Criminalized minorities

[spot]

Originally Posted by buttercup

does it matter?

It matters if there's mass injustice involved. It doesn't matter at all if it's justice that an adult male is 20 times more likely to be in jail today than the world average adult male if he lives in the USA and he's descended from those three million slaves. Is it just?

Perhaps the choice of people to kidnap or sell to the slavers on the African coast was made on the basis of accumulating the most evil criminal scum of the earth, whose inherited criminal characteristics would necessitate their locking up at such a disproportionate rate two or three hundred years later. Would such a cause be capable of increasing the chance of a US black adult male being in prison today, compared to world adult males, by a factor of over 20? It's possible, perhaps. So, there's a proposed mechanism to explain the correlation. I'm sure it's testable, and I find it absolutely unlikely.

I find it far more likely to assume that the people kidnapped or sold to the slavers were typical average people, with neither more nor less criminal tendency than anyone else on the planet.

What changed for them?

Can we think of any alternative reason for the correlation?



http://www.census.gov/ipc/prod/wp02/wp-02.pdf
World population aged 0-14 29%

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet...heet_2&_sse=on
11.9m US black male 18+
2310m world adult male
1 : 194 of world adult male population is US black
1 : 9.4 of of world prison population is US black
20.6 time more likely

Where is the mass injustice? If someone, regardless of racial or ethnic background, receives a fair trial and is sentenced in accord with prevailing judicial standards there is no injustice - at least in a jurisprudential sense.

[buttercup]

what do you intend to do about it spot?

[spot]

Originally Posted by Diuretic

Where is the mass injustice? If someone, regardless of racial or ethnic background, receives a fair trial and is sentenced in accord with prevailing judicial standards there is no injustice - at least in a jurisprudential sense.

I think injustice has an ethical sense too. That's what I'm exploring. I agree with you entirely that there is no "jurisprudential" injustice implied by my question.

Originally Posted by buttercup

what do you intend to do about it spot?

Talk it over in the thread, see where it leads.

Is anyone going to vote in favor of the initial slaves being the most evil criminal scum of the earth, so bad that they inevitably passed on criminal propensities to their descendants? That would solve the puzzle.

[koan]

Ralph Nader composed a letter to the Attorney General asking for more attention towards corporate crime. From this letter:

Certainly, as attorney general of the United States, you should understand the problem of corporate crime. After all, in a September 27, 2002 address to the Corporate Fraud/Responsibility Conference, you said that "the malignancy of corporate corruption threatens more than the future of a few companies -- it destroys workers' incomes, decimates families' savings and casts a shadow on the health, integrity and good name of business itself." You warned that "We cannot -- we will not -- surrender freedom for all to the tyranny of greed for the few." You told prosecutors that "with each act of justice, you send the unmistakable message that no board room is beyond the law, no executive is above the law."

...

Using conservative numbers issued by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for instance, criminologist Jeffrey Reiman, a professor at American University, estimated that the total cost of white-collar crime in 1997 was $338 billion. The actual cost is probably much greater. For instance, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, estimates that health-care fraud alone costs up to $100 billion each year. Another estimate (by University of Cincinnati Criminal Justice Professor Francis T. Cullen) suggests that the annual cost of antitrust or trade violations is at least $250 billion. By comparison, the FBI estimated that in 2002, the nation's total loss from robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft and arson was less than $18 billion - less than a third of the estimated $60 billion Enron alone cost investors, pensioners and employees.

Corporate crime steals from the population increasing poverty and worsening the conditions that many criminals are struggling to cope with. I wonder what the ratio of rich to poor is in the jail system right now.

[spot]

Originally Posted by koan

Corporate crime steals from the population increasing poverty and worsening the conditions that many criminals are struggling to cope with. I wonder what the ratio of rich to poor is in the jail system right now.

The idea of the oligarchs' own media constantly focusing public attention on street crime, while their own class steals at ten times the rate of the investigated and prosecuted sector, is the first attempt at an answer to my question which sounds sensible to me. If you select who to put under the spotlight you get a different prison demographic, that stands scrutiny. If you choose what behavior to criminalize and which categories of crime to resource the investigation of, you change the prison demographic. This is class-based rather than race-based, so far (though racism's heritage is still a class divide in US society, hence the relevance).

What has been criminalized within the last hundred years which could be made legal without any net damage to society at large, but which would more than halve prosecutions in the USA? Any offers?

Just an observation - it's as well for the oligarchs that recreational drugs are prohibited because that prohibition has spawned massive amounts of serious "street" crime which has occupied the attention of the ordinary person who then doesn't see the white collar criminals helping themselves.

Self-evident of course and ultimately it's a pointless observation but I feel better for having made it.

Sorry for the impulsive observation, I shall restrain myself, perhaps, in future.

[anastrophe]

Originally Posted by spot

And you're the second person not to have thrown his hands up in the air and refused point-blank to believe the possibility that the statistic might be true.

All I've done so far is to observe two facts, to see what reaction I get. I haven't said blame or guilt or right or wrong and I have especially not said excuse. Perhaps we can jointly suggest a cause. I did ask a few questions which you've chosen to ignore.

Is the correlation a reflection on the nature of slavery?

Is it a coincidence?

cum hoc, ergo propter hoc

chasing logical fallacies accomplishes nothing of value.

What has been criminalized within the last hundred years which could be made legal without any net damage to society at large, but which would more than halve prosecutions in the USA? Any offers?

I think I just made an offer. Did I?

[spot]

Originally Posted by anastrophe

cum hoc, ergo propter hoc

chasing logical fallacies accomplishes nothing of value.

Perhaps you could comment first on the logical fallacy of the original post. That would be very welcome and productive.

Edit: I did, after all, ask in that first post whether this was a coincidence. By all means drop the latin and just say yes, if that's your opinion. I believe there's an association between my two assertions. Why don't you? To be a coincidence would be, in my eyes, astonishing. Would you like me to find corroboration?

What benefit does the latin carry, in your mind, anyway? You must know that anyone wanting to know what you're implying has to look it up - as I had to just now. You can convey the same opinion in English far more informatively.

I ask - and I had to look up to check - because I'd thought my two events had a temporal link more usually described as a Post hoc fallacy. The two are distinguished in these descriptions from Wikipedia:

• Correlation implies causation, also known as cum hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin for "with this, therefore because of this") and false cause, is a logical fallacy by which two events that occur together are prematurely claimed to be cause and effect.
• Post hoc ergo propter hoc is Latin for "after this, therefore because of this." It is often shortened to simply post hoc. Some philosophy books translate the Latin to simply: "If after, then therefore, because." Post hoc, also known as "coincidental correlation" or "false cause," is a logical fallacy which assumes or asserts that if one event happens after another, then the first must be the cause of the second. It is a particularly tempting error because temporal sequence is integral to causality — it is true that a cause always happens before its effect. The fallacy lies in coming to a conclusion based only on the order of events, which is not an accurate indicator. That is to say, it is not always true that the first event caused the second event.

Sticking to English would be so much more sensible, in my opinion.