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The legal repercussion for getting involved in selling Marijuana at industrial scale has diminished substantially within certain avenues. Nobody is preventing o

The legal repercussion for getting involved in selling Marijuana at industrial scale has diminished substantially within certain avenues. Nobody is preventing or encouraging anybody from a particular race to capitalize off of that opportunity. There is nothing hypocritical at work whatsoever. The activity has become less and less criminal, so people with a lower threshold for criminal repercussion have become more involved as the threshold lowers. What is hypocritical about that? It's like saying that it's hypocritical that people who drank when prohibition was active were in jail, and then people who drank after it was repealed were not in jail. I fail to see the hypocrisy. I also fail to see where race comes into play.

gboudrias 9y ago
Your way of viewing things is so foreign to me (and I'm a foreigner so makes sense I guess). I think prisons should be all about rehabilitation. If you crime is selling drugs, and selling drugs is no longer something we train people out of... What's the point of staying in prison? Race does come into play as well, because your argument seems to be that it's "fair" that these people are still imprisoned. But by and large, they were set up by a society that left them few other choices, which is far from fair. Refusing to release them is tantamount to denying the error of our past ways. It was always a trap, ever since the lies that enabled marijuana prohibition in the first place.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
ryanlol 9y ago
>I also fail to see where race comes into play. This is what the advocates of racist policy always say. Enforcement is where race comes into play, you don’t see it because you don’t care. Otherwise it’s very hard to miss.
- ralusek 9y ago
  It's not hard to miss if you don't bother to get beyond "systemic racism" as a justifiable and primary explanation for the disparity in racial outcomes. If you are interested in a more wholistic understanding, then you should be aware that it, like most social phenomenon, is very complicated. You hear things like "crack carries a much heavier sentencing than powder cocaine, because crack is done by black people and powder cocaine is done by white people." It sounds like it might be a racist policy, but it simply is not. First of all, the drugs are not demographically comparable. Crack is a street drug, cocaine is a white collar and party drug. There are vastly differing levels of criminality surrounding them. Crystal meth, a drug much more comparable socio-economically to crack cocaine, not only carries the exact same federal sentencing as crack, but is predominately done by white people. Another might be if you look at the different rates of incarceration for drug offenses by racial breakdown. Black people and hispanics are clearly over-represented as compared with their representation of the population. They are also, however, over-represented in their involvement in drug criminality. That isn't to say that their level of criminality is exactly proportional to their over-representation, because they do get incarcerated at disproportionately higher rates, but it is important. Where the disproportionality manifests can be found in statistics that while entirely true, often make no attempt at controlling for location or socioeconomic factors. For example, black people with identical drug usage as white people for something like Marijuana encounter much higher rates of incarceration. It sounds racist, but, surprise, is complicated. Geographically and socioeconomically, there are massive differences in average black and average white distributions. Black Americans tend to have disproportionately higher representation in heavily policed urban areas, white Americans tend to have disproportionately higher representation in suburban areas. The extent to which this is motivated by racist policy is also, as is expected, very complicated, but should not be conflated with differing outcomes in criminality and arrests. If you want to go over specific statistics, I'm happy to, but I don't find the explanation that systems are just inherently racist to be a satisfactory explanation for complicated problems, because systems that are inherently racist have trivially simple solutions. We are not dealing with the Civil Rights Movement 2.0.

gboudrias 9y ago

Your way of viewing things is so foreign to me (and I'm a foreigner so makes sense I guess). I think prisons should be all about rehabilitation. If you crime is selling drugs, and selling drugs is no longer something we train people out of... What's the point of staying in prison? Race does come into play as well, because your argument seems to be that it's "fair" that these people are still imprisoned. But by and large, they were set up by a society that left them few other choices, which is far from fair. Refusing to release them is tantamount to denying the error of our past ways. It was always a trap, ever since the lies that enabled marijuana prohibition in the first place.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

ryanlol 9y ago

>I also fail to see where race comes into play. This is what the advocates of racist policy always say. Enforcement is where race comes into play, you don’t see it because you don’t care. Otherwise it’s very hard to miss.

ralusek 9y ago
It's not hard to miss if you don't bother to get beyond "systemic racism" as a justifiable and primary explanation for the disparity in racial outcomes. If you are interested in a more wholistic understanding, then you should be aware that it, like most social phenomenon, is very complicated. You hear things like "crack carries a much heavier sentencing than powder cocaine, because crack is done by black people and powder cocaine is done by white people." It sounds like it might be a racist policy, but it simply is not. First of all, the drugs are not demographically comparable. Crack is a street drug, cocaine is a white collar and party drug. There are vastly differing levels of criminality surrounding them. Crystal meth, a drug much more comparable socio-economically to crack cocaine, not only carries the exact same federal sentencing as crack, but is predominately done by white people. Another might be if you look at the different rates of incarceration for drug offenses by racial breakdown. Black people and hispanics are clearly over-represented as compared with their representation of the population. They are also, however, over-represented in their involvement in drug criminality. That isn't to say that their level of criminality is exactly proportional to their over-representation, because they do get incarcerated at disproportionately higher rates, but it is important. Where the disproportionality manifests can be found in statistics that while entirely true, often make no attempt at controlling for location or socioeconomic factors. For example, black people with identical drug usage as white people for something like Marijuana encounter much higher rates of incarceration. It sounds racist, but, surprise, is complicated. Geographically and socioeconomically, there are massive differences in average black and average white distributions. Black Americans tend to have disproportionately higher representation in heavily policed urban areas, white Americans tend to have disproportionately higher representation in suburban areas. The extent to which this is motivated by racist policy is also, as is expected, very complicated, but should not be conflated with differing outcomes in criminality and arrests. If you want to go over specific statistics, I'm happy to, but I don't find the explanation that systems are just inherently racist to be a satisfactory explanation for complicated problems, because systems that are inherently racist have trivially simple solutions. We are not dealing with the Civil Rights Movement 2.0.