OTOH, that comment by the judge seems to me to be practical advice; it may be wrong, but that’s what’s going to happen, and he’s doing the kid a favor by making him aware that it’s not just something that happens on TV.

Wikipedia: Bill Lockyer

Lockyer achieved some notoriety for a May 2001 press conference in which he said, “I would love to personally escort [Enron CEO Kenneth Lay] to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, ‘Hi, my name is Spike, honey’”; this statement was condemned as supporting prison rape.[2][3] Lockyer later apologized for the statement in a letter to the Los Angeles Times, saying, “My anger over the activities of energy barons doesn’t come close to my lifelong outrage at the crime of rape. … I guess I let my anger get the better of me…”[4]

The American public has just accepted that prison rape happens, and that’s fine. Hell, it’s even funny! Half the internet is still giggling over the “Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison” line from Office Space.

Junior Virginia Senator Jim Webb is talking about prison reform. Good for him. Prison reform is one of those issues that’s really pressing, but never gets talked about, because what politician wants to stand up for prisoners rights? But when you read…

I’m no bible-quoter, I doubt I’m properly Christian, but I know the New Testament enough to know that Christ urged his followers to help people who were in prison. We don’t know what these prisoners did, or what choice they thought they had. The guards: they do have a choice. If I believed in Hell I’d expect them to arive on the express elevator.

Dave, I think you’ve got a pretty good handle on the concept. That kind of thinking can make you more of a Christian that some people who go to church every Sunday.

Same sort of thing happens in the neighborhood where I grew up–the police were supposedly very ’strict enforcers’ of the speed limit, but if you were from that neighborhood, you could go far over the speed limit and never get a ticket.

That can be applied to almost any area where the cops in the area come from the area, or nearby.

I live in Illinois. I go on campouts and other Scouting activities in Wisconsin a lot. It’s taken as unassailable truth that you are 10x more likely to get popped for a given moving violation in Wisconsin if your plates are Illinois plates than if they are Wisconsin plates. Obviously I have no actual data, but it stands to reason that people from Illinois are less likely to be able to show up and contest a Wisconsin ticket than people from Wisconsin, which makes the cops’ jobs easier and increases revenue/ticket. Generalize that to “people outside an area are less likely to contest getting a ticket for a violation if it’s inconvenient for them to come back to the area they got the ticket in.” Then generalize further to “if they lack the time or money to contest the ticket.” Then consider on what basis a cop might be able to make a snap judgement on whether or not the driver of a car qualifies under those criteria.

There are prisoners who are dangerous, but other stories suggest that they are allowed to be dangerous: used as tools in the institutional drive to hell.

I’m no bible-quoter, I doubt I’m properly Christian, but I know the New Testament enough to know that Christ urged his followers to help people who were in prison. We don’t know what these prisoners did, or what choice they thought they had. The guards: they do have a choice. If I believed in Hell I’d expect them to arive on the express elevator.

We’ll have to debate that one more later. Personally, I wouldn’t be cool with drug legalization for teenagers, and I wouldn’t want kids getting high in school.

In many white neighborhoods, including poor ones, you don’t see the cops driving around constantly. In fact, they only come around when they get called.

And if they are driving around, often they pull over Black or Latino motorists that they don’t believe “belong” in that neighborhood. Unlike most Whites, Black and Latino motorists who aren’t poor or are in fact quite affluent can still be followed around or pulled over by police even in their own neighborhoods or other middle-class or affluent neighborhoods, or if they are driving expensive looking vehicles. Even if Whites were being singled out due to being poor(due to classism), this behavior doesn’t go up the economic scale in the same way it does for African-Americans and Latinos.

Among those racially profiled in this matter are the following. Black judges, Black prosecutors, Black C.E.O.s and ironically, Black police officers(who can also be and have been killed by White officers when trying to assist them if they are plain-clothed, a different type of profiling).

Sometimes Whites can be pulled over and questioned by police if they are in poor neighborhoods dominated by Black or Latino residents but unlike the Black person(who is seen as a criminal) not “belonging” in a predominantly White neighborhood(which is seen as filled with “good” people), a White person might be seen as potentially a criminal(i.e. most often there to buy drugs) only because the Black and/or Latino poor neighborhood is itself profiled as being criminal or a “bad” neighborhood. My mom used to tutor in South Central for example and was pulled over a couple times b/c police couldn’t figure out what she was doing there and would in fact say so.

Speaking of the latter, I was walking through a neighborhood which was mostly White, wealthier, lots of tenured and retired academics and a Black man driving a car pulled over asking me if I’d seen a current color and type of car moving and parked. I told him, no. I walked down the hill and saw police officers in uniform and two White detectives in an unmarked car. They knew who I was and when I passed them came over and told me what was going on. I mentioned my runin with the man asking about the same kind of car they mentioned. They seemed a bit interested and asked me to describe him. They listed races, White, Hispanic and Black and I said, he was Black. The guy I spoke with had been concerned when he’d asked me about the car so I thought that maybe he was the guy looking for his car which was the one reported stolen. I didn’t know what the detectives’ perception of my encounter was.

Later that day at a meeting, I ran into the area commander who told me he’d heard one of his detectives had shaken me down. I assumed he meant the two White detectives, that I’d run into. But he mentioned a name and knowing who that person was, I realized he was the Black man in the first car.

I realized too that I’d jumped more quickly to realize that the two White men(even before seeing their faces, one of which I did recognize) were detectives and the Black man wasn’t. Both had police cars around them at the time. It reminded me of a test often given to police officers where they are shown a White man pointing a gun at a Black man and a Black man pointing a gun at a White man and asked to identify what’s going on based on what they see.

Which one is most identified as the criminal? Which one is most identified as a plain-clothed officer? It might be easier for Whites and maybe others to see the Black man with a gun as a criminal and it might be more difficult to see him as an officer even when he’s not viewed as a criminal. That bias of Black equating criminal and not equating police officer(both which have caused the deaths of Black police officers in Providende, R.I, Los Angeles, Oakland and other places) is often seen in law enforcement and I think definitely the rest of the criminal justice system as well. That’s why there’s more policing and a kind of lockdown atmosphere at public schools which are predominatly Black and/or Latino in student composition as well.

At the private school I attended in Scotland there was a group of boys who went out drinking (underage of course) and on their way back to the boarding house, walked across the tops of every car on a residential street, denting the roofs and hoods of most of them, and stealing the decals as they went, building up a little collection of Mercedes and BMW badges. If this had been done by a bunch of 17 year old boys from the council house neighborhoods, they would have all had to go to trial for vandalism, and may well have gone to jail or juvenile detention. Since it was boys from “nice” families, the headmaster of the school took them door to door to personally apologize to the car owners and they were grounded for a couple of months.

You may very well be right. There are three important distinctions–black/white, poor/not-poor, and rural/urban (urban kids seem to get away with less regardless of race and class). Since my opportunity for observation was primarily on the juvenile justice system side, I saw black kids, and white kids, who were there for really minor offenses. (You and I grew up in very similar areas IIRC.)

Sam, I think that this involves both class and race, and I mentioned both class and race in my post. I did emphasize race more than class, but to tell you the truth I haven’t read enough research on the topic to be sure which is more important.

There is something glaring wrong when the group doing the most drugs gets away with it so much.

I went to a rural all white very poor high school, and kids did all kinds of crazy shit. Unlike many of my poor black counterparts, we had no security guards or cops in our schools and no metal detectors. None of that stuff. One time I watched a kid put another kids head through a window–I don’t know exactly what the punishment was, but the perpetrator was back in school.

That’s doesn’t mean that the kids in my school weren’t treated more harshly than the kids in Amp’s school. The kids at my school probably couldn’t afford a lawyer. But the distinct advantage that my classmates had was the nobody was constantly looking over their shoulder. In many white neighborhoods, including poor ones, you don’t see the cops driving around constantly. In fact, they only come around when they get called.

Let me, though, strongly second your headline point. Our prisons are brutal and brutalizing places, and that needs to change.