You didn’t bring up the racial make up of the prisons….

And as has been my habit this month, I had in mind the kind of conversation I’ve generally heard on the topic in the past………

Um… for the record, I was not saying anything at all about the size of the Black prison population being racist. Don’t know if your comment was directed at me or not.

I was only pointing out that Blacks make up nowhere near 80% of the US prison population.

By the way, non-Hispanic Whites are still, according to my link, incarcerated at a rate of 0.3%, making American Whites nearly twice as likely to be incarcerated as people in England/Wales or China or Brazil, 50% more likely than people in Mexico, ten times more likely than people in India, and five times more likely than people in Japan.

The Marmot:
Perhaps even more odd is that Japan–Japan!–actually locks up a full 0.60 percent of its population.

Check again, Marmot. The good folks at the Foreign Policy blog said they were missing a zero: instead of .60, it’s .060. I thought the .60 seemed rather high and uncharacteristic of Japanese society.

——what do you think happens in a city like Atlanta, Savannah, Baltimore, DC?

Majority black juries are somehow forced by the White Man to convict blacks against their will?

In a city like Atlanta, the mayor, police chief, city council —- the power positions —- are held by blacks, because blacks make up a large percentage of the voting population.

These are the people who enforce the laws.

The juries are also made up of a lot of blacks, because a lot make up the local community.

Or, is it the case that the blacks in jail are almost wholly from outside the cities and areas where the population is mostly black and thus the government leadership is mostly black?

How exactly does all this work in this argument?

And you want to criticize the other lamebrain people who look at the number of blacks in prison and say it is clearly a genetic/racial sign……….

Nice try. You’re only off by about 33%.

Nationwide in 1997, non-Hispanic whites comprised 34.8 percent of the prisoners, African-Americans 46.9 percent, Hispanics 16.0 percent, and others 2.3 percent. Overall, the study found that 2.6 percent of the African-American adult population was imprisoned in 1997, compared to 1.1 percent of Hispanics, and 0.3 percent of non-Hispanic whites. The report does not break out imprisonment rates for Asian-Americans, but most experts believe Asians tend to be imprisoned the least of all major groups.

Okay, these stats are from 1997, and maybe the Bush administration has been conducting a wholesale freeing of White criminals and replacing them with Black criminals. But if that were the case, I’m sure the liberal media would have told us.

I think a big factor in the reason the US has such a high percentage is the fact that we are a very court oriented society —– we put people in jail and we sue each other for “offenses” like a national sport.

It isn’t all good, but I’d rather live in a society where the police lock up too many people for real crimes than one in which people get away with much more crime and the police are much more corrupt than in the US (which has a fair amount of corruption itself).

On the drug issue, I have ultimately gotten an increasing amount of intolerance for how it usually goes too.

If wall we were talking about was pot, fine. But then, I’d have to make a distinction between people selling pot and those using it.

This is one of the huge beefs I had with an otherwise terribly insightful HBO show — The Wire. It was EXACTLY like what I saw in law enforcement in Savannah, but in the 3rd season, it did this thing on legalizing all drugs…..

…..and it made what I had already thought was a bad hole in the program intolerable.

A large percentage of destructive crime in the US is driven by drug use.

To cut this discussion short, how many of you would let a crack addict stay in your house after the wife or husband had kicked them out? even if he or she was your brother or sister?

Meth use (and production and selling) is becoming a major problem in Georgia.

And how many pot dealers do you think spend a career of only selling pot?

The drug culture in the US is one of the biggest things I bash American society about……

So, I can see stressing treatement as an option rather than incarceration….

….but probably not when the trouble with the law came because the addict was busting out my car window to steal my stereo to sell to get his next pipe dream….

About this:
We could say the same for domestic dispute.

Which is one area in which the US jail and prison system has grown a lot in my lifetime when American society thought it was a good idea to make special law to cover this siutation that had been one of “what goes on behind closed doors of the home stays there.”

The DOJ has these descriptions:

Violent offenses include murder, negligent and non-negligent manslaughter,
rape, sexual assault, robbery, assault, extortion, intimidation, criminal
endangerment, and other violent offenses.

Property offenses include burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft,
fraud, possession and selling of stolen property, destruction of property,
trespassing, vandalism, criminal tampering, and other property offenses.

Drug offenses include possession, manufacturing, trafficking,
and other drug offenses.

Public-order offenses include weapons, drunk driving, escape/flight
to avoid prosecution, court offenses, obstruction, commercialized vice,
morals and decency charges, liquor law violations, and other
public-order offenses.

Violent Property Drug Public order
1980 173,300 89,300 19,000 12,400
2002 624,900 253,000 265,100 87,500

Increase in non-violent crime accounts for half a million new incarcerations in the past two decades (some of which could be domestic disputes) and violent crime is also an increase of nearly half a million (some of which could be domestic disputes).

I guess what I’m saying is that the more intense treatment of domestic disputes seems to explain only a fraction (perhaps a significant fraction) of the disparity. Maybe we also have greater enforcement in the US, maybe we spend too much time and energy incarcerating drug-related crimes… maybe other factors. At any rate, 0.7% of the population is a very high number.