Classism is a bigger problem than racism in our justice system
I don't believe that there is any place in society today where racism is more prevalent than in our criminal justice system.
And yet, how the unfortunate people that fall into the clutches of the police, courts, and prisons are treated is determined more by the color green, than by black or white.
This may be hard for some people to accept, so I have two studies to back up this claim.
Let's start with police shootings.
For the 441 police killings I researched, the average neighborhood family income where a killing occurred was $57,764. The median family income was $52,907.
Just over five percent of the killings were in neighborhoods with over $100,000 median family income. The richest neighborhood that saw a killing was the 700 block on 14th street in northwest Washington, D.C.
This skews against what the actual income variation in America is. A household income of $100,000 or more puts you in the top 21% of American income earners; this means that incomes below this number are overrepresented by four times compared to the income distribution in how often they are killed by police.
Being black makes you twice as likely to be killed by cops, but being middle-class or poor makes you four times as likely to be killed by cops. In fact, according to this article, "95 percent of reported police killings were in neighborhoods with incomes under $100,000."
If you stay out of middle-class and poor neighborhoods you have almost zero danger of being shot by cops.
Interestingly, commenters to Zaid Jilani's article suggested that rich people don't get shot because they don't commit crimes. So Zaid Jilani followed up his original article with this one, where he makes a very poignant observation.
Jeffrey Reiman is a criminologist, sociologist and philosopher based at American University. In 1979, Reiman published the first edition of the book, The Rich Get Richer, The Poor Get Prison. The book had a simple but counterintuitive thesis: the rich are actually committing society's most destructive crimes in terms of both financial damage and loss of human lives, but our criminal justice system is harshest toward the poorest Americans, whose crimes inflict the least damage.
"If it takes you an hour to read this chapter, by the time you reach the last page, two of your fellow citizens will have been murdered. During that same time, more than six Americans will die as a result of unhealthy or unsafe conditions in the workplace. Although these work- related deaths were due to human actions, they are not called murders. Why not? Doesn't a crime by any other name still cause misery and suffering? What's in a name?"
The poor commit the lion's share of street crime, but widespread, destructive crime is the domain of the wealthy.
Most people survive their encounter with the cops, and thus enter the Orwellian-named criminal justice system. From here the classism becomes even more measurable.
Lewis discovered that race in itself makes no statistically significant difference for three out of the four criminal justice outcomes:
Now, a couple immediate caveats are necessary. First, there is a purely race-based difference in the likelihood of being imprisoned for over a year, and it is not small. Lowest-class blacks are about twice as likely to experience this, and it's also the worst outcome of the bunch.Second, this result in no way diminishes the extent of racist outcomes in the criminal justice system. Instead, it demonstrates that racism is expressed to a very great degree through disproportionate impoverishment. The above charts show that poor white Americans get treated nearly as badly as poor black ones — but there are dramatically more poor black people as a share of their population
Lewis conducts a counterfactual simply leveling black men up to an equivalent class structure of whites (that is, imagining a different world that is unchanged except that black and white men are equally distributed through the class groups, with 20 percent in each one), and finds it would reduce the black-white gap in the four criminal justice outcomes by between 54 and 85 percent
But as seen above, the level of absolute oppression in the bottom class is still enormous, for both black and white men. If we wanted to simply reduce police oppression to the greatest extent possible with economic policy, the best solution would be to just attack the existence of the bottom class altogether, wrenching down economic inequality by boosting up all of the poorest Americans regardless of race.
This is actually a brilliant solution.
On one side are the people who talk about racism all the time. They will never accept a solution that isn't strictly a race-targeted solution.
On the other side are actual people, who will say, "So your plan will reduce police oppression AND boost me up out of chronic poverty? I'm sold!"
Comments
The bail bond system sets up poor folks for incarceration
Lots of folks are in jail and their kids have been farmed out to family or gov't services because they can't make bail. They've not been convicted merely charged. If you can post bail on a non-felony charge, the likelihood is you will never go to jail. If you can't, you're in for months before trial
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/14/america-bail-syste...
The color has always been green rather than black or white. However typically black folk have less of the green.
and we haven't even touched on civil forfeiture
https://www.alternet.org/investigations/police-and-prosecutors-routinely...
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
In Atlanta the mayor is calling for releasing non-violent
offenders on signature bonds rather than cash bonds. Also recently, possession of less than an ounce of grass was reduced to a misdemeanor.
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"
That's good news!
I hope B'ham's new mayor follows suit.
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
well, threats to companies may put whites in jail
most people who chain themselves to a pipe line
or go to standing rock are not in the top income class
but a few are
OHIO AND IOWA ARE THE LATEST OF EIGHT STATES TO CONSIDER ANTI-PROTEST BILLS AIMED AT PIPELINE OPPONENTS
education system to the rescue
these guys have too much money
buying the country and the resources and private schools
bet that there not too many poor people in these schools
Koch family to open a new kind of private school: No teachers, no homework, no grades
And put them on college campuses as a step to further take over "higher" education
First it is Kansas
Oh Great! Following MIT.
MIT would go out of business without the military and surveillance spending
The intersectional and salt-white porkies will never, ever
talk about class. The last thing these assholes want is people working together to better their conditions. After all, there's no money to be made in that.
It's not like 'Murica has any real potential for revolt anyway. We're all too damned comfortable.
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
They are trying to take over schools
...and it is frightening.
GOP fat cats who make up the powerful donor network led by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch recently met in California and declared their intention to “fundamentally transform America’s education system,” including the K-12 sector.
http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/how-public-schools-became-the-koc...
They have long been in the arena of colleges and universities - setting up departments dictating the faculty and courses taught - but now they turn to K-12. What a nightmare. As though were are not already a nation of non-thinkers.
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
All of the ivies are owned by them already.
Last thing they want is "free" anything let alone public universities.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
From The Dawn of Time
The rich man has oppressed the poor man. On every continent, regardless of invisible geographic boundaries, race or tribal affiliation the political and social heirarchy is based on wealth.
Do China, Russia and South America have racial divides or economic divides? Was the feudal divide of Britain economic or racial?
The artificial construct of "whiteness" is a recent cultural development that has been well covered here at c99p and I have no doubt that we are well aware that the "science" of eugenics was and is as American as apple pie:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
Social Darwinism? The Prosperity Gospel? Divide and conquer; same as it ever was.
"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn
gjohnsit
I got skewered as a racist by the intersectional liberals for daring to suggest that money, not civil rights, not human rights, was the great equalizer. Pipelines generally impact and are protested most by native Americans. They are getting beat to shit, shot, and sent to jail for years. Where is BLM? Where is the #resist liberal? Not a peep. Guess native Americans are the wrong color.
gjohnsit you should be writing professionally. Do you send your material around? You make hash out of Shaun King and the Intercept hired him.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
This is one of the first reasons I
decided to leave that other place. The edict pushed me over that edge but I myself got skewered a couple of times for pointing out the economics IS the problem and a driver of much racism. Basically, I was told that its privileged of me to point that out and that we don't "have time" to worry about that when people are being killed and deported. The initial rearing of the head of identity only at that place, no comprehensive arguments need apply.
Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur
I agree, gjohnsit writes til the blood comes out of his
fingertips and he IS a professional writer. I don't know, if he has such a job already somewhere, but if he doesn't write anywhere for money, he should. Nobody there to take his articles? What a shame!
Ja, only in America...
May be he should try to send his articles over to European outlets. Over there they don't have enough people who go in details like gjohnsit does. At least I believe that.
https://www.euronews.com/live
That's very kind
I guess I probably should test the waters, but I haven't.
@gjohnsit @Meteor Man For China there's
For China there's Tibet, and the Uighurs.
@dkmich It's gotten worse, over
It's gotten worse, over there. No deviation, no toleration at all.
That would explain this
I am yelling about my personal hobby horse, but
so be it.
This shows why basic income plans are doomed to failure. Incomes are a bell curve - a horribly skewed bell curve, but a bell curve. Plot it out: x% makes less than $20k, x% makes 20 - 50k, x% makes 50 - 100k, x% makes more. Now give everyone say, $15K. All you do is move the bell curve; the behavior patterns that are generated by position on the bell curve will not change. All right, there will be some benefit, but it will be small, and will only last until the minimum cost of a decent life catch up - when the minimum rent in Davenport, Iowa inflates to San Francisco levels, just because the poor(ish) people of Davenport can now afford it. (or not)
My idea, a mandatory minimum income, would be much better. Plot it this way: x% make say $25k. The less than 20k demographic disappears. The 20 - 50% does not change, but internally it shifts downward, as people who are busting their asses to make $32k refuse to sacrifice their lives for a measly $7k. But the 50 - 100k and 100k+ classes do not change. The bell curve becomes a ski slope. The amount of money required to live a decent life does not change, just the number of people who can afford that minimum actually increases. Only the number of people making less than enough disappears. The social consequences of being low to middle income will not be completely eliminated, but the impact of extreme poverty will. Actually, there will be some short term negative consequences - a large percentage of the population "will have nothing to do", and there will be some social strain, but it won't take long before there will be an explosion of (mostly bad, let's be honest) rap groups and barbershop quartets and softball players and fantasy novelists and bird watchers. There will be a shortage of nursing home workers and janitors (until the pay scale catches up) but there will be no shortage of day care workers, heck, there will be volunteers.
On to Biden since 1973
Good points. Makes sense.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Good essay.
Comparing the cost of crime:
I Think an Even Better Indicator is Connection to Corporate.
A minimum wage job at Wal Mart is not the same as a more than minimum wage job at the Barber Shop, or the local convenience shop.
A solid connection to corporate, usually via employment, I believe is the #1 predictor of prison time. Respectable people have attachment to corporate. Those of us who don't are just rabble rousing moochers and eaters that don't "live in the real world".
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu