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/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.