40 reasons why our jails are full of Black and Poor people

[bravenak]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-quigley/40-reasons-why-our-jails-are-full-of-black-and-poor-people_b_7492902.html

[daleanime]

1. K&R.....

[octoberlib]

2. I'd like to hear some presidential candidates talk about this and tell us what

they're going to do to fix it.
The statistics are shocking. Wow.


Nineteen. Poor people have to rely on public defenders. Though anyone threatened with even a day in jail is entitled to a lawyer, the reality is much different. Many poor people facing misdemeanor charges never see a lawyer at all. For example, in Delaware more than 75 percent of the people in its Court of Common Pleas never speak to a lawyer. A study of Jackson County Michigan found 95 percent of people facing misdemeanors waived their right to an attorney and have plead guilty rather than pay a $240 charge for a public defender. Thirteen states have no state structure at all to make sure people have access to public defenders in misdemeanor courts.

Twenty-One. Lots of poor people plead guilty. Lack of adequate public defense leads many people in prison to plead guilty. The American Bar Association reviewed the U.S. public defender system and concluded it lacked fundamental fairness and put poor people at constant risk of wrongful conviction.


Twenty-Five. Average prison sentences are much longer than they used to be, especially for people of color. Since 1990, the average time for property crimes has gone up 24 percent and time for drug crimes has gone up 36 percent. In the U.S. federal system, nearly 75 percent of the people sent to prison for drug offenses are Black or Latino.

Twenty-Six. There is about a 70 percent chance that an African American man without a high school diploma will be imprisoned by the time he reaches his mid-thirties; the rate for white males without a high school diploma is 53 percent lower. In the 1980, there was only an eight percent difference. In New York City, for example, Blacks are jailed at nearly 12 times the rate of whites and Latinos more than five times the rate of whites.

[bravenak]

6. Me too.

They can't keep ignoring this issue forever. We are at the breaking point. I see more prison riots in our future if we go on like this.
I've been hearing rhetoric, but no plans or solutions.

[RobertEarl]

75. What is your solution, or plan?

If you chose Bernie as your candidate, it will help, because Bernie is for justice.

The problem is that if you have money, you can hire a good lawyer who can keep you out of jail. Like cheney. So a solution is economic equality and Bernie becoming president is a step in that direction. How's that for a plan?

[TheKentuckian]

107. End the failed and stupid drug war, ban private prisons, outlaw quotas and institute

lucrative whistle blower rewards and personel audits to help ensure they stay banned, redistribute fines, minimize court costs, ban "Terry" stops requiring officers to articulate specific reasonable suspicion to public dispatch on public record, refuse to allow peace officers to be involved in terrorism work as a base function allowing it to be the new drug war, end confiscation other than to return other people's property, get black people some resources so they can fight back against the system instead of have a public defender to run up the white flag to start.

[bravenak]

112. Yep. All that

[qwlauren35]

78. Yup.

Somebody close to me pled guilty for a crime he didn't commit because the public defender told him he would lose if his case went to trial. It has haunted him for life.

This list makes me ill. And I only got to number 13.

[qwlauren35]

81. Not going to happen.

The incarcerated can't vote, and many ex-cons in various states can't vote. And many poor people are too discouraged to vote, or can't take time off from work to vote and don't know about the provisions of absentee voting, and black people... "slaves to the Democratic Party".

No one has any reason to make this a prominent issue or election platform. None at all.

Frankly, if a Republican had a plan for ending disparities in the criminal justice system, so that poor people and black people were not unfairly stopped, searched, arrested, held without reasonable bond, unable to afford a lawyer, talked into pleading guilty, held for longer sentences, etc. well, I'd be tempted to vote Republican.

[bravenak]

86. I feel you.

[gollygee]

3. More examples in there

about how racism causes economic injustice.

[bravenak]

4. Racism seems to be one of the biggest factors.

[ismnotwasm]

14. +1000

[Number23]

87. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely.

[cali]

5. Good piece. Here's some of it:

One. It is not just about crime. Our jails and prisons have grown from holding about 500,000 people in 1980 to 2.2 million today. The fact is that crime rates have risen and fallen/a> independently of our growing incarceration rates.

Two. Police discriminate. The first step in putting people in jail starts with interactions between police and people. From the very beginning, Black and poor people are targeted by the police. Police departments have engaged in campaigns of stopping and frisking people who are walking, mostly poor people and people of color, without cause for decades. Recently New York City lost a federal civil rights challenge to their police stop and frisk practices by the Center for Constitutional Rights during which police stopped over 500,000 people annually without any indication that the people stopped had been involved in any crime at all. About 80 percent of those stops were of Black and Latinos who compromise 25 and 28 percent of N.Y.C.'s total population. Chicago police do the same thing stopping even more people also in a racially discriminatory way with 72 percent of the stops of Black people even though the city is 32 percent Black.

Three. Police traffic stops also racially target people in cars. Black drivers are 31 percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers and Hispanic drivers are 23 percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers. Connecticut, in an April 2015 report, on 620,000 traffic stops which revealed widespread racial profiling, particularly during daylight hours when the race of driver was more visible.

<snip>

Twenty-Eight. Prison has become a very big private business. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) owns and runs 67 for-profit jails in 20 states with over 90,000 beds. Along with GEO (formerly Wackenhut), these two private prison companies have donated more than $10 million to candidates and spent another $25 million lobbying according to the Washington Post. They lobby for more incarceration and have doubled the number of prisoners they hold over the past ten years.

<snip>

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-quigley/40-reasons-why-our-jails-are-full-of-black-and-poor-people_b_7492902.html

[bravenak]

7. Thank you.

I'm on my ipad so it was acting stank when I tried to copy.

[cali]

19. yeah, I figured that was it.

[BeanMusical]

41. Thanks for posting the OP despite the iPad problem.

[bravenak]

44. No problem.

[BeanMusical]

42. Thanks Cali.

[Starry Messenger]

8. K&R

It's lucrative and enforces the racial caste system.

[bravenak]

11. Very lucrative.nt

[jwirr]

9. Excellent article. And a lot of those causes could be easily ended. First of all those who are

mentally ill should be separated out of the jail system like they used to be. That is an issue that infuriates me as I have family members dating back 5 generations and know that they do not need incarceration. Hopefully since the dept. of justice made this study they will work on changing those situations.

[bravenak]

10. I agree. The mentally ill have gotten tossed in with everybody else.

Hopefully making people aware of what is going on will help our nation get the will to change.

[jwirr]

17. I am with you on all of this. Here on the reservation in MN many of those used to apply but in

recent years we have our own police force and that helps a lot. While just common sense should say that most of those 40 reasons should be corrected if it is left to the white populations they will not change them - mostly because they do not even understand the situation. It is so important to get out the vote in places like Ferguson MO but I also recognize that it is hard to see how our vote makes any difference most of the time. But it is the only peaceful way.

[bravenak]

18. I was glad to see the people of Ferguson vote out some of their council members.

I hope they keep voting. It is hard to see your vote count sometimes, but I can just look at how much progress we made in my state in the last few years. We got our minimum wages tied to inflation by voting over the heads of our governing officials. It may take a whole lot if that to make progress, but it shows that it can be done and won.

[jwirr]

22. In the mean time we here on DU could work together to contact our legislators about issues like

the incarceration of the mentally ill into jails and some of the other things that just make common sense. It might help to contact the justice dept. also as I think we have a very good lady as the head of that now.

[bravenak]

24. That is a great idea.

I hope she can sort out some of this mess during her term.

[Jefferson23]

12. Accurate account, and this one freaks me out all the time. One reads these stories

for years, and I feel sick when I do. We have lost our soul, no one should condone the
the disregard for our youth..we are so god damn punitive:

Eight. In schools, African American kids are much more likely to be referred to the police than other kids. African American students are 16 percent of those enrolled in schools but 27 percent of those referred to the police. Kids with disabilities are discriminated against at about the same rate because they are 14 percent of those enrolled in school and 26 of those referred to the police.

Just think what a society reaps in return for this disgrace.

[bravenak]

15. We throw people away like garbage.

[ismnotwasm]

13. K&R

With great enthusiasm

[bravenak]

16. Thank you!

[underpants]

20. Marking for later read

Thanks

[KittyWampus]

21. There's a lot to take in. It goes deep. Where to start?

Where to start?

[bravenak]

23. I know.

I have no idea where to start. I suppose we start at the beginning, the initial stops.

[questionseverything]

76. i think the place to start is with the for profit prison industry

and EVERY stop should be based on probable cause,nothing less

[bravenak]

82. Works for me!!

[Starry Messenger]

35. In CA, we've started a few things.

Downgraded smaller nonviolent crimes that were charged as felonies to misdemeanors.

That doesn't help with the lopsided traffic stops though. Or the sucking spiral of being trapped in the justice system as a Black person.

[erronis]

25. A great piece on HuffPo (as good as some of them used to be)

Thanks for posting this on DU. I don't usually visit HuffPo after it lost its focus - or rather gained more of a focus on tit-tillation. Maybe I'll have to find a way to peruse and block all the fox-style eye-grabbing garbage.

[bravenak]

26. I know what you mean about Huffpo.

I used to read it all the time before they sold themselves.

[Mr Dixon]

27. IMO

If anyone is still confused about the overall hopelessness, of the poor and minorities please read. I make no excuse for people that break the law, however if you look at the bigger picture is becomes pretty clear the money is at the center of the incarceration system.

[bravenak]

28. Racism and money.

We take money from the poor (from housing, welfare, food-stamps) to build jails to profit from their misery.

[Mr Dixon]

30. SAD

Agreed, however I'm not surprised this attaches to the divide and conquer narrative this country was built/stolen/created.

[mountain grammy]

29. From the article.. sums it up nicely.

What does it say about our society that it uses its jails and prisons as the primary detention facilities for poor and black and brown people who have been racially targeted and jail them with the mentally ill and chemically dependent? The current criminal system has dozens of moving parts from the legislators who create the laws, to the police who enforce them, to the courts which apply them, to the jails and prison which house the people caught up in the system, to the public and business community who decides whom to hire, to all of us who either do something or turn our heads away. These are our brothers and sisters and cousins and friends of our coworkers. There are lots of proposed solutions. To learn more about the problems and the solutions are go to places like The Sentencing Project, the Vera Institute, or the Center for American Progress. Because it's the right thing to do, and because about 95 percent of the people who we send to prison are coming back into our communities.

The American justice system has been mostly unjust since the beginning. The Supreme Court has upheld, at one time or another, slavery, segregation, and police overreach and brutality. State executions took the place of terror lynchings and incarceration became a substitute for segregation.

Once a person gets involved in the justice system, it's hard to get your life back, especially true for minorities. If police and prosecutors want to get a citizen for legitimate or illegitimate reasons, they will usually succeed. The stories of wrongful prosecution are frightening. It seems every day, an American citizen is finally exonerated after spending years, sometimes close to a lifetime, in prison. For every one released, you have to wonder how many more are rotting in prison.

[bravenak]

31. +1

I agree.

[fadedrose]

32. Prisons for profit

Need more prisoners to make more money.

The poor are worth more in jail than on the streets..

That's No. 28 on the list...

[bravenak]

33. It's evil. :(

[Dont call me Shirley]

34. There is zero incentive to stop this practice. The jails and prisons are being filled in the new

era of slave labor.

http://www.justicepolicy.org/news/8751

[bravenak]

36. I keep saying 'prison is the new slavery'.

People used to look at me crazy, but not so much these days.

[Dont call me Shirley]

37. The white descendants of the slave owners never gave up their family's vengeance. The east india

tea company descendants never gave up their family's vengeance. The descendants of the early fascists never gave up their family's vengeance. It is the new revolutionary and civil and world wars being played on a mass scale, this time economically, judicially and legislatively.

You are one very sane woman, bravenak.

[bravenak]

38. I agree. They are not able to let go of the hate.

We could shame them... But they lack shame.

[qwlauren35]

105. A few years ago

I saw a documentary on how white Southerners realized that incarceration could become the new slavery. It started right after Reconstruction. There were vagrancy laws, and black men were picked up en masse just for standing around doing nothing. And put to work on farms and in mines. That's how Birmingham's steel industry was run. And with it, was the loophole in the Constitution that disenfranchised convicts and in some states, ex-convicts. We won the right to vote and they found a legal way to eliminate it, even without Jim Crow and literacy tests and all of that other bullsh*t.

So, while "prison is the new slavery", the put-black-men-in-prison game has been going on for pretty much 150 years.

[bravenak]

111. I agree with this.

It is my belief that prison is a way to keep black men out of society and from being competition. It also causes poverty through single parenting by the mothers. It's almost like the prisons are big plantations and the profit compNies are the slavemasters. Well, not almost.

[LittleGirl]

39. Those stats are just sad and horrible

to read. The mentally ill should be served in hospitals (that Reagan closed) and drug dependent should be at rehab centers to help them. Of course, we need to legalize pot so that the pot smokers don't have to serve time either. Pay a fine and be done with it.

I've bookmarked this post because it is so important and yes, where are the politicians and why isn't this a topic? For-profit prisons are a disgrace to our citizens. Thanks for sharing.

[bravenak]

40. Yes. We have to find better ways to deal with the mentally ill and drug abusers.

In medical setting, imo. And stop locking up so many able bodied non violent offenders. They can do community service and job training. It costs more to jail a thief than to send him to trade school. And drug dealers... May as well send them to business school. Probably will be more ethical than our dear Wall Street Bankers. This drug war is stupid and racist.

[LittleGirl]

61. it is most definately.

Thanks for your posts!

[Rex]

43. I better hear something from our candidates about social and economic injustice

toward POC and other minorities. And what they plan on doing about it. Also, the apparent crisis with police brutality - because it is very much a national crisis.

[bravenak]

45. Agreed. I'm waiting. But not patiently.

[blackspade]

46. You only need one: $$$$

K&R

[bravenak]

47. And race. Race seems to trump money.

Notice how people have to be poor to be seen as jailable. Unless they are black or brown.

[blackspade]

50. Your point is well taken.

I would argue though that one major factor in racial disparities within the modern 'justice' system is a history of the use of race as a justification for an economic system that is built to exploit the labor of people of color.
Without the use of racist physical, intellectual, and moral paradigms the capitalist system that exploits their labor will not stand.

I guess my point is that the capitalist system exploits poor minorities and uses racism as a tool to do it.
But the day is coming when the minority will be the majority.

[bravenak]

51. I hope it makes a difference.

I get what you mean. We're just coming at it from opposite directions. Either way, it needs to end onve and for all. Might be best to keep attacking it from opposite ends until we win.

[blackspade]

54. We may be coming at it from different angles, but...

we have arrived at the same place.
The exploitation of people of color by a system that views them as a disposable commodity.
The issue that 'white' America needs to wake up to (POC already knew this centuries ago) is that our current economic system is like a cancer that attacks the ones with the least defenses and then moves on to erode the defenses of the next tiers of society (the largely white ones). Until we realize that the system has thrown us all overboard for the benefit of the 1% there will be little change.

The exploitation of people of color in the justice system should be a window into the future for all the rest of us.
Things have to change before we all end up in an open air prison of daily toil and hardship.

[bravenak]

55. Perfect!

It is like looking into the future. Plantations for all. I started writing a book about us in the future. I should really finish it one day. Before it becomes fiction instead of sci fi/ dystopian.

[blackspade]

62. :)

[Oilwellian]

56. Well, this nation has a very bad case...

of affluenza, and unfortunately, I don't see it waning as long as repubs control so many state governments.

[bravenak]

57. I keep hoping they'll just evaporate and let us live.

I think my state is on the verge of shutting down. We had Sarah Palin, then Sean Parnell. I look back on her time in office compared to his and wonder how the hell was she a better Governor. Slowly people up here are waking up to reality. The oil money is going away. Republicans keep giving it all to 'business'. We are dead broke. I have noticed that the Tea Party folks have stfu and disappeared. I hope they move back to where they came from and let us fix our state.

[d_legendary1]

48. A fee for public defenders?

What happened to "you have a right to an attorney. If you can't afford an attorney one will be assigned to you by the courts". I'm guessing that this came about as the result of for-profit prisons greasing up the public officials.

[bravenak]

49. Ain't that some shit?

I'm still trying to understand. The crime bill a la Clinton (Bill) put money into prisons without money for the defense of all of those people we decided to massively incarcerate. They have to take deals or risk a jury (often mostly white, with black suspects, not a good idea). Without bail, they end up in front of a jury looking like shit from stewing in their own stank from jail. It is set up for plea bargains. If you're innocent, you better plea bargain, your lawyer has no time for you, too many cases, not enough resources. If you're guilty, you better plea bargain, your lawyer has no time for you, too many cases, not enough resources.

[Yavin4]

52. In sum, we jail our race, mental health, and poverty problems

A sign of a civilization in decline.

[bravenak]

53. Basically.

[appalachiablue]

58. And we do this for profit, in a supposedly an advanced nation. What a disgrace & injustice.

[cui bono]

70. Except for the ones 'we' kill.

[Yavin4]

72. Yep. Domestic and abroad.

Tax cuts, de-regulate, jail, and kill. The very essence of the Republican platform.

[appalachiablue]

59. Thanks for this article exposing more of US corruption and decline. What a horrible and

profitable system operating in the largest and wealthiest so-called democracy in the world.

[bravenak]

60. I really need to find out how much the are robbing us taxpayers for.

A college education (4 year at state) per prisoner per year. Every felon should have a BA at that price.

[appalachiablue]

63. Plundering taxpayers for exec. salaries and $ for corrupt complicit pols, legislators,

judges and lobbyists is broad and in place now after 30 years. Systems that were once publically operated with low overhead, like hospitals, health ins., medical care, prisons, and public schools are now converting to private, for profit operations- privatization of all, the neoliberal mission.

Financiers will sniff out and try to raid any funds, any where, and especially the public's, often with buy-partisan support. Bank titan Pete Peterson has spent decades and millions trying to break into the Social Security Trust fund- since that money should go to elites, not the people!

News giant Rupert Murdock who knows nothing of education, encouraged the continued race to the trough of K-12 US public education funds in 2011 when he rang the bell, "there's a $500 billion sector that is desperately waiting to be transformed!" (raided). Right, into private, for profit voucher schools without teachers unions and under the direction of neoliberal corporatists like Arne Duncan, Sec. of Education, the Waltons, the Bradley Fnd., Gates and Michelle Rhee.

So rather than educate, employ and treat, we incarcerate, exploit and ruin, based on race, class, illness and vulnerability. Prisoners should have a BA, the least that can be done, also a job when they leave. Expunge records for all released, and soon to be released with non violent offense records. This while the effing system is being broken down. What an injustice to the people, their families and communities.

Murdock's pronouncement on public education, 2011
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/09/rupert-murdoch-news-corp-wireless-generation-education

[bravenak]

64. Thank you for the link.

[lovemydog]

65. Thanks for the good read.

I'm becoming a prison abolitionist. It's horrendously unjust. In particular, I believe we should release all prisoners who are incarcerated on all drug charges. Then release all non-violent offenders. Then consider imprisoning the Wall Street racketeers who helped crash our economy.

[bravenak]

66. I agree. I'm starting to become one too.

Prisons should be for violent people and people who do great harm. Wè can train some of the rest of them to rebuild our infrastructure.

[lovemydog]

68. I first heard the term from looking up the director of Selma.

I was impressed with the movie & looked her up on imdb. Her name is Ava DuVernay. She's quoted there as saying she's a prison abolitionist. I'd never heard it described like that. "I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible." I think that's a great way of framing it. I've been saying it to friends and it has a good ring to it. How we speak and act, I think it can impact others.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1148550/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm

[appalachiablue]

109. I'm highly impressed by Ava Duvernay's work 'Selma' and what I've read and seen of her.

The term prison abolitionist is great, thanks for passing it along.

[lovemydog]

110. Me too appalachiablue. Selma is such a great movie.

She's being discussed as the first woman to direct a Marvel feature. She directed a movie about hip hop, which I plan to see.

Yes, prison abolitionist has a great ring to it. It ties in with history and the constant struggle to expand civil rights.

[qwlauren35]

106. Thank you for that...

"Do great harm". A lot of white collar criminals do great harm, and I don't want them to get away with it.

[raouldukelives]

67. Ask not for whom the bell tolls.

As taxes are evaded by corporations in the interests of shareholders, as our infrastructure crumbles, what is left is angry, confused and staying alive any way it can, by preying on the weakest citizens first.

[cui bono]

69. Though this isn't just a racial component, the privatization of our prisons

leads to the desire for more inmates to raise profits.

Thirty-Eight. The US spends $80 billion on this big business of corrections every year. As a retired criminal court judge I know says, "the high costs of this system would be worth it if the system was actually working and making us safer, but we are not safer, the system is not working, so the actual dollars we are spending are another indication of our failure." The cost of being number one in incarceration is four times higher than it was in 1982. Anyone feeling four times safer than they used to?

Thirty-Nine. Putting more people in jail creates more poverty. The overall poverty rate in our country is undoubtedly higher because of the dramatic increase in incarceration over the past 35 years with one research project estimating poverty would have decreased by 20 percent if we had not put all these extra people in prison. This makes sense given the fact that most all the people brought into the system are poor to begin with, it is now much harder for them to find a job because of the barriers to employment and good jobs erected by a criminal record to those who get out of prison, the increased number of one parent families because of a parent being in jail, and the bans on receiving food stamps and housing assistance.

[bravenak]

71. Yes. Prison keeps families poor.

And the prison industry can never get enough prisoners. So they love kids being poor. Poverty leads to crime and more money for them.

[Sissyk]

73. Thank You! n/t

[bravenak]

74. Welcome!nt

[sheshe2]

77. Thanks for the article, bravenak.

I had read it before and the statistics are staggering.

Whatever you do, don't read the comments.

[bravenak]

83. The comment section is always evil.

Looking at the list put together in that way is like a punch in the gut. It really is as bad as we think. It is actually worse.

[sheshe2]

84. I have to agree with you,

It actually is worse.

[bravenak]

85. At least people aren't pretending nothing is wrong anymore.

I see that as progress. Tiny progress to be sure, but it does not go unnoticed anymore. And people around here cannot say you did not warn them. You did. Many times.

[Solly Mack]

79. K&R

[myrna minx]

80. K&R Thank you for posting.

[scarletwoman]

88. Fantastic piece! I'm so glad you posted it!

While I already was generally aware of how incredibly effed up our criminal "justice" system is, seeing all those points laid out one after the other was absolutely stunning! And absolutely heartbreaking, too.

It's beyond egregious. I do not want to turn my head away, I want to help change this.

[bravenak]

89. Thank you. I feel the same way.

Seeing it all together like this is scary. There is no justice in our system. I'm inclined to say it was designed to be exactly how it is. I will pick the candidate who sees the problem and provides a solution. I feel like coming up with a list of solutions for each point. But it is a daunting task.

[scarletwoman]

90. It appears to me that one of the root problems is the racism of the police.

It's all there in points # 2 through 6.

Two. Police discriminate. The first step in putting people in jail starts with interactions between police and people. From the very beginning, Black and poor people are targeted by the police. Police departments have engaged in campaigns of stopping and frisking people who are walking, mostly poor people and people of color, without cause for decades. Recently New York City lost a federal civil rights challenge to their police stop and frisk practices by the Center for Constitutional Rights during which police stopped over 500,000 people annually without any indication that the people stopped had been involved in any crime at all. About 80 percent of those stops were of Black and Latinos who compromise 25 and 28 percent of N.Y.C.'s total population. Chicago police do the same thing stopping even more people also in a racially discriminatory way with 72 percent of the stops of Black people even though the city is 32 percent Black.

Three. Police traffic stops also racially target people in cars. Black drivers are 31 percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers and Hispanic drivers are 23 percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers. Connecticut, in an April 2015 report, on 620,000 traffic stops which revealed widespread racial profiling, particularly during daylight hours when the race of driver was more visible.

Four. Once stopped, Black and Hispanic motorists are more likely to be given tickets than white drivers stopped for the same offenses.

Five. Once stopped, Blacks and Latinos are also more likely to be searched. DOJ reports Black drivers at traffic stops were searched by police three times more often and Hispanic drivers two times more often than white drivers. A large research study in Kansas City found when police decided to pull over cars for investigatory stops, where officers look into the car's interior, ask probing questions and even search the car, the race of the driver was a clear indicator of who was going to be stopped: 28 percent of young Black males twenty five or younger were stopped in a year's time, versus white men who had 12 percent chance and white women only a seven percent chance. In fact, not until Black men reach 50 years old do their rate of police stops for this kind of treatment dip below those of white men twenty five and under.

Six. Traffic tickets are big business. And even if most people do not go directly to jail for traffic tickets, poor people are hit the worst by these ticket systems. As we saw with Ferguson where some of the towns in St. Louis receive 40 percent or more of their city revenues from traffic tickets, tickets are money makers for towns.

Solution? I don't know, but a start might be a federal law that mandates that all police departments keep a record of the race/ethnicity of those they stop/ticket/arrest with the fed auditing these statistiics. And if (when) the audit reveals racial bias, that police department goes under DOJ monitoring, and the obviously biased police officers get fired.

Of course, that pre-supposes that the DOJ is interested in correcting these injustices.

[BrotherIvan]

91. The end of your post was just what I was thinking this morning

We need monitors of police activity. We need to see statistics to reveal racial profiling and abuse. We need a kind of national database and a government office that is charged with holding cities and counties accountable for their policing. We need to make sure that cities and counties are not making up their revenues on the backs of poor, black, and brown people. They can pull all of this off because no one is looking. They are not held accountable in any way for making sure the justice system is just. The courts need to be examined the same way and if there is discrepancies for sentences, someone from DOJ needs to come in and fix it.

We have schools being taken over for bad test scores. We have people screaming to the high heavens that "bad teachers can't be fired." But what about bad cops? What about racist courts? There is no accountability anywhere in the system.

[scarletwoman]

97. "They can pull all of this off because no one is looking." Exactly!

I totally agree.

There is no accountability anywhere in the system.

And unless we demand it, there will continue to be no accoutability.

[BrotherIvan]

92. Thank you for posting this article

It is important for people to know the facts and to discuss the issue. My only coherent thoughts are above. But something needs to be done right damn now. So much attention is being placed on candidates saying something, but how do we put pressure on the current administration, that will be in office until 2017, to do something now? We can't wait that long. We have to find a way to demand it. I'm not sure how or who or what, but we need to see this as a national crisis.

Best post on DU in a long damn time.

[bravenak]

93. That is my problem too.

How can we make them do something... I am glad that the justice department is investigating different departments, but this needs to be a national thing. We need the power to sanction the police when we see the raw numbers.

[BrotherIvan]

94. Yes, because police departments have local control

I don't even know where to start. I don't even know if legislators can make federal legislation that sticks. I would think the best place to start is with mayors and governors. Maybe if there was a draft of legislation--the liberal version of ALEC--and we could enlist some places to implement it, or even better, come up for a vote.

The other thing that needs to happen is lawsuits that change the law. I remember the prosecutor showing the old law that said an officer could shoot a fleeing suspect (the wrong law on fucking purpose) so someone had to have sued to get the law changed to say it is NOT legal.

The whole problem is so huge I don't even know where to begin and who or what to support.

[bravenak]

95. I agree. We have to come at it from many directions.

[Agschmid]

96. Kick!

[libodem]

98. K&R

[lovemydog]

99. Most in prison haven't had a trial and were encouraged to plea bargain,

as the article points out. Bail and nearly every other aspect of incarceration favors the rich.

This is another example of how local politics matter so much. We must get local and state governments that provide a voice for equality and justice under the law.

And here's a good section from the end of the article:

'These are our brothers and sisters and cousins and friends of our coworkers. There are lots of proposed solutions. To learn more about the problems and the solutions are go to places like The Sentencing Project, the Vera Institute, or the Center for American Progress. Because it's the right thing to do, and because about 95 percent of the people who we send to prison are coming back into our communities.'

[bravenak]

100. +1

[octoberlib]

101. Kick

[chervilant]

102. Bravo, bravenak, for linking this article!

There is about a 70 percent chance that an African American man without a high school diploma will be imprisoned by the time he reaches his mid-thirties; the rate for white males without a high school diploma is 53 percent lower. In the 1980, there was only an eight percent difference. In New York City, for example,Blacks are jailed at nearly 12 times the rate of whites and Latinos more than five times the rate of whites.

In the early 70s, criminology produced reams of research that revealed much of what's been covered in this article. I will assert something I've been saying for quite some time now: we MUST have each others' backs!

Already, I have friends caught in this horrible system. They are young. They WERE vital. I fear they are now lost.

[bravenak]

104. It was a great article.

I also have people in this system and it is rigged.

[me b zola]

103. K&R

[Logical]

108. Good post! I hate how the police are so out of control. nt

[bravenak]

113. Thanks. Me too.

Feel like they are coming for the rest of us soon.