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Since males are also incarcerated at a rate many multiples of females, is the prison system also sexist? Or is your explanation for that „that males commit mor

Since males are also incarcerated at a rate many multiples of females, is the prison system also sexist? Or is your explanation for that „that males commit more crimes“? You might want to be careful applying this logic to the black incarceration rates, then.

omegaworks 6y ago
Prisons aren't disproportionately located in majority-female areas. Prisons are, however, disproportionately located in majority-white areas. Prison gerrymandering allows majority white communities to count Black prisoners from outside their community in their census while stripping them of their ability to vote. It gives the white community more power and resources, and takes not only from the prisoner their right to vote, but from the prisoner's community a census taker. The Census is literally how representatives in the House are allocated and per-capita funding is divided.
- axiosgunnar 6y ago
  The prison location has nothing to do with the location of the crime. Not every town has a prison, and prisoners often get shifted around to different prisons for various reasons (security requirements etc.) Also, pretty much all of the US is „majority female“, even if it‘s just by 1.6%.
- pseudo0 6y ago
  A far simpler explanation for the same pattern would be that prisons take up a lot of space, and are therefore often located outside of urban centers, and rural areas also happen to be whiter than average. People generally also don't want to live near prisons, making it politically expedient to stick them somewhere out of sight in the boonies. Those reasons seem a lot more convincing to me than a concerted effort to shave a few fractions of a percent off census data.
  - omegaworks 6y ago
    The benefit of the doubt can only go so far, extending it to this issue is an exercise in willful ignorance of the history of this country[1] and how it has systematically accumulated and protected white wealth at the expense of people of color. It's not just "a fraction of a percent." It's one in five. "One in five people in prison for at least 10 years is a black man incarcerated before age 25.[2]" You have no idea the sheer magnitude of the problem we have here. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619... 2. https://apps.urban.org/features/long-prison-terms/demographics.html https://apps.urban.org/features/long-prison-terms/demographi...
mikepurvis 6y ago
I think prison demographics have a lot more to do with inequalities in the justice system and how different communities are policed than it does who actually "commits more crimes", especially when you start looking at things like fraud and non-violent drug offenses.
- axiosgunnar 6y ago
  So you are saying we have systematic misanthropy in the justice system?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    "So you are saying we have systematic misanthropy in the justice system?" I can't tell if you're arguing in bad faith or if you think you're actually being profound here with these socratic challenges. Men commit and are caught, charged, and imprisoned for many more crimes than women are. Black men probably commit somewhat more crimes than white men— a fact which can largely be understood in context by examining structural inequalities like not having access to the same schools, community supports, family stability, plus adding in layers of racism and generational trauma, etc etc. But their representation in the corrections system is significantly out of proportion even to this ratio due to factors like racist policing and courts, and compounded by things like the bail system, which pressures the innocent to plead guilty. These two situations are not really comparable.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - 8note 6y ago
      Racist policing and racist sentencing seem like they could easily make up for the proportion. Most white people don't get charged when they are caught commiting a crime, and the ones that do get light sentences that can keep them out of the correctional system
jacksnipe 6y ago
You’re intentionally jettisoning historical context (3/5 compromise + wording of fourteenth amendment) here
- axiosgunnar 6y ago
  Could you elaborate what you refer two with those two concepts? As you can see, I am not doing anything intentional as I don‘t know enough about the „3/5 compromise“ and the 14th admt
  - jacksnipe 6y ago
    First, my bad! I mixed up 13 and 14 -- I meant the 13th amendment. So first, the 3/5 compromise: When the constitution was being drafted, there was a disagreement between the free and slave states (actually, I'm not sure if there were any free states, or if at the time the North was just not reliant on slave labor and essentially winding it down). The north wanted slaves to not count towards your state's population for the purposes of apportioning house representatives. Since slaves could not vote, they argued, they shouldn't count towards your representation in the federal government. The south, on the other hand, wanted slaves to count towards the state's population for apportioning house representatives. Since slaves still required the same resources to survive as non-slaves, they argued, they should be counted. This ultimately led to the "3/5 compromise": slaves counted as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of apportioning house representatives. Now, fast forward to the federal abolishment of slavery, the 13th amendment. It explicitly says "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." So it is very squarely placing prisoners in the same historical context as slaves, and they were thought of and reasoned about as such. So in the end, it seems straightforward to me that the state of slavery and prisons in America deliberately reduces the representation of black people. This is by design. While it does effectively increase the representation of women, there's far less of an argument to be made that it's an intentional feature of the system. NOTE: In checking these sources, I discovered that the 14th amendment (actually the 14th this time) says that voters who have become ineligible to vote shouldn't be counted towards your representation. Maybe it was superceded by a later amendment? SECOND NOTE: Here's an NPR article mentioning the prisons-count-as-population-for-representation concept: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/12/31/761932806/your-body-being-used-where-prisoners-who-can-t-vote-fill-voting-districts https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/12/31/761932806...
narshian 6y ago
The implication of your comment is that there is something inherent in black people that makes them more likely to end up in prison. Are sure you want go down that road?
- axiosgunnar 6y ago
  One could rephrase your comment like this: The implication of your comment is that there is something inherent in males that makes them more likely to end up in prison. Are sure you want go down that road? That‘s the point I‘m trying to make.
  - tambourineman88 6y ago
    Testosterone perhaps?
  - narshian 6y ago
    What is your point exactly?
heterodoxxed 6y ago
Are you arguing that communities should be allowed to artificially inflate their voting population with non-voting prisoners? Do you think that's just and fair?
- axiosgunnar 6y ago
  I do not care about details of US election laws. For what‘s worth, no, I do not believe communities should be able to inflate their voting population like that, but I have literally never heard of this topic ever being an issue anywhere else in the world. So that‘s like me asking „Do you think that it‘s fair that kids have free from school on carnival days“? You wouldn‘t care about this super-localized societal micro-issue either, assuming you‘re from the US and not Brazil.
  - heterodoxxed 6y ago
    OP provided two links for context, both of which were clear about being about the US prison system.
  - bmm6o 6y ago
    You've picked an odd subthread to take your stand in then, since that's explicitly the topic of the post you are replying to.
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
Looking at the U.S.A., it seems obvious to me that the following four things are true: - Males commit more crimes than females - Males are more easily, and longer incarcerated than females on the same evidence. - Blacks commit more crimes than whites - Blacks are are more easily, and loner incarcerated than whites on the same evidence “careful?”, I'll be frank that I smell the stench of U.S.A. culture war identity politics where facts that should obvious to everyone are not examined on their veracity, but on “What team might the messenger be playing for?”. — what is there to be “careful” about what seems to be the obvious?

omegaworks 6y ago

Prisons aren't disproportionately located in majority-female areas. Prisons are, however, disproportionately located in majority-white areas. Prison gerrymandering allows majority white communities to count Black prisoners from outside their community in their census while stripping them of their ability to vote. It gives the white community more power and resources, and takes not only from the prisoner their right to vote, but from the prisoner's community a census taker. The Census is literally how representatives in the House are allocated and per-capita funding is divided.

axiosgunnar 6y ago
The prison location has nothing to do with the location of the crime. Not every town has a prison, and prisoners often get shifted around to different prisons for various reasons (security requirements etc.) Also, pretty much all of the US is „majority female“, even if it‘s just by 1.6%.
pseudo0 6y ago
A far simpler explanation for the same pattern would be that prisons take up a lot of space, and are therefore often located outside of urban centers, and rural areas also happen to be whiter than average. People generally also don't want to live near prisons, making it politically expedient to stick them somewhere out of sight in the boonies. Those reasons seem a lot more convincing to me than a concerted effort to shave a few fractions of a percent off census data.
- omegaworks 6y ago
  The benefit of the doubt can only go so far, extending it to this issue is an exercise in willful ignorance of the history of this country[1] and how it has systematically accumulated and protected white wealth at the expense of people of color. It's not just "a fraction of a percent." It's one in five. "One in five people in prison for at least 10 years is a black man incarcerated before age 25.[2]" You have no idea the sheer magnitude of the problem we have here. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619... 2. https://apps.urban.org/features/long-prison-terms/demographics.html https://apps.urban.org/features/long-prison-terms/demographi...

mikepurvis 6y ago

I think prison demographics have a lot more to do with inequalities in the justice system and how different communities are policed than it does who actually "commits more crimes", especially when you start looking at things like fraud and non-violent drug offenses.

axiosgunnar 6y ago
So you are saying we have systematic misanthropy in the justice system?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  "So you are saying we have systematic misanthropy in the justice system?" I can't tell if you're arguing in bad faith or if you think you're actually being profound here with these socratic challenges. Men commit and are caught, charged, and imprisoned for many more crimes than women are. Black men probably commit somewhat more crimes than white men— a fact which can largely be understood in context by examining structural inequalities like not having access to the same schools, community supports, family stability, plus adding in layers of racism and generational trauma, etc etc. But their representation in the corrections system is significantly out of proportion even to this ratio due to factors like racist policing and courts, and compounded by things like the bail system, which pressures the innocent to plead guilty. These two situations are not really comparable.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - 8note 6y ago
    Racist policing and racist sentencing seem like they could easily make up for the proportion. Most white people don't get charged when they are caught commiting a crime, and the ones that do get light sentences that can keep them out of the correctional system

jacksnipe 6y ago

You’re intentionally jettisoning historical context (3/5 compromise + wording of fourteenth amendment) here

axiosgunnar 6y ago
Could you elaborate what you refer two with those two concepts? As you can see, I am not doing anything intentional as I don‘t know enough about the „3/5 compromise“ and the 14th admt
- jacksnipe 6y ago
  First, my bad! I mixed up 13 and 14 -- I meant the 13th amendment. So first, the 3/5 compromise: When the constitution was being drafted, there was a disagreement between the free and slave states (actually, I'm not sure if there were any free states, or if at the time the North was just not reliant on slave labor and essentially winding it down). The north wanted slaves to not count towards your state's population for the purposes of apportioning house representatives. Since slaves could not vote, they argued, they shouldn't count towards your representation in the federal government. The south, on the other hand, wanted slaves to count towards the state's population for apportioning house representatives. Since slaves still required the same resources to survive as non-slaves, they argued, they should be counted. This ultimately led to the "3/5 compromise": slaves counted as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of apportioning house representatives. Now, fast forward to the federal abolishment of slavery, the 13th amendment. It explicitly says "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." So it is very squarely placing prisoners in the same historical context as slaves, and they were thought of and reasoned about as such. So in the end, it seems straightforward to me that the state of slavery and prisons in America deliberately reduces the representation of black people. This is by design. While it does effectively increase the representation of women, there's far less of an argument to be made that it's an intentional feature of the system. NOTE: In checking these sources, I discovered that the 14th amendment (actually the 14th this time) says that voters who have become ineligible to vote shouldn't be counted towards your representation. Maybe it was superceded by a later amendment? SECOND NOTE: Here's an NPR article mentioning the prisons-count-as-population-for-representation concept: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/12/31/761932806/your-body-being-used-where-prisoners-who-can-t-vote-fill-voting-districts https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/12/31/761932806...

narshian 6y ago

The implication of your comment is that there is something inherent in black people that makes them more likely to end up in prison. Are sure you want go down that road?

axiosgunnar 6y ago
One could rephrase your comment like this: The implication of your comment is that there is something inherent in males that makes them more likely to end up in prison. Are sure you want go down that road? That‘s the point I‘m trying to make.
- tambourineman88 6y ago
  Testosterone perhaps?
- narshian 6y ago
  What is your point exactly?

heterodoxxed 6y ago

Are you arguing that communities should be allowed to artificially inflate their voting population with non-voting prisoners? Do you think that's just and fair?

axiosgunnar 6y ago
I do not care about details of US election laws. For what‘s worth, no, I do not believe communities should be able to inflate their voting population like that, but I have literally never heard of this topic ever being an issue anywhere else in the world. So that‘s like me asking „Do you think that it‘s fair that kids have free from school on carnival days“? You wouldn‘t care about this super-localized societal micro-issue either, assuming you‘re from the US and not Brazil.
- heterodoxxed 6y ago
  OP provided two links for context, both of which were clear about being about the US prison system.
- bmm6o 6y ago
  You've picked an odd subthread to take your stand in then, since that's explicitly the topic of the post you are replying to.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago

Looking at the U.S.A., it seems obvious to me that the following four things are true: - Males commit more crimes than females - Males are more easily, and longer incarcerated than females on the same evidence. - Blacks commit more crimes than whites - Blacks are are more easily, and loner incarcerated than whites on the same evidence “careful?”, I'll be frank that I smell the stench of U.S.A. culture war identity politics where facts that should obvious to everyone are not examined on their veracity, but on “What team might the messenger be playing for?”. — what is there to be “careful” about what seems to be the obvious?