US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1543

On December 25 2014 10:26 Aveng3r wrote:

Your kind of writing a lot without actually saying anything. I can't make heads or tails if your points, what message are you trying to convey exactly?

On December 25 2014 10:41 Aveng3r wrote:

normally no, but with your posts its proving difficult

but hey thanks for not being rude about it, merry christmas to you too!

On December 25 2014 10:39 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Sure, here's a few:

"My point is the media and a lot of people in this thread give excuse, and contextualize only because by doing so they know it will pass on prejudgment on the victim and the situation that will inevitably "excuse" the act. Somehow we don't contextualize in some other cases - like in banking scandals, where it's always white people from rich neighborhood ! Why ? "

Yeah, no one ever assumes the greedy rich guy narrative, the racist white cop narrative or the gentle giant black guy narrative.

"Somehow, a kid killing another kid in the same difficult neighborhood, or a guy selling drugs has no excuse, despite (most of time) some really really troubling biography. But a cops, representing the state, and thus normally held to a higher standard, has all the excuse of the world and we should have a "balanced narrative"."

Nonsense. People talk about 'difficult upbringing' all the time. Just look at the last few cases in this thread. Mike Brown started out as an oppressed gentile giant in a rough, neighborhood full of racist white cops.

"In a country where a 13 years old got life sentence for killing another kid while practicing wrestling move, in that kind of harsh country that has the habit to send to jail black people who do "bad things" no matter their personnal history, we should have a "balanced narrative", but please only when it's a police officer killing a black dude."

We don't send blacks to jail for ambiguous crimes of "bad things" and personal history is considered when sentencing / parole comes up.

On December 25 2014 11:13 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

You aren't making sense. You're just saying things without justification that do not make good arguments. Sometimes cops are exonerated for shootings, sometimes not. Sometimes people are given lighter sentencing because of their rough circumstances, sometimes not. You seem to have done nothing but assemble a view based on, I don't know what. Some sort of weak literary critique?

On December 25 2014 11:25 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Yes, yes, yes.

Are you telling me that you are not aware of these things? Yet you have such a strong opinion? WTF do you base your opinions on???

On December 25 2014 11:32 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
Of course that's a problem. Where did I say it wasn't?
Edit: oh, I didn't 'connect the dots' based off of WhiteDog's stellar analytical device of closing one's eyes and imagining the reason.

On December 25 2014 11:40 Aveng3r wrote:
Whitedog I need to see some verification for

"There are more black males in prison than in college"
And
"1 in 3 black males will end up in jail"

I could be wrong but neither of those seems correct.

The bit about "the system is designed to put those with difficulties in jail" is crap

Several studies have concluded that overall, more black males are in prison than are enrolled in colleges and universities. In 2000 there were 791,600 black men in prison and 603,032 enrolled in college versus 1980, when there were 143,000 black men in prison and 463,700 enrolled in college.

A black male born in 1991 has a 29% chance of spending time in prison at some point in his life.
Nearly one in three African American males aged 20–29 are under some form of criminal justice supervision whether imprisoned, jailed, on parole or probation.

African-American men comprise a mere 6% of the American population, but according to the Department of Justice, they make up nearly half of the 2 million inmates in U.S. jails or prisons. These men are largely imprisoned for non-violent offenses.

The bit about "the system is designed to put those with difficulties in jail" is crap

THE largest mental health center in America is a huge compound here in Chicago, with thousands of people suffering from manias, psychoses and other disorders, all surrounded by high fences and barbed wire.

Just one thing: It’s a jail. The only way to get treatment is to be arrested.

Psychiatric disorders are the only kind of sickness that we as a society regularly respond to not with sympathy but with handcuffs and incarceration. And as more humane and cost-effective ways of treating mental illness have been cut back, we increasingly resort to the law-enforcement toolbox: jails and prisons.

More than half of prisoners in the United States have a mental health problem, according to a 2006 Justice Department study. Among female inmates, almost three-quarters have a mental disorder.

In the jail here, some prisoners sit on their beds all day long, lost in their delusions, oblivious to their surroundings, hearing voices, sometimes talking back to them. The first person to say that this system is barbaric is their jailer.

“It’s criminalizing mental illness,” the Cook County sheriff, Thomas Dart, told me as he showed me the jail, on a day when 60 percent of the jail’s intake reported that they had been diagnosed with mental illness. Dart says the system is abhorrent and senseless, as well as an astronomically expensive way to treat mental illness — but that he has no choice but to accept schizophrenic, bipolar, depressive and psychotic prisoners delivered by local police forces.

Mental Health Problems of Prison and Jail Inmates
At midyear 2005 more than half of all prison and jail inmates had a mental health problem, including 705,600 inmates in State prisons, 78,800 in Federal prisons, and 479,900 in local jails.These estimates represented 56% of State prisoners, 45% of Federal prisoners, and 64% of jail inmates.

On December 25 2014 12:13 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

But I didn't say that it wasn't a problem. I argued with your opinion of the causes and implications.

I don't have time to get into great detail, but citing examples of white cops being cast in a poor light or blacks cast in a good light in mainstream media isn't hard. So your proposition that cops are portrayed as angels and blacks as criminals isn't accurate. Just look at Treyvon Martin and Mike Brown - both had a very positive initial image in the media that tarnished with time.

Lots of factors go into sentencing and people circumstances do get brought up. That doesn't give people a get out of jail free card, however so people in high crime communities still have more people winding up in jail. As to why more blacks wind up in jail, that's a complex issue and just arguing that there's an implicit policy to just lock up blacks is a very shallow interpretation of reality.

As for police exonerations, yes they're frequent, but cops can and do go to jail for their on-duty actions.

Nearly two times a week in the United States, a white police officer killed a black person during a seven-year period ending in 2012, according to the most recent accounts of justifiable homicide reported to the FBI.

On average, there were 96 such incidents among at least 400 police killings each year that were reported to the FBI by local police. The numbers appear to show that the shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., last Saturday was not an isolated event in American policing.

The reports show that 18% of the blacks killed during those seven years were under age 21, compared to 8.7% of whites. The victim in Ferguson was 18-year-old Michael Brown.