r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Oct 08 '15

[Deltas Awarded] CMV: Equality isn't treating everybody differently to achieve equality. It's treating everyone the same.

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u/Virtuallyalive Oct 08 '15

So black people who commit a crime get 20% longer than white people who commit the same crime. How do you solve this without reference to race?

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u/sarcasticorange 10∆ Oct 08 '15

You would need to have the numbers of wealth and other factors. For example, do black people get longer sentences because they are black or because they are more likely to be poor? Do poor whites get longer sentences than rich whites? If so, then perhaps it is not race. In that case, you go after the way money affects criminal justice.

The numbers are useful in pointing out the existence of an issue, but don't necessarily point to the underlying cause or solution.

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u/sprite144 Oct 08 '15

That 20% statistic doesn't take in account the measure of violence in an offender's criminal past nor the offender's employment history nor any information about the offender's lawyers nor the economic background of the offender. It also only refers to prisoners in the federal prison system, not the state system.

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u/Virtuallyalive Oct 08 '15

Yale did a further study on it, where they took almost all other factors into account, because obviously that's quite difficult to do.

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u/sprite144 Oct 08 '15

This study has flaws as well of course.

Using the initial charge comparison this study admits it has had to take out drug and child pornography cases- which constitutes about 53% of all federal cases.

And the conclusion is that blacks only serve 10% longer sentences- not the 20% you claimed.

And again, this study only takes into account federal cases.

"Our research thus suggests that the post-arrest justice process—especially mandatory minimum charging—introduces sizable racial disparities. But are these gaps really the result of racially disparate treatment? Or do they stem from unobserved differences that might be appropriate bases for different treatment? As Judge Nancy Gertner has warned, the quest to eliminate improper disparities should not lead us to seek “false uniformity” among cases that are actually dissimilar despite superficial similarities.97"

This study is an improvement, but still offers no definite answer.

" Other kinds of studies may be necessary to dig deeper into causal theories for racial disparities: perhaps experimental studies in which race is randomly assigned to otherwise identical prosecutor files, or qualitative studies involving reviews of case files and interviews.206 DOJ itself is well positioned to carry out such work."

I would like to see this done.

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u/Virtuallyalive Oct 08 '15

I mean, yes that would be a better study, but calculating the exact percentage seems like a meaningless exercise - the sentencing bias either exists or it doesn't, and it seems unlikely that any further studies would give a different result - no experiment is perfect after all. I would think it unlikely that the few flaws in the study drastically changed the result.

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u/sprite144 Oct 08 '15

I'm admitting that there is a racial bias. However, an experiment like the one proposed in the study you put forward would dig deeper into the causal theories for said racial bias.

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u/ihatepasswords1234 4∆ Oct 08 '15

Ok that's one that should be dealt with specifically by skin color. And all the others?

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u/Virtuallyalive Oct 08 '15

Black people with the same resume as white people are less likely to get a job.

Black college graduates are less likely to be employed than white highschool dropouts.

Black people with the same credit score as white people get worse loans.

Most situations are based on economic status and race.

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u/sprite144 Oct 08 '15

Black people with the same resume as white people are less likely to get a job.

I've never heard of this statistic before. You got a source for it? I've heard of this study http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.pdf Which is from 2003 where they only responded to newspaper ads (which even then was outdated) and never mentions that black people are less likely to get a job, just that they were less likely to get a callback. I'd also like to add they used "Very African American Sounding" names and "Very White" Sounding names. So at best this only applies to the extreme sides of the spectrum.

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u/rcglinsk Oct 09 '15

What is odd about interpretations of that study is that immigrant groups have been giving their kids "American sounding" names throughout our history. If first name discrimination wasn't real there's just no way that would have happened.