Comment by newman8r | Hacker News Reader

Comment by newman8r | Hacker News Reader

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The article makes the claim for the year 1850, and your claim is for the year 1860. There were more slaves in 1860 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_Census) than in 1850 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1850_United_States_Census)

In 1860 there were 3,953,761 slaves counted in the census.

In 2016, if you count everyone under probation and parole in addition to those in jail and prison, the number is 6,613,500 (https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpus16.pdf)

If you assume 40% of them are black, like the article claims, the number comes out to 2,645,400. This is considerably less than the number of slaves in 1860, or 1850 for that matter.

If you have a source to back up your claim then you should post it. I'm actually curious what sources the author might have been using.

I don't think you're acting in bad faith, I think you just read that huffpost article and assumed it was correct. I just wanted to reply since you were curious about what you might have done wrong.

Yep, you're right - I was off by a decade.

I initially heard about this not from The New Jim Crow but from this (seemingly awesome) Brown University student:

http://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/statements/2014/dec/0...

...but if I'm doing the math correctly, it appears to hold even for 1860 for adult males.

Actually I see now that you specifically said 'black men', which is a different statistic, so I think you might be correct.

Jesus. They're criminals not slaves. Don't do the crime, don't do the time.

Look, I too watched 13th on Netflix. Black people are over-represented in violent crime like assault, murder and rape, and so are over-represented in prisons.

> Don't do the crime, don't do the time.

Isn't this materially the same as, "if you are black, and especially black and male, choose your diet according to what the government says you can put in your body?"

If "the crime" is ingesting cannabis, I do the crime all the freakin' time and I have never, ever imagined that I might suffer any consequence of it.

Is "Don't do the crime, don't do the time" a reasonable thing to say in an environment of such intense selective enforcement?

Where to begin?

> Isn't this materially the same as....

No it's not. Are you suggesting that because a crime is so prevalent it should be ignored? As long as a crime is a crime and people commit that crime you can expect consequences for that crime. We live in a nation of rules and laws.

Anyway let's visit the facts:

- 59% of black prisoners sentenced to more than 1 year in state prison were sentenced for a violent offense, not drug crimes.

- More than half of the extra prisoners added in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s were imprisoned for violent crimes; two thirds were in for violent or property crimes. Only about a fifth of prison inmates are incarcerated for drug offenses. Only a fraction of those for marijuana.

- Black Democrats and the NAACP were instrumental in enforcing tough sentences for drug crime as drugs were decimating their communities.

So violent crime is still the main reason for the incarceration rates. As for those incarcerated for drug crimes - perhaps there are too many imprisoned but it's mostly for selling hard drugs, not weed. And even if it was weed, it's not slavery.

> Is "Don't do the crime, don't do the time" a reasonable thing to say in an environment of such intense selective enforcement?

Yes, yes it is. And the 95% of blacks (and any race for that matter) that don't do drugs would agree.

http://www.drugwarfacts.org/node/876

http://rainystreets.wikity.cc/naacp-citizens-mobilization-ag...

Your argument would carry more weight if you weren't hung up solely on the weed angle. There are far more injustices than selective enforcement of weed offenses.

That said, it's hard to equate incarceration with slavery unless there's an economic benefit to the state in incarcerating prisoners. Is there?

> If you assume 40% of them are black, like the article claims, the number comes out to 2,645,400. This is considerably less than the number of slaves in 1860, or 1850 for that matter.

As far as I can tell, the tables in: "Recapitulation of the Tables of Population, Nativity, and Occupation" from[1] indicate that there were roughly 800.000 male slaves 15 years or older in 1860 - they're listed next to free coloureds" - but I find no indication about black/non-black slaves (I imagine there were some Native Americans, Chinese at least in non-insignificant number?).

I believe op was talking about adult black males.

On a side note, would be nice if this data was digitized properly and available for easy analysis? I couldn't find any indication that it is?

[1] https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/dec...

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