Racism of the US Justice System...

Might it also have to do with stacking charges rather than race? I'm not saying some cops/judges etc aren't racist, but lets face it, typically when you arrest a white collr sort of person for drugs........it's not because they had a gun, robbed someone, car jacked someone etc.........when you look at the numbers they are skewed by this. If a black thug steals a car, and gets arrested for the car theft, the gun, the drugs, resisting arrest etc, you have a slew of charges, attributed to one person........so instead of say 6 black guys going to jail as the statistics suggest, it's only 1 black guy but his numbers count on all of the different categories? In the end, I think it has less to do with racism and more to do with bad parenting, skewed nimbers, media influence, entitlements, and a general dumbing down of certain parts of society.....

reply to post by jambatrumpet


Good lord. Does no one here know that US prisons are the biggest source of slave labor in the world?

And FORGET affirmative action! ...We're competing with prisons for jobs - prison owners and wardens offer cut rate labor on contract and pocket the cash.

And yeah. Blacks are WAYY over-represented - not cuz they're really bad people either. Just easy targets.


S&F btw.

Yeah.. I hope this law passes because my brother would get out of jail.[sooner]
People bitch about affirmative action when white folks have had an advantage for over 300 years... get the hell out of here.
If y'all don't want to help us , pay for my trip back to Africa.

reply to post by DuceizBack


If you didn't emmigrate here from africa, buy your own ticket. If you're going off of a supposed right to reparations, well, Obama hasn't gotten there.....yet. If your brother is in prison, why should he be released early? He obviously did the crime, he can do the time......

Yes, there are a disproportionate number of African Americans -- especially black males -- in prison today. It almost seems like a war against the whole minority male population. I do not doubt a degree of racism, maybe sometimes unconscious, in the minds of both judges and jurors. I also know that if an African American kills a white person he or she is more likely to get life or death than if their crimes are black on black.

There is another thing to consider too, and that is class. You don't see very many upper class people of any race in prison. IMO this is because they are often found guilty of "white collar" crimes which are somehow taken less seriously than ones that involve outright robbery or drug trafficking or assault. Even though some millionaires like Bernie Maddoff have bilked millions out of their life savings through Ponzi schemes and other illegal but "respectable" methods and ruined more lives and made more people victims than your average robber. Hell, white collar criminals brought down Wall Street and plunged the country and most of the rest of the world into a terrible depression. And what do they serve for it? Ten years at the most.

In addition, the rich can afford the best lawyers while the poor often have to rely on inexperienced, overworked legal aid and/or court-appointed attorneys. Yes, there is definitely a class element involved in this, with a disproportionate number of prisoners from the working class.

If you are poor, a minority and a male, your goose is already cooked before the trial begins.

reply to post by DuceizBack

If y'all don't want to help us , pay for my trip back to Africa.

Here you go

Here's the contact email for blacks who want to be repatriated to africa: [email protected].

Originally posted by Sestias
If you are poor, a minority and a male, your goose is already cooked before the trial begins.

Great statement Sestias....The foundational racism of our Justice System is Economic Racism.

Martin Luther King was assassinated when he began to focus his attention on the plight of the poor...

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People's Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington — engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be — until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection."

King's economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America's cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor" — appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness."

How familiar that sounds today, more than a quarter-century after King's efforts on behalf of the poor people's mobilization were cut short by an assassin's bullet.

www.fair.org...

reply to post by DuceizBack


why don't y'all get like us and help yourselves..
2nd

reply to post by jambatrumpet


The same here in NZ, one of my mate's mate is white, he stabbed someone, then told the cops he accidentally stabbed him and he didn't go to prison. He is still free, he has done so many crimes and still free. Only recently he is put on Home Detention, still not prison, just installed the beeper on his leg, has to stay home for the next 6 months and play games, watch TV, smoke what ever he wants, when ever he wants blablabla..

The fact that my Samoan mate went to Jail for being in a stolen vehicle proves much to me.

Thought I'd chime in, being that I was at one time, not too long ago, familiar with some of the going-ons that put some of these drug traffickers in jail.

In the metro area and outlying suburbs of Chicago, most of the hard drug selling (crack, coc aine, heroin) was done by young black men. Most of the buyers were white, but plenty of black buyers as well especially as you get into the inner city. This is from personal experience, I was there, I know it to be true. Most of your prescription drugs were sold by older people, both black and white, to younger people who then sold them at a profit. The younger people in that case were mostly white. Those same younger, white "street pharmacists" were also the gateway to designer drugs like extacy and ketamine. Marijuana seemed to be equal across the racial spectrum.

That being said, I'm not surprised when I hear black men being arrested more than white men for selling crack and heroin. In my experience they sell it more. Now when you talk about possession, the users usually carry less weight than the sellers, and less weight carries a lighter sentence than more weight (based on intent to distribute). Also, the courts look at users more as victims the first few times, giving them lighter sentences in the beginning.

So if you tell me the courts are racist for putting black people in jail over drug charges, I urge you to consider the facts I've presented from my personal experience. Just food for thought.

Having grew up in the era, and experienced some of these dealings, I thought I should share my perspective.

Whites tend to stay away from crack, and those who become involved in the more serious, harder types of drugs wind up living in the black community. White drug dealers are far more discrete, they only sell to people they know, or people who vouch for the people looking to buy drugs.

If you are a white guy looking to buy drugs, then you have to know how to find a connection. There is a bit of an art to it. If all else fails, you can always go into the local black community, and simply drive around, and someone will approach you, in your car, and offer to sell. Whites who typically bought drugs in this manner were forced to do so because they weren't trusted by the white community that dealt in drugs.

The reason most Blacks and Hispanics are arrested is because they are much more open about selling drugs.

Then there are the murder rates. When you look at how many black men are out there killing other black men, then it is easy, at least to me, to understand why so many are treated more harshly by the law.

Personally, I find that in my experiences, the Black community is very friendly and overall decent people, with about the same amount of jerks as any other community. It is sad and perplexing that Black communities tend to have such high crime rates. However, I do not buy that poverty or past treatment is the cause.

Back in the day, when racism and prejudice where acceptable, and it wasn't that long ago, plenty of other groups had to deal with racism. Most of these other groups have moved on, Asians, Irish, Eastern Europeans, while the Black and Latin communities continue to struggle.

I think the elitist liberal ideals being taught about how the failures of certain groups are all because of past oppression only encourages people to not take responsibility for their own actions. This intellectualized racism only encourages resentment and hate.

reply to post by jambatrumpet




The answer you are looking for is called mandatory minimums for the Federal Level. It specifies jail time for possession of the types of illegal drugs. Federal mandatory minimums are racist as the drugs that are used predominately by black people carry a longer prison time than the drugs of choice by white people.

Originally posted by jambatrumpet
Reverse racism is a claim not backed up by numbers... According to Bureau of National Affairs Employment Discrimination Report, most court cases concerning white males being turned down for a job are found not to be because of Affirmative Action, but because of a lack of qualifications and shortcomings.

That being said, not being awarded a job or admittance to a college is not equivalent being placed in shackles...

I'm not sure I understand your response, are you saying a racist Justice system is acceptable because of the existence of affirmative action?

There is no such thing as "reverse racism". It is a term coined to somehow minimize race issues when whites are the victims, that's why they give it it's own name. Racism is racism and should be treated as such.

Originally posted by General.Lee
Racism is racism and should be treated as such.

Spot on.

There is no pecking order amongst the ''races'', and any people that judge others along the lines of their ethnicity, are equally ignorant; regardless of race !

Originally posted by jambatrumpet
According to U.S. Sentencing Commission figures, no class of drug is as racially skewed as crack in terms of numbers of offenses. According to the commission, 79 percent of 5,669 sentenced crack offenders in 2009 were black, versus 10 percent who were white and 10 percent who were Hispanic. The figures for the 6,020 powder coc aine cases are far less skewed: 17 percent of these offenders were white, 28 percent were black, and 53 percent were Hispanic. Combined with a 115-month average imprisonment for crack offenses versus an average of 87 months for coc aine offenses, this makes for more African-Americans spending more time in the prison system.

Crack coc aine is considered a ''hard drug'', so the authorities will clamp down on it more vigorously than some other substances.

If the majority of crack users and dealers are black, then that will show in the statistics for drug offences.

Hard drugs flourish in deprived areas, and due to the history of black people in the United States, black people tend to disproportionately populate these less affluent areas.

People being imprisoned for using drugs are done so because of the drug that they are taking/supplying; if a particular race happens to be more likely of committing these offences, then that is just how it goes.

I don't think crack is targeted because of the ethnicity of the users, but rather, that it is a highly addictive drug that leads to a multitude of social issues, that happens to have a larger number of one race that are involved in it's usage.

Originally posted by americandingbat
Basically, the point was that people looking at what you've looked at -- the ratio of convicted murderers sentenced to death vs. all convicted murderers -- didn't seem to show bias. Where it got really interesting was that when you looked at the race of the person killed, people who killed white people were much more likely to get the death penalty than people who killed black people, and blacks who killed whites had the highest death penalty rate.

Now like I said, this was a while ago, and the studies we read on the topic weren't brand new even then, so I'm not sure how out of date this is (at least 20-30 years). But it was a really useful example to me of how tricky the issue of race in the criminal justice system is, and how factors that you might not think to take into account when trying to measure racism in the system can skew the results.

You are correct that it is a very complex issue and that statistics taken at face value don't tell the whole story.

My reply was aimed more at the people who say things along the lines of: ''Only 13% of the US population is black, yet 42% of inmates on death row are - the system must be racist !''.
When in actual fact, the overall percentage of one ethnicity within the overall population is irrelevant to crime statistics, and the only relevant statistic is the ethnicity of the perpetrators of the particular crimes that are committed.


On the subject of harsher sentencing when there's a white victim, as opposed to a black victim, then that is not necessarily entirely racially motivated either.

Here in the UK, the Metropolitan Police have special unit set up to deal with so-called ''black on black'' crime committed in London, because there is a lot of violence linked to drugs and gangs within the black population of the city.

I mention that because in the statistics I linked to earlier, apparently of all the murders committed by black people in the US, then 90% of their victims are also black.

It is not too much of a stretch to suppose that a lot of these murders are related to drugs and gangs, where a lot of people - judges and prosecutors included - have an attitude that the victims ''had it coming to them'' or ''you reap what you sow'', which may account for prosecutors not seeking the death sentence in many of these cases, because a lot of people would think that killing a drug dealer is not as serious a crime as murdering an innocent person.

I'd be interested to see whether the death penalty is sought after more when a middle-class black person is the victim.

Mandatory minimums are generally restricted to Federal Cases. States have their own sentenceing guidlines in terms of how long, probation, time served etc.

If you are curious about Crime stats in the US as a whole based on breakdown:

FBI 2009 UCR Reports

All law Enfrocement, College Campuses and some Health centers (that are linked to teaching type colleges) are required by law to report certain crimes.

Obviously the way this works, things will fall through the cracks in terms of reporting (charging at tone level, pleading it out at a lesser charge, or upgrading the charge etc).

To the person who made the comment about slave labor in Prisons, you do understand that when you go to jail you loose certain rights? This particular argument has gone through state and federal courts and as long as prisons meet the criteria, its legal, whether you agree with it or not. The people in prison are serving a debt to society, not going to camp for however many years with cable TV and nothing to do.

Race baiting and trolling, no matter how well put together and "civil" is still just that. Anyone who actually looks at these statistics in depth.... well they don't really help your argument. Or maybe we should Obama-ize the justice system, different penalties depending on race? None of our situations are going to get any better until we take responsibility for our own actions. Not that our Justice system isn't corrupt, i just think that we could resolve most of the racial issue with a little common sense and understanding.