For instance, up until 2010, there was a 100:1 (one hundred to one) disparity between federal criminal penalties for crack cocaine possession vs. powder cocaine possession. Crack possession also carried a mandatory minimum five-year sentence. Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010, reducing the disparity to 18:1 and removing the mandatory minimum. The law is still influenced by the incorrect belief that crack is more dangerous than powder, but the legal system is capable of recognizing and fixing its flaws (even if the fix is partial).

So if the police get complaints from neighbors they respond to that. If your rich neighbors tolerate your coke addiction, they don't come knocking. If you have a noisy neighbor who complains they do come knocking. Police respond very much to community complaints, from my experience with them growing up.

Whenever the police came to "bust" activities, it was mostly due to neighbors calling in "suspicious activity" I.e. Underage drinking and weed.

The fact that I cannot determine this from context may be a problem all by itself.

And while it's true that there is usually a reason for throwing people in jail, that reason is often an arbitrary, capricious, or morally dubious reason. I prefer that people go to jail for doing a specific, non-accidental harm to someone else, rather than doing something that merely offends a moral principle held by someone else.

Get high on a PCP dipper, and you are only hurting yourself. Get high, strip naked, and go out to jump on top of cars, and you might do time for all the auto-body damage, proportional to the cost of repairs. Get high on heroin, and you are only hurting yourself. Share some of your heroin with someone who doesn't know how dangerous it is, who then dies from asphyxiation, and you might go down for negligent manslaughter. Get drunk on alcohol, and you are only hurting yourself. Get drunk, and then try to drive home, taking out 14 mailboxes and one step-down transformer, and you might be doing some time.

...unless you have money, or know the right people. One of my former bosses occasionally mentioned at work that he grew weed inside his house. He probably went months without ever even seeing a cop. No suspicion means no searches, means no evidence, means no prosecution, means no jail. I have known people who drove drunk on at least a weekly basis, and never got cited for it even once. They all either had money or a few cop friends.

It isn't just that the justice system is not enforcing malum prohibitum offenses among that class, but they also look the other way for more serious malum in se crimes. The rich can afford more skillful lawyers. The connected can get the police and prosecutors to back off a bit.

I know someone who quit a prosecutor job because she got tired of putting people in jail for being poor. That's what modern policing is doing. It's packing the prisons with poor people and the jails with the untreated mentally ill. I didn't vote for this. I don't know anybody that would. Yet the people around me keep electing representatives who promise to be "tough on crime" and the "law and order" candidates, without stopping to consider that those people may be inventing new crimes just so they can get tough on them, or that their new laws may encourage more civil disorder.

Actually, it kind of is. What's the implicit assumption in that story? Of course, that he's a drug dealer. What would be the pretext for pulling him over and searching his car? To look for drugs.

It really is the cornerstone of policing in 2015, just try to imagine counterfactuals where there was no such thing as illegal drugs and drug dealers and so on and it becomes obvious.

The Moynihan report decrying the break down of black families was released in 1965, before the drug war, at a time when incarceration per crime committed was approaching all-time lows.

The incarceration rates in America bottomed out around 1973. At that time, about 63% of black and poor persons lived in a single-female headed household. By 1978, with incarceration rates still within their historical range, the rate was nearly 70% (source Losing Ground by Charles Murray). Family structure breakdown came first, it was not caused by incarceration. It is wishful thinking to believe that if all these men were not locked up they would be upstanding and faithful fathers, the problems go far beyond that.

It's more complicated than that. Police are actually much more tolerant of open-air/street corner drug-dealing in black ghetto neighborhoods than in suburbia. If you read books or news articles about these neighborhoods, you see that the dealing gets ignored for months and months, or the dealers are harassed and arrested and then right back out on the street later in the day. This would never be tolerated the same way in suburbia. Then what happens is that there is a shooting, or a gang war with many shootings breaks out. Neighbors demand that the police "do something." Since the police do not know who is responsible and witnesses refuse to talk, the police take the path of least resistance and lock up whoever they can on drug charges. I recommend the books "Ghettoside" and "Don't Shoot" for more on these issues.

Do you know what Ockham's razor is?

The elephant in the room is that black ghetto communities do not self-police and have a dire problem of particular senseless and indiscriminate murders. For instance, Ghettoside recounted a story of a 13-year-old, black kid wandering through the back alleys of his neighborhood, stumbling across a gang of older youths, who immediately started shooting at him. That is just insane. Completely insane. And the book is full of examples like that, of street shootings that take out innocent bystanders because the shooter couldn't be bothered to verify that the target was actually in an enemy gang.

If a community does not self-police, then there are two equally bad options: 1) outsiders can impose their own policing, which is always going to be fraught, brutal, and mistake-prone. 2) other communities can just try to contain the problem, ie, they can segregate themselves.

If you grow up in the ghetto with role models largely being gang members and most your friends have been or are going to jail, it's difficult to grow into a mentality that value education and achievement. It just happens due to historical reasons, especially racism, majority of the ghetto are blacks. This actually perpetuate the unspoken racism, where people consciously or unconsciously associate black people with all the bad things happening in ghetto.

As a counter example, Asian Americans were also highly discriminated against in the past century, immigration from Asia were barred, those who were here cannot acquire citizenship, cannot own land, etc etc. Asians were generally viewed as poor uneducated labours, not too different from blacks. But today Asians are hardly viewed as that, largely thanks to large influx of educated and hard working Asian immigrants in recent years (due to immigration law preference), who changed the public perception of Asians, lifted Asian neighbourhoods from ghetto status and gave positive role model and connections to poor Asian kids (local or immigrants).

Conclusion? Focusing on "helping" visible minority actually reinforce the perception that certain ethnic groups need help. What we need to focus on instead, is to help those in need of help, without regards to skin colors.

The problem is economic and cultural (we allow for guns) so the police take maximum caution, and given the police are the only expression of government in some areas, the negativity falls on them. It's not as if most of the community in a blighted area don't want police - they do, but they also want police to act as if the areas didn't have a violent characteristic. Any area of the world with high crime, be it Russia, china, France, germany, greece will have police act differently in those communities. It's a reaction to the dynamics in such places. It takes effort to overcome and the local Govs typically don't put in the necessary effort.

This kind of intellectual forgery is why the left (and it's prescriptions) are increasingly viewed with suspicion. Bring yourself to be honest with your words and assessments. Make sure what you say passes the smell test. Otherwise you're just preaching to the converted.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-m...

I was as surprised as you likely will be. The exception is with capital punishment. It looks like black people are more likely to get it than others. But otherwise nationwide crime and punishment statistics look mostly fair.

During that time my car broke down, and it would cost $3000 to fix it. This was money I didn't have. The car was otherwise reliable, so overall it would have been a good financial decision to fix the car that would have provided me with more than $3000 worth of transportation amortized over its future useful life.

But that didn't matter, I couldn't afford to fix it.

I did need a car though, or I couldn't get to work. What I could afford was to take out a loan to buy a used car, even though that used car was not as reliable as my previous car and cost more than $3000.

I ended up getting the used car. My decision to do that was based on my need to get to work and keep my job. It was the right decision, but had I had an extra $3000 in cash, the right decision would have been to fix my otherwise reliable car.

People without extra cash are constantly one misfortune away from a downward spiral.

Is there any statistic to show what percentage of today's top 1% earners where born to a bottom 50% family from the previous generation, and viceversa? If less than what you would expect from two non-correlated random variables, this suggest where you start in life has an effect of how far you can go. This does not invalidate your hypothesis, but may suggest that upwards mobility takes more than one generation to lift people from poverty to wealth.

Further more, we can do the same analysis to figure out how many people from bottom 50% families grow to reach 75% percentile or above. I do not know what it would be, but if much lower than expected, that would suggest that upwards mobility is quite limited, invalidating your hypothesis.

(I've been poor. I don't think that.)

Inequality starts from inequality of opportunities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_issues_in_China#Overview

I remember when my home city was still very poor, people treated each other much better. There is a general sense of community and trust. People are always offering a hand to those in need of help, even though helpers themselves are poor. Theft was literally unheard of, let alone more serious crimes.

>In 2013, the majority of charitable dollars went to religion (31%), education (16%), human services (12%), and grantmaking foundations (11%).2

That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with those donations, it just means they might be to keep the lights on at religious, academic, or arts institutions.

It also doesn't mean that Americans aren't at all compassionate givers... I think we are. It's just that we're also all too often anxious to draw lines about deserving or undeserving, though (criminals, of course, being deserving of punishment rather than charity).

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."

Edit: That said, I do think the argument that even with all this, the argument that legalizing everything now and worrying about the details later is better than keeping it illegal while we work out details does have merit. I'm not convinced it is right, but I'm not convinced it is wrong either.

From "Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America":

-----------

This was how Coughlin did his job on many a night. Coughlin couldn’t do much about all the shooters in Southeast who got away with it. But he could enforce drug laws, gang injunctions, and parole and probation terms relatively easily just by driving around and making “good obs”— good observations, cop lingo for catching, at a glance, a bulge under a shirt, a furtive motion of hands. A chase might ensue, and sometimes ended with the cops shutting down whole neighborhoods as the LAPD “airship,” or helicopter, thumped overhead. Coughlin took extra risks to get guns— this was the gold standard.

Coughlin’s methods were guaranteed to look like straight harassment to those on the receiving end. After all, how important was a bag of marijuana in a place where so many people were dying? But Coughlin’s motivation wasn’t to juke stats, boost his department “rating,” or antagonize the neighborhood’s young men. He had seen the Monster, and his conscience demanded that he do something. So he used what discretion he had to compensate for the state’s lack of vigor in response to murder and assault.

This practice of using “proxy crimes” to substitute for more difficult and expensive investigations was widespread in American law enforcement. The legal scholar William J. Stuntz singled it out as a particularly damaging trend of recent decades. In California, proxy justice had transformed enforcement of parole and probation into a kind of shadow legal system, sparing the state the trouble of expensive prosecutions. State prisons, already saddled with sick and elderly inmates, were all the more crammed as a result.

But in the squad rooms of Southeast station, cops insisted that desperate measures were called for. They would hear the name of a shooter, only to find they couldn’t “put a case” on him because no witnesses would testify. So they would write a narcotics warrant— or catch him dirty. “We can put them in jail for drugs a lot easier than on an assault. No one is going to give us information on an assault,” explained Lou Leiker, who ran the detective table in Southeast in the early aughts. To them, proxy justice represented a principled stand against violence. It was like a personalized imposition of martial law.

Leovy, Jill (2015-01-27). Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (pp. 140-141). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

When the author was asked in the comments to expound on the thesis he just provided a link to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Court#Due_process_and_r...

I think the crux is in the last paragraph of that section, although the link to the War on Drugs is not made explicit:

> Conservatives angrily denounced the "handcuffing of the police." Violent crime and homicide rates shot up nationwide in the following years; in New York City, for example, after steady to declining trends until the early 1960s, the homicide rate doubled in the period from 1964 to 1974 from just under 5 per 100,000 at the beginning of that period to just under 10 per 100,000 in 1974. Controversy exists about the cause, with conservatives blaming the Court decisions, and liberals pointing to the demographic boom and increased urbanization and income inequality characteristic of that era. After 1992 the homicide rates fell sharply.

I think it's entirely reasonable that the War on Drugs began as a reaction to rising crime rates.

My two additional bits: I've often heard that the US is a little exceptional in that it approaches the problem of "police doing bad things" by throwing "tainted" evidence out and mostly not holding the police accountable for their actions, whereas other countries allow the "tainted" evidence to stand but then allow some sort of proceeding against the police to address the bad behavior. It seems from my limited understanding that the US approach stands on the Warren Court.

It's interesting that both aspects of the US approach (War on Drugs, shielding the police from liability) are under fire. I wonder if these things are as controversial in other Western countries -- if not maybe the Warren Court really does deserve some scrutiny. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that the Warren Court caused the police protectionism, rather that it tacitly allowed it to persist with frameworks that mostly provide indirect corrective feedback to police misbehavior.

And there will still be a market for black market drugs. The legal, high-quality, taxed drugs will be more expensive than the underground variants. People will still make and sell homebrew meth, just as people still make and sell homebrew booze.

This isn't to say that I think we should keep things the way they are. There are many intoxicating substances that cause grievious harm to individuals, families, and society in general and I don't think that any of the illegal ones are worse than alcohol in that regard. And I don't think that getting high or being addicted is a criminal act (though it may lead to things that are criminal, such as stealing, driving under the influence, etc.)

I also think that intoxicating oneself is usually a bad idea, particularly if it's done to escape from or avoid some problem or life situation that needs to be dealt with and resolved. My worry is that legalization will be percieved as endorsement, absent any campaign to highlight the ethical, moral and personal responsibility expectations that people will need to live up to. And we seem as a society to have really gotten shy about teaching that certain behaviors and ways of living can be right or wrong, absolutely.

I'm not saying that it shouldn't end. I'm saying that it is not "as simple as it sounds" and if you try and treat it that way there will be fallout to deal with.

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"?

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...

8.4% owned, how many are not privately owned have services/goods/staff provided in large part by private companies?

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

In the United States, there are 487,000 incarcerated awaiting trial [1].

[1] http://www.americasquarterly.org/aborn-prisons

http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/trends/cig...

http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/Social/Module1Epidemi...

> Border Patrol, nevertheless, cannot pull anyone over without "reasonable suspicion" of an immigration violation or crime (reasonable suspicion is more than just a "hunch"). Similarly, Border Patrol cannot search vehicles in the 100-mile zone without a warrant or "probable cause" (a reasonable belief, based on the circumstances, that an immigration violation or crime has likely occurred).

> In practice, Border Patrol agents routinely ignore or misunderstand the limits of their legal authority in the course of individual stops, resulting in violations of the constitutional rights of innocent people. These problems are compounded by inadequate training for Border Patrol agents, a lack of oversight by CBP and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the consistent failure of CBP to hold agents accountable for abuse. Thus, although the 100-mile border zone is not literally "Constitution free," the U.S. government frequently acts like it is.

https://www.aclu.org/constitution-100-mile-border-zone

"Racism" isn't merely a buzzword or an excuse if it's actually a historic and ongoing phenomenon.

Hint: one history includes codified discrimination until ~50 years ago and legal enslavement until ~150 years ago and the other one doesn't. Well, I'll give you that Asian Americans faced codified discrimination into the 20th century, but don't overlook the "antipodal" patterns of how each ethnic group came to be in America.

Hint 2: Asian Americans came over, at a minimum, in indentured servitude.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Asian_Americans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_history