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[In 2013] about 10% of the population over 12 years of age had used illegal drugs in the previous year, and that this use was more or less evenly distributed across the largest racial groups: 8.8% for Hispanics, 9.5% for whites and 10.5% percent for African Americans.
Convictions for drug crimes are another matter entirely. Thirty-three percent of those serving prison terms for drug offenses are African Americans, two-and-a-half times their proportion in the population. [...] Overall African Americans are about five times as likely to go to prison for drug possession as whites, and judging from exonerations, innocent black people are about 12 times more likely to be convicted of drug crimes than innocent white people.
[...] Sixty percent of the drug exonerations we know about occurred in Harris County, Texas, home to Houston (133/221). The defendants in these cases pled guilty to drug possession before the supposed drugs they possessed were tested in a crime lab, and were exonerated weeks, months or years later after testing was done and no illegal drugs were found. Why did these defendants plead guilty even though they possessed no controlled substances? Some may have had powders or pills that they thought contained illegal drugs but did not. As far as we can tell, however, most pled guilty to get out of jail.
[...] Most, if not all of these innocent black defendants in Harris County pled guilty rather than go to trial because it was their best option, given that they had been arrested and charged, and were held in jail. But why were so many innocent black defendants arrested for drug possession when there is no reason to believe that African Americans are more likely than whites to use illegal drugs?
Two-thirds of the arrests in the Harris County guilty-plea exoneration cases (89/133) were based on cheap and notoriously inaccurate "presumptive" field tests for drugs, usually on substances found in searches following traffic stops. Anybody who is subjected to that process is at risk of false arrest and conviction. Across the country, African Americans drivers are about as likely to be stopped as white drivers, but after that, they are three times as likely to be searched. As a result, they bear much of the brunt of drug-law enforcement—including false drug possession convictions, which may number in the thousands if not tens of thousands a year.
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Race_and_Wrongful_Convictions.pdf
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Sunday March 12 2017, @12:46PM (6 children)
The logical mistake in the argument is it jumps from total use rates to prison convictions which misses at least four logical jumps where the initial factoid may no longer apply:
1) Locally the cops will harrass or misdemeanor most casual users, the stereotypical college kid with a baggie of weed in his backpack. Dealers will get the revolving door "justice" system which eventually gets around to putting them in prison. So as a thought experiment take the first factoid as true (may not be) and assume 10% of white folk are weed smoking college kids and hippies and 10% of black folk are heroin dealers. Outcomes are going to be a bit different based on business model and quantity at arrest time.
2) A classic drug argument that no one outside of libertarian circles cared about is in the 80s if you cooked coke into crack after the anti-crack laws took hold because you were black, you got tons of prison, whereas selling coke "paleo" "raw food" or "vegan" style to white folk to sniff instead of smoke was always much milder punishment. As if there was kosher and non-kosher coke with differing punishments based solely on serving style. Would not be surprised to hear "white folk drugs" in 2017 have different punishments from "black folks drugs" in 2017. If black folks want to get punished more, they can use black drugs or get punished less by using white drugs its a free country and if dumb people intentionally choose to suffer I don't see it as my place to prevent them from getting what they clearly enjoy. On a large scale its an injustice that black soul food cooking drugs is punished, but on a small scale its just stupidity and they deserve what they get.
3) The data might be wrong, in which case its not much of an argument.
4) Along the lines of #2, different drugs have different lifespans. For instance my old neighbor took most of a lifetime to accumulate more than a half dozen drunk driving convictions and finally scored years of prison time pled down to almost a year of work release if I recall. Anyway for the sake of argument lets say race A likes to smoke weed and that kills them from cancer in, on average, 200 years, meaning most users will live a full although stoned life and for most users the only negative effect on their lives is the cops and justice system. And lets say heroin kills its users on average in a decade. That might actually be high, but the exact numbers don't matter. Say every decade a user has an "interaction" with the police and injustice system from random stop and frisk or bad luck or whatever it don't matter. Obviously the weed smoker on average is going to experience around 6, 7, 8 police interactions in his weed smoking lifespan. Obviously only half the heroin users will live long enough to experience more than 1 police interaction in their careers. So if the average drug using white is popping pills and heroin their death rate is so high they'll never interact with the cops much other than the cops picking up their body, while if the average drug using black is blazing weed for his entire life he's statistically likely to live so long the cops will harass him for at least half a century and eventually after the 3rd 4th 5th arrest they toss him in the can for a couple years, and after he gets out he blazes up again and gets arrested for a 6th time. On paper the situation looks dismal for blacks but the fact they're not dying young is actually pretty good, assuming you think prison is a superior experience to death.
There is no binary requirement that only one of the above is true. The most likely outcome is something like the initial factoid was false due to sample selection bias (survey at a NORML rally or prison survey or whatever) while simultaneously the average white user is more likely to die of heroin and the average black weed dealer is more likely to visit the jail than the coroner and simultaneously the average white weed smoking college kid isn't getting 30 yrs in prison while the most extreme black heroin dealer could get 30 yrs maybe if combined with some conspiracy and murder charges.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @01:00PM (4 children)
Excellent rationalization. The world is just.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday March 12 2017, @02:01PM (3 children)
Excellent rationalization. The world is just.
Its hard to figure out the original logical fallacies because there are so many in the summary. Its like the whole wikipedia page came to visit.
Your specific logical fallacy is "Affirmative conclusion from a negative premise"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies [wikipedia.org]
Aside from the small scale argument this is a classic example of macro vs micro. Why all the focus on the micro-injustice, which admittedly is micro-interesting, when the macro problem is so much more interesting?
At the macro level, no one would disagree with the idea that neighborhoods are better when they have fewer criminals and laws are enforced, that most neighborhoods in the country are racially segregated to some extent. So if you assume all the propositions in the article ... black kids are being unfairly rewarded by growing up in neighborhoods with unfairly lower crime than white kids, because black criminals are being segregated from society in prison FAR more than white criminals are, to the extreme that innocent blacks are going to prison while criminal whites are at home screwing up their neighborhoods and screwing up the next generation of white kids. That seems rather unfair to white people, especially our most vulnerable such as kids, who did nothing wrong yet have to grow up in a den of white neighborhood criminality, whereas the black kids are growing up in a crime free paradise where all the criminals, plus a little extra, are all in prison far away from society, unable to ruin future black culture. Won't anyone think of the (white) children?
In summary the article points out the justice system in Texas is intensely anti-white because criminal activity levels are constant by race (um... OK) and Texas is not policing the white community which therefore must be absolutely overrun with white crime, compared to the tranquil, safe and heavily police enforced black communities.
The article is highly racist because it implies some basic human biological differences exist in that white folk and black folk seem to respond to law enforcement pressure racially differently, despite as the article claims being equally criminal in desire and private action. The article is white supremacist in that it implies whites are smarter so they don't get caught and don't poop where they sleep WRT ruining their own neighborhoods, while implying that decades of evolutionary selection pressure STILL haven't taught the blacks a single lesson and they're still getting busted on a regular basis, the article is implying a genetic biological racial IQ difference.
The implied macro level conclusions of the article seem rather fascist by SN standards or any standards. Well, reality does have built in political biases, but still...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @04:44PM (1 child)
implying that decades of evolutionary selection pressure STILL haven't taught the blacks a single lesson and they're still getting busted on a regular basis, the article is implying a genetic biological racial IQ difference
Yep, I knew it. The world is just.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @05:59PM
implying that decades of evolutionary selection pressure STILL haven't taught the blacks a single lesson and they're still getting busted on a regular basis, the article is implying a genetic biological racial IQ difference
Yep, I knew it. The world is just.
... and VLM is a fucking racist who finds justification for his racism where ever he looks.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday March 12 2017, @07:14PM
> implying that decades of evolutionary selection pressure STILL haven't taught the blacks a single lesson and they're still getting busted on a regular basis, the article is implying a genetic biological racial IQ difference
Jesus motocrossing Christ. We GET it, you're an irredeemable husk of a human being who's sunk so low you'd need to say "Sir" to a snake's gut in a wagon rut. Enough already; you're run out of anything new or original to say. Now you're just getting boring.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Troll) by khallow on Sunday March 12 2017, @04:01PM
If black folks want to get punished more, they can use black drugs or get punished less by using white drugs its a free country and if dumb people intentionally choose to suffer I don't see it as my place to prevent them from getting what they clearly enjoy. On a large scale its an injustice that black soul food cooking drugs is punished, but on a small scale its just stupidity and they deserve what they get.
The key is that "black drugs" are cheaper for the dose and can be purchased in smaller lots. Both are important for poor drug users. It's straightforward economics. For example: [wikipedia.org]
In the early 1980s, the majority of cocaine being shipped to the United States, landing in Miami, was coming through the Bahamas and Dominican Republic.[1] Soon there was a huge glut of cocaine powder in these islands, which caused the price to drop by as much as 80 percent.[1] Faced with dropping prices for their illegal product, drug dealers in Los Angeles and Oakland made a decision to convert the powder to "crack," a solid smokeable form of cocaine, that could be sold in smaller quantities, to more people. It was cheap, simple to produce, ready to use, and highly profitable for dealers to develop.[1] As early as 1981, reports of crack were appearing in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego, Miami, Houston, and in the Caribbean.[1]
Initially, crack had higher purity than street powder.[2] Around 1984, powder cocaine was available on the street at an average of 55 percent purity for $100 per gram (equivalent to $230 in 2016), and crack was sold at average purity levels of 80-plus percent for the same price.[1] In some major cities, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Houston and Detroit, one dosage unit of crack could be obtained for as little as $2.50 (equivalent to $5.76 in 2016).[1]