4 ms·

Not to mention that drug use tends to push you into con college (prison) and you can't find a good job after that.

macintux 9y ago
The fact that a felony conviction makes such a strong impact on your ability to find a job, and even to vote, is unfortunate.
- munificent 9y ago
  And by "unfortunate" you mean "a deliberate strategy among people in power to continue to disenfranchise and control marginalized people".
  - darawk 9y ago
    That's a pretty bold claim. Why do you believe it's deliberate?
    - geofft 9y ago
      The fact that it's deliberate is a common viewpoint among people who have studied it. The New Jim Crow is a good book along these lines targeted at a popular audience. It's definitely an uncomfortable and politically-incorrect claim, but I don't think it's a very bold one (in the sense of being a tenuously-supported leap of logic).
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      It's a well-known effect that policy-makers don't deny knowledge of, and no substantial action has been taken to attempt to correct it. It is, therefore, clearly intended that it continue, whether or not it was originally intentional.
    - michaelmrose 9y ago
      Well in certain parts of the nation you used to be able to own black people and derive income from the fruits of their labor along with the proceeds of legal corruption sometimes called campaign contributions. Inconveniently they get freed and you now have to pay them, worse they vote against you and without sufficient votes you are no longer viable and liable to lose the corruption money. If only you could shake down the annoying population regularly and you know put them in their place wherein their place is a prison cell wherein you can work them for free again and take away their inconvenient vote. Disenfranchisement has always been a tool as long as voting has been a thing in America. Its only a bold claim if you missed the last few hundred years.
      - darawk 9y ago
        That has nothing to do with the fact that a felony conviction makes it difficult to get a job, though.
        unpwn 9y ago
        It kinda does, because if your unemployable, your more likely to commit crime and go to jail again
        darawk 9y ago
        Of course. What I meant is that his post does not make the case that, with respect to employment difficulty, there is any deliberate conspiracy.
        macintux 9y ago
        I think the powder vs crack disparity speaks volumes. Guess which type of cocaine resulted in felonies at 1/100th the mass of the other? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/28/crack-powder-sentencing-d_n_662526.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/28/crack-powder-senten... So, the law may not make much difference in whether employers take felons, but it makes a huge difference in who is a felon.
    - munificent 9y ago
      In the US, felony disenfranchisement affects 5.85 million, around 2.5% of the potential voting population [1]. As I'm sure you know, the US has a very long history of racial bias in incarceration, going all the way back to the Civil War and before. Once black people were given the vote by the Fourteenth Amendment, Southern states took to underhanded means to re-disenfranchise them. Literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, etc. Any arbitrary voting requirement they could manufacture that "just happened" to exclude more blacks than whites was fair game. It was (and still is) bad enough to force a federal law to try to clamp it down, the Voting Rights Act of 1965[2], considered one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation. After that, Nixon declared the War on Drugs ostensibly to reduce drug use, which it has been famously ineffective at. John Erlichman, his domestic policy advisor at the time later claimed: > The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two > enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m > saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war > or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with > marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we > could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their > homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the > evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. Whether or not that's true, the War on Drugs has been an excellent vehicle to incarcerate more people. Those incarerations have history of racial bias. In 1998, African-Americans, who only comprised 13% of regular drug users, made up for 35% of drug arrests, 55% of convictions, and 74% of people sent to prison for drug possession crimes. Nationwide African-Americans were sent to state prisons for drug offenses 13 times more often than white men.[3] In 2010, black people made up 13% of the US population, but 40% of the incarcerated. Black people are imprisoned at something like 5 times the rate of white people.[4] See also: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/opinion/the-racist-origins-of-felon-disenfranchisement.html?mcubz=3 https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/opinion/the-racist-origin... https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/virginia-felon-disenfranchisement/480072/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/virgini... [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/13/felon-voting-laws-disenfranchisement https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/13/felon-voting-l... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965 [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_the_War_on_Drugs#cite_note-celling-america-246-2472-34 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_the_War_on_Drugs#cite... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_in_the_United_States_criminal_justice_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_in_the_United_States_crim...

The fact that a felony conviction makes such a strong impact on your ability to find a job, and even to vote, is unfortunate.

munificent 9y ago
And by "unfortunate" you mean "a deliberate strategy among people in power to continue to disenfranchise and control marginalized people".
- darawk 9y ago
  That's a pretty bold claim. Why do you believe it's deliberate?
  - geofft 9y ago
    The fact that it's deliberate is a common viewpoint among people who have studied it. The New Jim Crow is a good book along these lines targeted at a popular audience. It's definitely an uncomfortable and politically-incorrect claim, but I don't think it's a very bold one (in the sense of being a tenuously-supported leap of logic).
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    It's a well-known effect that policy-makers don't deny knowledge of, and no substantial action has been taken to attempt to correct it. It is, therefore, clearly intended that it continue, whether or not it was originally intentional.
  - michaelmrose 9y ago
    Well in certain parts of the nation you used to be able to own black people and derive income from the fruits of their labor along with the proceeds of legal corruption sometimes called campaign contributions. Inconveniently they get freed and you now have to pay them, worse they vote against you and without sufficient votes you are no longer viable and liable to lose the corruption money. If only you could shake down the annoying population regularly and you know put them in their place wherein their place is a prison cell wherein you can work them for free again and take away their inconvenient vote. Disenfranchisement has always been a tool as long as voting has been a thing in America. Its only a bold claim if you missed the last few hundred years.
    - darawk 9y ago
      That has nothing to do with the fact that a felony conviction makes it difficult to get a job, though.
      - unpwn 9y ago
        It kinda does, because if your unemployable, your more likely to commit crime and go to jail again
        darawk 9y ago
        Of course. What I meant is that his post does not make the case that, with respect to employment difficulty, there is any deliberate conspiracy.
        macintux 9y ago
        I think the powder vs crack disparity speaks volumes. Guess which type of cocaine resulted in felonies at 1/100th the mass of the other? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/28/crack-powder-sentencing-d_n_662526.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/28/crack-powder-senten... So, the law may not make much difference in whether employers take felons, but it makes a huge difference in who is a felon.
  - munificent 9y ago
    In the US, felony disenfranchisement affects 5.85 million, around 2.5% of the potential voting population [1]. As I'm sure you know, the US has a very long history of racial bias in incarceration, going all the way back to the Civil War and before. Once black people were given the vote by the Fourteenth Amendment, Southern states took to underhanded means to re-disenfranchise them. Literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, etc. Any arbitrary voting requirement they could manufacture that "just happened" to exclude more blacks than whites was fair game. It was (and still is) bad enough to force a federal law to try to clamp it down, the Voting Rights Act of 1965[2], considered one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation. After that, Nixon declared the War on Drugs ostensibly to reduce drug use, which it has been famously ineffective at. John Erlichman, his domestic policy advisor at the time later claimed: > The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two > enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m > saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war > or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with > marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we > could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their > homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the > evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. Whether or not that's true, the War on Drugs has been an excellent vehicle to incarcerate more people. Those incarerations have history of racial bias. In 1998, African-Americans, who only comprised 13% of regular drug users, made up for 35% of drug arrests, 55% of convictions, and 74% of people sent to prison for drug possession crimes. Nationwide African-Americans were sent to state prisons for drug offenses 13 times more often than white men.[3] In 2010, black people made up 13% of the US population, but 40% of the incarcerated. Black people are imprisoned at something like 5 times the rate of white people.[4] See also: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/opinion/the-racist-origins-of-felon-disenfranchisement.html?mcubz=3 https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/opinion/the-racist-origin... https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/virginia-felon-disenfranchisement/480072/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/virgini... [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/13/felon-voting-laws-disenfranchisement https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/13/felon-voting-l... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965 [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_the_War_on_Drugs#cite_note-celling-america-246-2472-34 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_the_War_on_Drugs#cite... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_in_the_United_States_criminal_justice_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_in_the_United_States_crim...