If you use WordPress for your blog, or you read a WordPress blog like this one, then you are aware of a recently-added feature, where WordPress creates links at the end of posts if you read the post in its individual URL (i.e. click the title of any post on this blog, and you’ll see a webpage with that post as the only post, the URL having the number corresponding with the year, month, day, and words of the title separated by dashes). Usually, there are four or so links, sometimes one or more of the links is to the same blog you’re reading. They’re called “Possibly Related Posts,” but take some time to appear in a post after you have created it.
I noticed that a link to this post of mine:
http://countenance.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/the-new-hoosegow/
Was created on this story in this Thai free speech advocacy blog:
http://facthai.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/1-in-31-americans-gaoled-drug-war-chronicle/
Save the last paragraph, which I think is the blogger’s editorial, it’s a reprint of a Pew study about the high rate of American incarceration, and the expense therein to states. Pew suggests that states adopt “community corrections,” i.e. more generous use of probation, and “Impose swift and certain sanctions for offenders who break the rules of their release but who do not commit new crimes.”
The terms of one’s parole or probation only has teeth to begin with because of the threat of actual (re-)incarceration. If prisons are so overcrowded and actual incarceration too expensive (and racially biased) that we can’t imprison anyone but the worst of the worst, then what incentive does a probationee or parolee have to obey the terms of their probation or parole? They can’t be punished by any means worse than probation or parole, except for the concept of home confinement — but still, if prison is out of the question, all a violation of leaving one’s confined home will get you is more home confinement.
Like I said, this particular blog added its own one-paragraph editorial at the end, and with the blog post title being “1 in 31 Americans gaoled,” their theory is that the jails and prisons are overcrowded because the possession or use of certain drugs is illegal. All the while the Pew report which they reprint states that black adults are most likely of any racial group to be incarcerated. There is a faulty causation here, because in heavily black jurisdictions, as a generality, the prosecutors are black or white liberal, the judges are black or white liberal, and the juries are mostly black. And the defendants are almost entirely black. The hard truth of the matter is that in such places, the wind is into the backs of the black defendants. Ceteris paribus, compared to suburban and rural white justice systems, prosecutors, judges and juries, prosecutors are less likely to bring charges, juries are less likely to convict, and judges give more lenient sentences if any prison time at all. One-fifth of first time armed robbers in St. Louis City get no prison time. And then there are the matter of the actual cops — in big cities, thanks to local, state and Federal affirmative action mandates, they’re more likely to have black and thus corruptible cops, which are more likely to “look the other way” when it comes to black criminal suspects.
Putting this all together, it is highly highly highly unlikely that a black person in a majority black court jurisdiction will ever see any adjudicated (i.e. not counting the time between initial arrest and being bailed out) state jail or prison time for just possessing illegal drugs in violation of state law. Dealers are another story, though. And AFAIK, the Feds very rarely go after those in possession — they focus on the big time dealers that cross state lines, and they have the luxury of being able to pick from a wide jury pool, geographically speaking. Federal juries in the Eastern Missouri district are held in St. Louis, but jurors can come from anywhere in the eastern part of the state, meaning that they’re whiter and more the hanging suburban/exurban/rural type.
Even with all this wind to their blacks, they’re still an overwhelming majority in state prison systems; they are the ones that are there are the real “violent and career criminals” that even Pew thinks should be incarcerated. If the system were fair, they’d be an even bigger majority.
