This Person is a Member of the US House of Representatives

[PanzerJaeger]

I take it you are not a fan of the book "The New Jim Crow" that all the Sociology majors at my campus have to read.

I am not. The author goes to ridiculous lengths to blame black incarceration rates on anything and everything besides black behavior, and her talk of a new caste system and a new Jim Crow forces the reader to question her grasp of the subject matter. Also, it is essentially a copy of several other books with the author's unsupported assertions worked in here and there. Basically, it is pseudo intellectual dribble propped up by pseudo science meant to give new life to the black oppression industry, and it does not surprise me that it is being peddled on college campuses.

If the author wanted to be truly groundbreaking, as her prose makes it desperately clear that she does, she could have attempted to address the reasons why black people are more likely to engage in criminal behavior than other races. Such an investigation would have certainly highlighted some actually important issues surrounding severe poverty, the lack of opportunities in inner cities, the cultural failings surrounding familial and parental expectations, and a culture that glorifies criminal activity. Such a line of reasoning apparently did not occur to the author as she seems incapable of accepting the basic premise, preferring to blame all of black America's problems on what she refers to as the 'white system'.

It becomes a revolving door only after the book gets thrown at them the first time.

The outcomes of the United States justice system are racist. That is not to say the institutions are racist but the end result certainly is.

I don't think you can ever prove why that is without conjecture but we can at least acknoweldge that fact. The data points that out beyond a doubt.

We are only 40 years removed from firebombings and assinations for equal voting rights. Why is it so out of the realm of possibilty that the system can still be prejudical?

Really the end result of the disproportionate penal population is the culmination of a litany of things including but not limited to the drug war, overcrowding, three strike, mandatory minimums, the fallacy of being "tough on crime", bias

I do not believe adverse impact is a valid concept. Black people are imprisoned more often than whites for the same crimes because they often have longer criminal records than whites. Black people are policed more than whites because they often live in high crime areas - crimes committed by black people. The truth is that black people are the genesis of the 'problem' of disproportionately high black incarceration rates. I would even go so far as to say that black people are the genesis of most of their own problems in contemporary times. That fact cannot be obscured by conjuring up sympathetic emotional appeals to fire bombings or other excesses from the '60s.

What is more disturbing is the logical outcome of such thinking - affirmative action in sentencing.