreading is obnoxiously wilful, to the point that it's clear you're looking for evidence to back something you believe a priori. But someone else has already taken that on.
Anyway, the bar for these sorts of claims is high for a reason: people have made these "black men just have medical differences that make them more susceptible to violence/rape/murder/crime" arguments since the existence of modern medicine. The evidence behind these claims has always been pure bullshit racism masquerading as science.
(Structural) sexism? Poverty? Poor fashion sensibilities?
> (Structural) sexism?
In the specific form of paternalism this would certainly seem to be a factor, at least.
Second, there are tons of alternative explanations (e.g. socialization). Nature vs. nurture is adolescent-level stuff, and obviously males and females are socialized differently. Stop being thick.
Third, that's not how science (or anything except religion) works. You don't get to make fallaciously substantiated conjectures and then demand everyone believe them until the core claim is disproven.
edit: Oh wow, based on prior coments you're actually just straight up early 20th century style racist, or a troll, or both. Done engaging you, and really hoping you're just a stupid troll and don't believe anything you're saying here.
Some of that is racism in crime reporting and law enforcement behind the stats, and some if it is a real disparity, and at least some of that real disparity -- perhaps all of it -- results from the fact that black people in the US come from a cultural which has very different attitudes due to a very different experience with authority historically, with de jure discrimination and overt police repression of the black community extending into living memory (and even stronger farther back where it still exerts considerable cultural influence), which has a considerable impact on attitudes towards institutions of authority and the broader society.
Piling more racism by the broader society on top of that is not going to alleviate that problem.
When it comes to the disparity in non-violent arrests, remember that whites are more likely to abuse drugs than blacks
http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/07/study-whites-more-like...
when you control for socioeconomic status.
[0]: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#Development_3
I suspect wider cultural reasons rather than just simple corruption - though that no doubt plays a part.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Correctional_Peace_O...
So they lobby to increase prison terms and to "enforce current drug laws". I suppose they should have the right to do that, but it still seems a bit odd to me!
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/correctional-offic...
So they might be able to have quite some impact by lobbying and voting as a block, but they are not a big enough body to swing votes against a meaningful majority.
(your link states that union has ~31,000 members, California had about 17.5 million registered voters in the Nov 2014 election)
That reads to me like it could mean "outlaw medical marijuana."
8.4% owned, how many are not privately owned have services/goods/staff provided in large part by private companies?
This sums it up for me.
Here in the United States, we do have issues with the justice and penal systems. But these number alone do not paint the full picture.
In other countries, if you're convicted of a crime you may have a body part cut off. You may be executed. Or you may simply "disappear". In any of these cases, you're not considered a prisoner.
You can be executed in the US, too. In fact, the US executes more people per year than anyone but China and a handful of countries in the Middle East.
So adding the possibility of execution into the comparison doesn't actually make the US look better.
Apples and oranges. Consider this report: http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/10/world/amnesty-international-de...
In 2012, the US executed 43 people. The number of executions in China? Believed to be in the thousands.
How did the condemned in the United States die? Here's the breakdown: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/methods-execution . Note that all of these individuals were afforded appeals and legal representation.
Some of the other countries? Maybe no trial at all. Maybe a completely rigged trial. Appeals? Doubtful but short. Time between being charged with the crime and execution? Perhaps days, as opposed to years in the United States. The method of execution? Anything goes; in North Korea the Kim regime has become especially creative here, dropping mortars and using AA guns to kill prisoners.
Is the U.S. justice system faulty? Yes. Can one make a compelling argument against the death penalty? Probably. Can an honest argument be made that the United States and China (let alone some of the other countries on the list) are even in the same league? Doubtful.
No one is in the same league as China with regard to the death penalty (so the "let alone" is backwards, there), but leaving aside China and handful of Middle Eastern countries the United States is far out in the "heavy use" of the death penalty compared to every other country on Earth.
So you probably don't want to bring up the "in some countries, criminals might get killed instead of imprisoned" in a discussion of how the US is worse on imprisonment than every other country on Earth, because, compared to all but a handful of the ~200 countries on the planet, adding in consideration of the death penalty on top of incarceration exacerbates rather than mitigates the ways in which the US is worse.
But are those really the countries you would like the USA to be compared with?
"The percentage of criminals in the United States"
Like I said, drawing and inference from the two stats you posted is disturbing because both of those stats say nothing of the actual amount of valid criminals/lawbreakers.
Why are Americans so criminal? More than Iran, China, Russia, Syria, Saudi Arabia.... Why is it that Americans can't follow the rules? What is wrong with them?
Of course that assertion is absurd because, at its foundation, that logic gets very racist very fast.
Not sure how this is really an additional fact. If you defined criminals in the sense of "criminals as defined in the US", you have almost by definition a direct correlation to the number of prisoners.
BTW, here in Germany we also have politicians who think that Europe's criminals concentrate in Germany. Probably every country has some people believing that all criminals come to them. The difference between countries is how much influence those voices have.
Often, the DA will structure a plea bargain on drug or weapons posession (over a long list of more serious charges) because those are very easy to prove.
This idea that the prisons are full of good guys caught up in the system is detached from reality. Most guys doing hard time are guilty of about twenty other things that they haven't been prosecuted for.
Furthermore black offenders receive sentences that are longer than white offenders - http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873244320045783044...
And white people are significantly less likely to be arrested for drug possession, despite usage rates being fairly similar - https://www.aclu.org/news/new-aclu-report-finds-overwhelming...
A prisoner deserves to be sentenced for the crime they were convicted of, not for any possible crimes that we think they may have committed. To behave otherwise is completely antithetical to a society that supposedly values justice
So no, prisons aren't "full of good guys", but they're full of people serving sentences that are longer than any rational policy would dictate who have been prosecuted in a system that has been shown time and again to have deep issues with bias and inequality.
Not to mention the violence and overcrowding endemic in the prison system. It should be a source of national shame that it has continued this long without real reform.
This is an oft repeated lie. Blacks use narcotics at well over double the white rate. Claims that rates are similar are based on surveys, as opposed to test data.
Anyway, you are missing the point here that prosecutors know exactly who they're convicting. Sentences now are almost all plea bargains. They get serious criminals to plea out on narcotics charges rather than go to court and face the full set of charges and a 25 year sentence. They don't even bother prosecuting some kid with some drugs. This is how the system works. It may be problematic, but it's not as broken as naive people assume.
System works to what end ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
Along the same lines of reasoning as yours, approximately 1/2 our murders are committed by black Americans, and the proportion of people who are black are well correlated with murders. So one could equally well say that the murder rate is high because of the presence of black people. Would you endorse this conclusion? If not, why not?
(Let me emphasize I'm not endorsing the conclusion I derive here - I simply plan to repeat whatever argument jaquesm has against the above conclusion back at him w.r.t. guns.)
IF this was true, we would see a correlation between gun ownership (or access) and murder rates. If anything, the correlation is slightly negative, both in the US and globally.
Where you DO see the correlation is inequality. In US states, using data from wikipedia, I find a 70% correlation between gini coefficients and homicide rates. The same is true globally.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and...
There is a correlation, albeit a negative one:
http://www.theacru.org/harvard_study_gun_control_is_counterp...
The study, which just appeared in Volume 30, Number 2 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (pp. 649-694), set out to answer the question in its title: “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence.”
The findings of two criminologists – Prof. Don Kates and Prof. Gary Mauser – in their exhaustive study of American and European gun laws and violence rates, are telling:
Nations with stringent anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those that do not. The study found that the nine European nations with the lowest rates of gun ownership (5,000 or fewer guns per 100,000 population) have a combined murder rate three times higher than that of the nine nations with the highest rates of gun ownership (at least 15,000 guns per 100,000 population).
For example, Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland’s murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe. Sweden and Denmark are two more examples of nations with high murder rates but few guns.
Without knowing exactly what they considered homicide and what they considered a firearm related homicide, these numbers are meaningless. Only a few years ago the CDC released a large study where they choose to define a female forcing a male to penetrate as not being rape, thus resulting in very different statistics about rape than had the definitions been the more common 'non-consensual sex' or such.
In the last 20 years they have stopped giving ammunition to keep with your military rifle, exactly because they started having problems with shootings. Switzerland is the worst possible "example" of gun ownership reducing violent crime.
Note however that this is wild speculation, just things you have to take into account.
In the United States, there are 487,000 incarcerated awaiting trial [1].
Try the scenario when you're in a low income family with an addict. This very easily leads to a vicious cycle - eventual arrest and incarceration. That's one less person coming home with a paycheck. That's a family growing up a generation with a criminal.
And our culture doesn't shame (rightfully) the selfishness of doing drugs - it's ramifications on families. Instead, we blame cops, we blame the government, the privileged roll eyes and think being soft, sympathetic and compassionate will help.
Whatever the solution we want to take to crime - and however hip Ivy League law students make going soft on this and that - our culture needs to recognize criminal acts are inherently selfish, not cool.
http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/trends/cig...
http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/Social/Module1Epidemi...
This sums it up for me.