Access to legal resources is nearly exclusively related to wealth, not race. A black person will have pretty much the same access to legal resources as the equivalently wealthy white person. Poor people regardless of race don't have much access to anything.

> I think arthurcolle's point is that most people believe our justice system is inherently racist; poor minorities do not have access to the same financial means for legal resources

Class segregation isn't the same thing as racism.

Perhaps, but if you have a non-uniform distribution of race amongst classes, it's not entirely unrelated.

In that case you should check out the section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...

It seems clear to me given the evidence presented, that bias in the justice system does not account for the gap when it comes to serious crimes. Given this, in my opinion "Blacks commit crimes at around 5x higher rate than Whites" is a fair claim. I actually should have said 8x, I misremembered the article.

One interesting thing to me is that within parts of academia, it is not controversial to claim that Black people commit more crimes. Such academics seek the causes of this difference in various sociological explanations. You can see the discussion in the rest of the wiki article. But outside of academia a very different story is told. I believe that academics think that ordinary people cannot be trusted not to draw "racist" conclusions from the statistics about crime. Therefore liberal academics do nothing to dispel the myth amongst mainstream liberals, that Black crime rates are mainly due to bias in the justice system.