LBJ is your favorite strawman.Originally Posted by PawDawg
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LBJ is your favorite strawman.
Him being you hero, does not make him a stawman.
Him being my hero is itself another strawman.
Well, there ya go. You got it all figured out, problem solved.
As for me, I will not even pretend to understand how Einstein's and Newton's brains worked. I don't think common core would get me any closer, either.
thanks, chad. this is a good summary to start the discussion with. i would like to take a look at each point individually, but let's take it in small bites (i don't have time to keep up with a discussion about 5 points at a time). i'll go ahead and comment on the first couple of items.
Policies and Practices
The criminal justice system is held together by policies and practices, both formal and informal, which influence the degree to which an individual penetrates the system. At multiple points in the system, race may play a role (i really wish they would recognize the difference between "race plays a role" and "racial disparities result") Disparities mount as individuals progress through the system, from the initial point of arrest to the final point of imprisonment.26) Harsh punishment policies adopted in recent decades, some of which were put into effect even after the crime decline began, are the main cause (assumes causation without presenting evidence, but this is not a point worth arguing over) of the historic rise in imprisonment that has occurred over the past 40 years.27)
The rise in incarceration that has come to be known as mass imprisonment began in 1973 and can be attributed to three major eras of policymaking, all of which had a disparate impact on people of color, especially African Americans. Until 1986, a series of policies was enacted to expand the use of imprisonment for a variety of felonies. After this point, the focus moved to greater levels of imprisonment for drug and sex offenses. There was a particularly sharp growth in state imprisonment for drug offenses between 1987 and 1991. In the final stage, beginning around 1995, the emphasis was on increasing both prison likelihood and significantly lengthening prison sentences.28)
Harsh drug laws are clearly an important factor in the persistent racial and ethnic disparities observed in state prisons. For drug crimes disparities are especially severe, due largely to the fact that blacks are nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested for drug offenses and 2.5 times as likely to be arrested for drug possession.29) This is despite the evidence that whites and blacks use drugs at roughly the same rate. From 1995 to 2005, African Americans comprised approximately 13 percent of drug users but 36% of drug arrests and 46% of those convicted for drug offenses.30) what are the circumstances surrounding typical drug arrests? people don't typically get arrested for quietly using drugs in their homes. this one point could get its very own thread and it would probably go for several hundred posts. i just want to throw out a few thoughts and see what everyone thinks about it:
1. most drug arrests take place in areas with high rates of theft and violent crime (i don't have stats for this, so if i'm wrong, please let me know).
2. because the premise behind the war on drugs is that drug use is a major contributing cause to crime, we have major criminal penalties attached to drug offenses.
3. if you suspect someone of a crime, it can be difficult to gather the evidence needed for a conviction, but if you find drugs on someone you have all the evidence you need for a drug conviction.
4. cops may detain and search someone on suspicion of a crime, or for just loitering and "looking suspicious" in a high crime area. if they have drugs on them, the cops have an arrest and probably feel like they got some bad guys off the streets (and maybe they did, but all they will get convicted of is a drug offense).
5. nobody wants to go to jail, and people who don't do anything against the law apart from using marijuana will run from the police and perhaps even get violent to avoid arrest.
6. having been confronted with violence from people who look, dress, and act a certain way, police will, consciously or not, treat people with suspicion who have those characteristics.
7. as a result, confrontations in certain communities often get escalated to violence due to mistrust on both sides.
the only way i can image this being solved:
(a) at minimum, there should be no criminal penalty for drug use or possession, and the definition of "intent to distribute" needs to be drastically modified.
(b) police need to look at the way they train, and procedures and protocol that they use, with the goal of decreasing the likelihood of violent interactions. this effort will only work if you have they buy-in from the people actually doing the work, wearing the bullet-proof vests and putting their lives on the line. the only way this will happen is if we stop calling them racist and emphasize that the change is needed to protect the police and the people in the communities they serve.
(c) influential people in the affected communities need to stop encouraging violence toward police (implicitly or explicitly). instead they need to work with the police to develop procedures and protocol that are likely to result in a positive outcome, and they need to educate the people in their communities on how to interact with the police without getting yourself shot or arrested
eta: i just realized i kinda crossed over into police shootings (a topic for yet another thread) but the point holds that mistrust on both sides leads to actions on both sides that lead to increased likelihood of arrest.
Even Texans hated the man and still do decades after his death. He screwup our country, education and enabling of the poor as bad as Jimmy Carter did the same but including the Mid East.
How LBJ, Obama, Hillary and Bernie Sanders are your heroes is beyond me.
Fatherless homes with no direction, mothers having babies that are on drugs, easy access to drugs, rappers degrading women, welfare, disruptive kids in the classroom. There's nothing that can be done about the fatherless homes, you can't force morals on people that don't want to have them. The biggest problem with our education system is that there are too many kids that are disruptive in the classroom, and there's nothing that the teacher can do about it. The disruptive kids should be expelled from the school. They don't need an education to become a drug addict, so why ruin the classroom for a few that will never matter.
Many of these kids are born to mothers that were on drugs when they were born. Welfare kids bring more welfare kids, so, cut out the welfare. There are women that have multiple kids with multiple fathers. The women will stop getting pregnant if they can't get welfare. Make the fathers of these kids pay for them.
Get rid of the drugs. Drugs cause poverty and bad living conditions for kids. Bad habits keep getting repeated. Build the wall to keep the drugs and criminals out of our country.
so no comments on de-criminalizing drug possession? any other thoughts on why there are disparate drug arrest rates? does anyone think there actually is a racial bias?
Well, I think the article actually refutes your first enumerated point about drug arrests.
“Three recurrent explanations for racial disparities emerge from dozens of studies on the topic: policies and practices that drive disparity; the role of implicit bias and stereotypes in decisionmaking; and, structural disadvantages in communities of color which are associated with high rates of offending and arrest.”
Jeffrey Fagan’s work in this area found that police officers’ selection of who to stop in New York City’s high-profile policing program was dictated more by racial composition of the neighborhood than by actual crime in the area.31)
perhaps you could point to the specific point where this refutation takes place.
the article does comment, "Alfred Blumstein’s work in this area examined racial differences in arrests and, after comparing these to prison demographics, determined that approximately 80% of prison disparity among state prisoners in 1979 was explained by differential offending by race, leaving 20% unexplained. He noted that if there was no discrimination after arrest, the racial makeup of prisoners should approximate the population of arrestees." the bold sentence does not follow logically.
it also claims that "police officers’ selection of who to stop in New York City’s high-profile policing program was dictated more by racial composition of the neighborhood than by actual crime in the area." i don't have access to the referenced study, so i can only assume it uses similar non sequitur logic as the previous comment.
i think this statement supports my hypothesis:"The process of stopping, questioning and frisking individuals based on little more than suspicion (or on nebulous terms such as “furtive behavior,” which were the justification for many stops) has led to unnecessary criminal records for thousands."
one thing that one has to keep in mind is the implicit bias of every researcher in this field...
You can assume it is flawed or research the study, which is based on Floyd v. City of New York.
thanks. i did check out the information from that case, which is fascinating and publicly available. i haven't gone very far into it, but here is some interesting information from the first case file listed, a statistical study on stops in nyc in 2013-2015:
In 2013, Blacks were frisked in 58.9 percent of the stops compared to 55.6 percent of the stops of Non-Hispanic others (Whites, Asians, Native Americans). Also in 2013, Blacks were subjected to force more frequently, with 14.5 percent of the stops involving force compared to 12.6 percent of the stops for Non-Hispanic Others. In 2014 and 2015, the differences are no longer significant when Blacks are compared to Non-Hispanics stopped in similar circumstances.it claims that this small difference is statistically significant, and i'll trust that their statistical analysis is adequate. but this is before controlling for any additional factors that may figure in to the reason for frisking. of course, they also note that the differences disappeared in 2014 and 2015...
at any rate, it is significant to note that the floyd case was a response to perceived non-compliance with daniels v. city of new york, in which the nypd was found to be violating the 4th amendment by searching without reasonable suspicion.
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