lol wut

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3288002&forum_id=2#30944850)

Author: \'\' \'\' \" \"

not trolling, i think a large percentage of white people are literally devils. evil to the point of not being human.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3288002&forum_id=2#30951366)

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/

Recognizing that research on criminal justice processing in the United States is complex and fraught with methodological problems, the weight of the evidence reviewed suggests the following. When restricted to index crimes, dozens of individual-level studies have shown that a simple direct influence of race on pretrial release, plea bargaining, conviction, sentence length, and the death penalty among adults is small to nonexistent once legally relevant variables (e.g. prior record) are controlled. For these crimes, racial differentials in sanctioning appear to match the large racial differences in criminal offending. Findings on the processing of adult index crimes therefore generally support the non-discrimination thesis.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07418820400095741

http://www.umass.edu/legal/Benavides/Spring2005/397G/Readings%20397G%20Spring%202005/5%20Sampson%20Lauritsen.pdf

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1147431

https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/abstractdb/AbstractDBDetails.aspx?id=53887

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/799813?uid=16785200&uid=3739728&uid=2&uid=3&uid=67&uid=16754504&uid=62&uid=3739256&sid=21104653990711

https://www.ncjrs.gov/app/abstractdb/AbstractDBDetails.aspx?id=103011

http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/04/15/qje.qjs014.full

Police records consistently show that black people are arrested at disproportionally high rates (compared to their presence in the population) for violent crimes. For example, blacks are arrested eight times more often for homicide and fourteen times more often for robbery. Even less flashy crimes show the same pattern: forgery, fraud, and embezzlement all hover around a relative risk of four.

(White people are arrested at disproportionally high rates for things like driving drunk, and Asians are arrested at disproportionally high rates for things like illegal gambling, but these carry lower sentences and are less likely to lead to incarceration.)

Once again, there are two possible hypotheses here: either police are biased, or black people actually commit these crimes at higher rates than other groups.

The second hypothesis has been strongly supported by crime victimization surveys, which show that the percent of arrestees who are black matches very closely matches the percent of victims who say their assailant was black. This has been constant throughout across thirty years of crime victmization surveys.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3288002&forum_id=2#30944780)

The part of the blog post I cut and paste is the most important part - because a very large part of liberals' arguments about criminal justice is that blacks don't commit violent crimes at a higher rate - that rather they are targeted unfairly for crimes that everyone commits. The victimization research shows this is demonstrably false - therefore it's the most important part to get across. Also the parts in criminal justice where discrimination is found is rather trivial compared to the parts where no discrimination is found - e.g. committing violent crimes, sentencing, police shootings, etc.

But here's another part for you:

As you can see, a person shot at by a police officer is more than twice as likely to be black as the average member of the general population. But, crucially, they are less likely to be black than the average violent shooter or the average person who shoots at the police.

We assume that the reason an officer shoots a suspect is because that officer believes the suspect is about to shoot or attack the officer. So if the officer were perfectly unbiased, then the racial distribution of people shot by officers would look exactly like the distribution of dangerous attackers. If it’s blacker than the distribution of dangerous attackers, the police are misidentifying blacks as dangerous attackers.

But In fact, the people shot by police are less black than the people shooting police or the violent shooters police are presumably worried about. This provides very strong evidence that, at least in New York, the police are not disproportionately shooting black people and appear to be making a special effort to avoid it.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3288002&forum_id=2#30945490)

--

Summary

There seems to be a strong racial bias in capital punishment and a moderate racial bias in sentence length and decision to jail.

There is ambiguity over the level of racial bias, depending on whose studies you want to believe and how strictly you define “racial bias”, in police stops, police shootings in certain jurisdictions, and arrests for minor drug offenses.

There seems to be little or no racial bias in arrests for serious violent crime, police shootings in most jurisdictions, prosecutions, or convictions.

Overall I disagree with the City Journal claim that there is no evidence of racial bias in the justice system.

But I also disagree with the people who say things like “Every part of America’s criminal justice is systemically racist by design” or “White people can get away with murder but black people are constantly persecuted for any minor infraction,” or “Every black person has to live in fear of the police all the time in a way no white person can possibly understand”. The actual level of bias is limited and detectable only through statistical aggregation of hundreds or thousands of cases, is only unambiguously present in sentencing, and there only at a level of 10-20%, and that only if you believe the most damning studies.

(except that you should probably stay out of Memphis)

It would be nice to say that this shows the criminal justice system is not disproportionately harming blacks, but unfortunately it doesn’t come anywhere close to showing anything of the sort. There are still many ways it can indirectly harm blacks without being explicitly racist. Anatole France famously said that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich as well as poor people from begging for bread and sleeping under bridges”, and in the same way that the laws France cites, be they enforced ever so fairly, would still disproportionately target poor people, so other laws can, even when fairly enforced, target black people. The classic example of this is crack cocaine – a predominantly black drug – carrying a higher sentence than other whiter drugs. Even if the police are scrupulously fair in giving the same sentence to black and white cokeheads, the law will still have a disproportionate effect.

There are also entire classes of laws that are much easier on rich people than poor people – for example, any you can get out of by having a good lawyer – and entire classes of police work that are harsher on poor neighborhoods than rich neighborhoods. If the average black is poorer than the average white, then these laws would have disproportionate racial effects.

For more information on this, I would recommend Tonry and Melewski’s Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America. They begin by saying everything above is true – the system mostly avoids direct racist bias against black people – and go on to say argue quite consistently that we still have a system where (their words) “recent punishment policies have replaced the urban ghetto, Jim Crow laws, and slavery as a mechanism for maintaining white dominance over blacks in the United States”. If you want something that makes the strongest case for the justice system harming blacks, written by real criminologists who know what they’re talking about, there’s your best bet.

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3288002&forum_id=2#30945759)

while it sucks, punishing a drug more accessible to the poor more harshly than a similar, but more expensive drug, is not necessarily without justification.

the harmful effects of drugs are exacerbated by poverty, less expensive drugs are more accessible to children, problem drug habits can be treated privately by the less poor, etc

all law violations with set fines have a disproportionate effect on the poor, already. it just happens that people have an easier time understanding that without crying foul. in some shitlib countries, they actually try to account for that by making fines on speeding offenses proportional to income of the offender. it's disgusting, but again, not without reason

(https://xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=3288002&forum_id=2#30946089)