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The Justice System is just a money system that wants to sustain itself and grow.
ALL govt systems fit that definition.
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Non-Violent criminals should NOT be jailed.
Honest questions, not criticizing, if someone steals your identity and charges up your CC's and they're caught, they should not be jailed? If someone takes pictures of a minor naked in their home then they shouldn't be jailed? What should be the penalty in these types of cases?
Honest questions, not criticizing, if someone steals your identity and charges up your CC's and they're caught, they should not be jailed? If someone takes pictures of a minor naked in their home then they shouldn't be jailed? What should be the penalty in these types of cases?
Good question. I was thinking more of drug users, than pedophiles, or major fraud scammers. I think house arrest can be used effectively with the GPS technology we have today. However, the criminals you describe should be punished and jail time is warranted on those instances. There are a large number of drug users that could be released, and I think they are clogging up the jail systems. I don't think jail rehabilitates them either. The answer? Difficult to say. Rehab, house arrest, work programs?
T
I have friends that are big city cops, both Black and White. They tell me that AGRESSION in the Black community is the number one problem. Violence is deemed OK to use to settle arguments in that culture. Why? Is it genetic? Is it a learned response in a hostile environment? Or is it a combination of both?
I don't understand this situation.
The protagonist of "The Boondocks" by cranky cartoonist Aaron MacGruder called such instances of sudden aggression "an n-word moment." He also said things like, "nobody ever wrote anything worth reading with their thumbs" with a great disdain toward any device made wholly for information consumption and not creation.
I am black, but the world of my youth was not the inner city. I was a military brat, and my childhood was spent on Army posts or in the neighborhoods where soldiers predominated. What that essentially means is that I was raised in the ultimate "gated community" where every kid had an employed father in the house.
Now, my early years were spend in the Jim Crow days--so those were neighborhoods where all those fathers were black Korean War veterans. So this was the situation: Black neighborhoods with fully employed, highly disciplined black fathers and stay-at-home mothers in every household. I had what I call "a well-ordered childhood."
I remember about 1964 going on a family trip to visit distant relatives living in the southside of Chicago. There were three older second cousins, women, living in an apartment complex with a number of kids I could never take count of (to this day, I have trouble at reunions recalling which third cousin is the child of which second-cousin).
I think the second day I was there, I got mugged in front of the apartment building by an older kid with a screwdriver. That event was ended by my second cousin roaring out of the building with a knife. There was noise, aggression, and confusion all around.
Even as a kid, that terrified me as a life of chaos.
Did you see the movie "Hidden Figures?" If so, maybe you noticed the picture it presented of the black women who worked for NASA there in Virginia--their neighborhood, their homes, their lives. Tidy homes, obedient children, married mothers (or else, widowed), Sunday afternoon church socials. Essentially, their environment was separate but equal with their white counterparts.
One of the consequences of the dismantlement of Jim Crow-- intended, but not fully examined for its effect--was that it gave mobility to the black middle class. When I was a kid and neighborhoods were segregated by race, that meant black doctors, lawyers, school teachers, et cetera, lived in the same neighborhoods as those in the lower economic levels.
The end of segregation--the dismantlement of redlining, the opening of more affluent areas that had previously been reserved for whites--enabled those who had the gained the education and had done the work to earn the ability to move to those areas to do so. They did. They integrated.
And so, what we had left as "black communities" going into the 80s are comprised largely by those who would not or could not move from them.
Last edited by Ralph_Kirk; 07-26-2019 at 11:21 AM..
Totally agree. The Justice System is just a money system that wants to sustain itself and grow. Non-Violent criminals should NOT be jailed. Drug users should not be jailed.
I have friends that are big city cops, both Black and White. They tell me that AGRESSION in the Black community is the number one problem. Violence is deemed OK to use to settle arguments in that culture. Why? Is it genetic? Is it a learned response in a hostile environment? Or is it a combination of both?
Agreed, and it is a sad situation to actually want to be in jail.
I have friends and family who are police officers also black and white. I agree that aggression and frustration in poverty stricken areas in particular is the reason for a lot of gun violence in urban areas. However, urban areas in an of themselves are not "the black community" nor are they representative of "black culture." If anything IMO those people represent the lingering effects of systematic racism as they are often raised by people who were impacted by that racism and who, themselves, have no foresight or hope for the future of themselves and their children. So instead they, themselves are overly violent and aggressive with their children and they push these sorts of views on their offspring.
Unlike others who have responded, I did grow up in the inner city and I grew up poor and black with a mother who was an unwed, teenage mom. My mom only spanked me one time in my life and my family in general are not aggressive about every slight that may occur in your life. I was taught to "pick your battles" and when you grow up though around a lot of hostile people, you do need to have a certain level of aggression. I got into a lot of fights, mostly due to people trying to "test" me in a way to see if they could take advantage of me. And I'll note that both white and Latino kids did the same to me because I was a nerdy kid and in all segments of America in the past and today, often people think nerdy folks are weak and easily bullied/taken advantage of. I was taught how to box when I was 4 by my dad - who even though he wasn't married has always been in my life (still is). My own family IMO is very representative of the black experience and "black culture" in America. We have always had people of various income statuses in the family. In my parents' generation more of them, their siblings/their first cousins, etc, graduated from high school and went to college or earned a good amount of money over our grandparents. This was because they came of age after 1965 and the passage of legislation that decreased discrimination and segregation.
However, they also were then impacted by the crack epidemic. I think many people today do not realize the impact the crack epidemic had on black America. I grew up in the 1980s/1990s. My dad became a crackhead in the 1980s. I still saw him and he was involved in my life (I joke he was the most responsible crackhead you'd ever meet) but I knew a lot of my friend's parents who basically destroyed themselves and their families based on addiction. IMO this new opioid epidemic is similar except it is more heavily impacting white families and so they are getting more help instead of being criminally stigmatized and their families destroyed by foster care and law enforcement agencies like ours were in the 1980s and 1990s. This is one of a few things that makes me upset today about how this epidemic is being treated versus the one I went through as a child with my dad and many of my older cousins, their children, my friends parents, etc. I don't know anyone who was not impacted by the crack epidemic and not too many people gave them the pity and assistance like people are provided today who suffer from meth or opiod addictions.
Many of the black parents who are overly aggressive are the way they are because they were not raised correctly due to their parents being crackheads or them being reared in foster care and no one giving AF about them. Anyone, no matter their skin color would have a chance of being this way with similar circumstances so it is not "genetic."
However, facts are that violence by/against black people perpetuated by black people has been decreasing for many years. It was WAY worse in the 1990s when I was a teen. I know many people who were murdered when I was younger or who went to prison for committing violent acts. Unfortunately, I also know of people today where similar things have occurred, but there are less of these today than what it was when I was young.
But basically, the idea that this is a "black community" issue in relation to aggression or that our "culture" as black people is to blame, that is entirely false. I do think a lot of police officers have this view but IMO that is because they often only come into contact with people at the worst times in their lives and so are not privy to the 95% of other people who don't have these problems who are black.
A majority of black people today don't even live in the inner city. Our culture is not built on aggression either. Our culture is centuries old and in regards to violence/aggression, historically black America has fought to decrease both in this country at a very high level in comparison to other populations.
Last edited by residinghere2007; 07-26-2019 at 11:34 AM..
Then the problem isn't unwed mothers, it's fatherless homes.
IMO this is a cop out that people often try to use to blame crime in particular on.
Crime has decreased as out of wedlock briths went up as well as "fatherless" homes. The two aren't related.
Just like aggression and violence aren't a part of black culture or the black community. IMO often these are brought up to try to create reasons for people to have racial prejudices of other groups of people or outright racist beliefs in thinking someone is genetically inferior to another group of people based on skin color/ethnicity.
If OOW births and "fatherlessness" was really a cause of a decline in our society's measure of "success" as related by education, income, and criminal acts, then all 3 of these would not have improved in black America and all 3 of them would have gotten worse in white America over the past 40-50 years.
Location: New Albany, Indiana (Greater Louisville)
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Best crime deterrent is certainty of punishment. In most inner cities over half of murders go unsolved. Core problem is lack of trust in police and justice system People prefer killers dealt with outside justice system. Origin of problem complex, I guess generally caused by unfair treatment of Blacks historically in courts and polic3 stop and frisk of regular people in name of crime prevention .
The protagonist of "The Boondocks" by cranky cartoonist Aaron MacGruder called such instances of sudden aggression "an n-word moment." He also said things like, "nobody ever wrote anything worth reading with their thumbs" with a great disdain toward any device made wholly for information consumption and not creation.
I remember when The Boondocks was just a cartoon.
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I am black, but the world of my youth was not the inner city. I was a military brat, and my childhood was spent on Army posts or in the neighborhoods where soldiers predominated. What that essentially means is that I was raised in the ultimate "gated community" where every kid had an employed father in the house.
Now, my early years were spend in the Jim Crow days--so those were neighborhoods where all those fathers were black Korean War veterans. So this was the situation: Black neighborhoods with fully employed, highly disciplined black fathers and stay-at-home mothers in every household. I had what I call "a well-ordered childhood."
I was never a military brat. When I lived in Savannah (for a short time), I met several military brats though. Living in the suburban part of Savannah, I had that well-ordered childhood. In fact, most of the kids around me had that childhood. This was back in the mid 1990s (I was born in 1986). I lived in other places too. I was just mentioning that particular place. I lived in a neighborhood with alot of White people, but there were alot of Black people in the neighborhood too.
I grew up in the Atlanta area, the exurbs actually. My neighborhood could be described as middle class, majority White. Where I was living during the late 1990s-early 2000s, there weren't alot of Black families in my neighborhood. Most of the people worked. Working fathers were the norm. Working mothers were also the norm. For a while, I was one of the few kids whose mother didn't have a regular job. My father worked though. There were some bad kids in my neighborhood though. I got assaulted a few times. These were often kids whose parents were never home until 6 PM and the kids had some time to kill between 4 pm and 6 pm. I know one kid who went to jail for burglary. He wasn't a poor Black kid from the ghetto. He was a middle class White kid whose father let him get away with everything, including vandalism. I met the kid's father. His father was a jerk. Apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
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I remember about 1964 going on a family trip to visit distant relatives living in the southside of Chicago. There were three older second cousins, women, living in an apartment complex with a number of kids I could never take count of (to this day, I have trouble at reunions recalling which third cousin is the child of which second-cousin).
I think the second day I was there, I got mugged in front of the apartment building by an older kid with a screwdriver. That event was ended by my second cousin roaring out of the building with a knife. There was noise, aggression, and confusion all around.
Even as a kid, that terrified me as a life of chaos.
Wow. I'm sorry that happened. I know what it's like to be a crime victim, both at the hands of Black people and White people. I got mugged while I was in college. This didn't happen in a rough inner city neighborhood. This was in a supposedly safe, suburban area. And the kicker, one of the persons involved was barely 16. The persons who did got caught trying to flee in their car. No public transportation available at that time of the robbery.
Your story also rememinded me of when my family and me lived in an apartment complex in the suburbs of Atlanta (before we moved into a house in another suburb). My father was one of the few fathers I ever saw in the apartment complex. And many of the kids, they were some bad kids. And not just the Black kids. Some bad White kids in the apartment complex too. One kid stole my bicycle. When I found the kid who stole, a police officer happened to drive by. He only gave the bike back under threat of jail time. What kind of 8 year old/9 year old steals a bicycle and then when caught, backtalks the police officer catching him?
It's hard for me to imagine a bunch of my relatives in one apartment building like that. All of my relatives live in other states.
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Did you see the movie "Hidden Figures?" If so, maybe you noticed the picture it presented of the black women who worked for NASA there in Virginia--their neighborhood, their homes, their lives. Tidy homes, obedient children, married mothers (or else, widowed), Sunday afternoon church socials. Essentially, their environment was separate but equal with their white counterparts.
One of the consequences of the dismantlement of Jim Crow-- intended, but not fully examined for its effect--was that it gave mobility to the black middle class. When I was a kid and neighborhoods were segregated by race, that meant black doctors, lawyers, school teachers, et cetera, lived in the same neighborhoods as those in the lower economic levels.
The end of segregation--the dismantlement of redlining, the opening of more affluent areas that had previously been reserved for whites--enabled those who had the gained the education and had done the work to earn the ability to move to those areas to do so. They did. They integrated.
And so, what we had left as "black communities" going into the 80s are comprised largely by those who would not or could not move from them.
I've never heard of "Hidden Figures" until now. I will have to look it up.
I am glad that Jim Crow got dismantled. To be blunt, Jim Crow was basically a dictatorship targeted at Black people. People should be free to live wherever they want to live. Separate wasn't equal because separate was codified into law.
On the flip side, what you describe is similar to the environment my father lived in. He grew up in a Black neighborhood. He's from the Midwest, so there wasn't Jim Crow in his hometown. There was alot of housing discrimination. There were lawyers, dentists, and teachers in his neighborhood. There were also many lower income people and criminals in his neighborhood. He came up in a working class household where both of his parents worked. His parents owned their own home. When housing discrimination laws were dismantled, what you describe is what happened in his neighborhood. People who had the money to live elsewhere did just that. They went into neighborhoods that were reserved for Whites or went to the suburbs. By the 1980s, my father's old neighborhood no longer had that middle class base, and the neighborhood has continued to get worse. It's a poor, violent neighborhood. It has always been marginal. There were issues when he was growing up. His school was considered one of the worst in the city, in the 1960s. Today the neighborhood is in much worse shape.
It wasn't intended that neighborhoods like my father's would become much worse. It just took place that way. What we see are those who couldn't leave. Those who could leave have left or will leave.
I was never a military brat. When I lived in Savannah (for a short time), I met several military brats though. Living in the suburban part of Savannah, I had that well-ordered childhood. In fact, most of the kids around me had that childhood. This was back in the mid 1990s (I was born in 1986). I lived in other places too. I was just mentioning that particular place. I lived in a neighborhood with alot of White people, but there were alot of Black people in the neighborhood too.
I grew up in the Atlanta area, the exurbs actually. My neighborhood could be described as middle class, majority White. Where I was living during the late 1990s-early 2000s, there weren't alot of Black families in my neighborhood. Most of the people worked. Working fathers were the norm. Working mothers were also the norm. For a while, I was one of the few kids whose mother didn't have a regular job. My father worked though. There were some bad kids in my neighborhood though. I got assaulted a few times. These were often kids whose parents were never home until 6 PM and the kids had some time to kill between 4 pm and 6 pm. I know one kid who went to jail for burglary. He wasn't a poor Black kid from the ghetto. He was a middle class White kid whose father let him get away with everything, including vandalism. I met the kid's father. His father was a jerk. Apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
Wow. I'm sorry that happened. I know what it's like to be a crime victim, both at the hands of Black people and White people. I got mugged while I was in college. This didn't happen in a rough inner city neighborhood. This was in a supposedly safe, suburban area. And the kicker, one of the persons involved was barely 16. The persons who did got caught trying to flee in their car. No public transportation available at that time of the robbery.
Your story also rememinded me of when my family and me lived in an apartment complex in the suburbs of Atlanta (before we moved into a house in another suburb). My father was one of the few fathers I ever saw in the apartment complex. And many of the kids, they were some bad kids. And not just the Black kids. Some bad White kids in the apartment complex too. One kid stole my bicycle. When I found the kid who stole, a police officer happened to drive by. He only gave the bike back under threat of jail time. What kind of 8 year old/9 year old steals a bicycle and then when caught, backtalks the police officer catching him?
It's hard for me to imagine a bunch of my relatives in one apartment building like that. All of my relatives live in other states.
I've never heard of "Hidden Figures" until now. I will have to look it up.
I am glad that Jim Crow got dismantled. To be blunt, Jim Crow was basically a dictatorship targeted at Black people. People should be free to live wherever they want to live. Separate wasn't equal because separate was codified into law.
On the flip side, what you describe is similar to the environment my father lived in. He grew up in a Black neighborhood. He's from the Midwest, so there wasn't Jim Crow in his hometown. There was alot of housing discrimination. There were lawyers, dentists, and teachers in his neighborhood. There were also many lower income people and criminals in his neighborhood. He came up in a working class household where both of his parents worked. His parents owned their own home. When housing discrimination laws were dismantled, what you describe is what happened in his neighborhood. People who had the money to live elsewhere did just that. They went into neighborhoods that were reserved for Whites or went to the suburbs. By the 1980s, my father's old neighborhood no longer had that middle class base, and the neighborhood has continued to get worse. It's a poor, violent neighborhood. It has always been marginal. There were issues when he was growing up. His school was considered one of the worst in the city, in the 1960s. Today the neighborhood is in much worse shape.
It wasn't intended that neighborhoods like my father's would become much worse. It just took place that way. What we see are those who couldn't leave. Those who could leave have left or will leave.
FYI on the bold - housing discrimination was a part of the "Jim Crow" of the north. As was employment discrimination. I remember you saying your dad is from Milwaukee, Milwaukee is one of the cities that faced a lot of racial discrimination by black people especially in the past but also today it still is one of the worst. The idea that "Jim Crow" did not exist in the north is a false idea.
The same scenario you describe after the bold occurred in my own hometown in Ohio and in various urban areas across the US, which Ralph spoke of. It is a typical narrative of black America between 1960 and 1990. The black middle class often moved out of the neighborhood - this is why when people speak of inner cities being "the black community" they are wrong. Black people today, a majority of us do not live in the inner city and IMO it is kind of weird that people like to act like those who live in inner cities are representative of all black people in America, including the over 75% of us who don't live in inner cities. They are not the black community. The idea that we should be judged by the worst part of our demographic is kind of a racist view (in believing that all of us are inferior based on certain people that folks like to demean and FWIW all poor black people also are not all horrible people). It is always interesting to me that people do this when they don't do it for other ethnic groups in America and especially not white people in regards to thinking they all are "white trash" and that their poverty "culture" represents "white America" as a whole. It is interesting as well that a lot of black people do the same thing - judge our entire demographic by the inner city criminals even though this group of inner city criminals is less than 2% of our population at large. Shows their adherence to an inferiority complex or internalized racism.
ETA: I can't believe you have never heard of the Hidden Figures movie and women... It was a very popular movie only a few years ago.
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