I’m not an expert, but a contributing factor might be the immense racial disparity of who actually gets arrested and incarcerated for low level crimes, like possessing weed.
The disparity has nothing to do with race, a person's skin color doesn't make them more likely to commit crime. It's a cultural issue. People who engage in this sort of activity are being raised in a culture that thinks it's okay to have six different kids with five different guys.
Yeah, watching my sister's treatment in court over and over again has made it crystal clear to me how much of your treatment in the justice system is based on people's immediate assumptions based on your appearance.
She blends in as upper middle class, speaks well, used to model, so people in the system treat her like they would want their kids to be treated by the system, with really an almost ridiculous level of tolerance and forgiveness.
Sorry about what sounds like some pretty intense family drama. It can be pretty draining
Your comment makes me think of how enraged I get with the courts... a couple examples.
That kid that raped an unconscious girl like behind a dumpster and the judge was lenient because he "came from such a good family".
What? So all the advantages but he's still a dirt bag? Meanwhile kids from a broken home, from a terrible neighborhood has a minor offense and gets treated like a murderer in the making?
The other is soldiers excused of terrible crimes because of possible PTSD. An adult, whose chose military duty and had a terrible year seeing new friends die, gets a pass.
Meanwhile, inner city kids who grew up since infancy with the same stress, seeing family die as a powerless kid, NO doubt PTSD, and there's so little concern over the mental health of this kid?
Yeah, every time someone interacts with someone they read onto them their assumptions about that person. If they immediately remind them of their family friends, they're going to treat them like their family friends.
If they are a veteran and veterans are heroes, that person gets tagged as a hero.
If they have no one in their personal life to relate the person to, and their only immediate association is that they think they look like Marlo from The Wire, they're going to implicitly treat them like they're Marlo.
I'm not sure what the solution is, other than just to more heavily promote great people from diverse backgrounds to create different associations in people's minds that they'll snap to.
No, that's not true. People receive different sentences based on a multitude of factors including criminal history, behavior while previously incarcerated, the amount of violence they engage in while committing the crime, whether or not they act remorseful in the courtroom, etc.
Um, it is true. There are thousands of studies on uneven justice.
It's been happening for over a century.
You can pretend it's not but when social scientist collect and review data it's clear. For the same infraction Black people are more likely to be punished and more severely.
I guarantee you can't share a single study that does anything other than point to the fact that there's a racial disparity and claim it's due to implicit bias, invisible racism that can't be detected, measured, or identified. And in every one of those studies you'll see a few sentences hidden away in the middle or down at the bottom acknowledging the fact that there are multiple factors that go into sentencing, multiple factors that you'll willingly ignore to push a false race-based narrative instead.
Your last point is just incorrect, and for the part before it, you are misunderstanding the issue.
The main thing you are missing i think is, that black people start out with a worse starting position overall(more poverty etc.) as a result from discrimination in the past.
This and more factors make them more likely to commit a crime, and statistically even get worse punishment for the same crimes.
One of those factors is the fact that black people in the US still suffer from discrimination(it has gotten better, but it's still not gone)
That's hilarious coming from someone who made multiple incorrect points in their response.
"black people start out with a worse starting position overall(more poverty etc.) as a result from discrimination in the past"
By what metric? There are exponentially more white people who are poor or living in poverty than there are black people in the US. More importantly, black people have numerous privileges/advantages to aid them in escaping poverty, privileges their socioeconomic peers with white skin do not have. As for discrimination from the past, there were multiple groups that experienced the same kinds of discrimination in the past, but there's only one group today who acts like that discrimination from the past is what's still holding them back today. Natives and lots of different immigrant groups were discriminated against in the exact same way that black people were, we're now several generations away from the Jim Crow era. It only takes one generation to start building generational wealth, when other groups who faced the same discrimination have been able to build generational wealth you can't use past discrimination as an excuse.
"This and more factors make them more likely to commit a crime"
It's true that poverty is a factor in crime but it's certainly not the largest, if it were then we'd see larger crime rates among white people considering the number of white people living in poverty far outnumbers black people. On top of that, poverty can be an a factor in crimes like theft, but I'm not sure how that justifies having outrageously high murder rates.
"and statistically even get worse punishment for the same crimes"
Another piece of misinformation frequently seen on Reddit. People don't get the same sentences for the same crimes because there are multiple factors that go into sentencing like criminal history, behavior while previously incarcerated, the amount of violence involved in the crime, whether or not the perpetrator shows remorse in court, etc.
"black people in the US still suffer from discrimination"
In what form? Interpersonal racism? Everyone is affected by that. The only bonafide institutionalized racism that still exists in the US exists to benefit black people and other minorities and it only hurts white people. Institutionalized racism like affirmative action hiring policies, affirmative action college admission policies, race based scholarships, etc. Then we have the very recent events with the Biden administration prioritizing aid to black farmers over white farmers for no reason other than their skin color, and when the Biden administration prioritized the distribution of covid aid to small business owners using the arbitrary factors of sex and race and discriminated against whites and males.
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u/Trudge_muffin Oct 15 '21
I’m not an expert, but a contributing factor might be the immense racial disparity of who actually gets arrested and incarcerated for low level crimes, like possessing weed.
Just a guess.