Friday, January 16, 2009
Solution To The Possibility That Black Americans Are Sent To Jail More Than White Americans
There's probably about a million articles on the web about black Americans being sent to jail more so than whites and face unfair discrimination in their sentencing. I've never been to jail so obviously I don't know what the court system is like. However the fact that I haven't been jail is not because of my race. It's because I don't break the law! It's entirely possible the justice system is biased. Then again it's entirely possible it's not. Either way, follow one simple rule and you'll never have to deal with it: Don't break the law. If the court system is biased and more prone to put black Americans in jail, it doesn't mean they don't deserve it. They broke the law. Just because it's possible a few more white people get off the hook for crime, doesn't excuse the fact that a black person broke the law. They still have to be punished. They get a long sentence? Tough luck. You shouldn't have broken the law in the first place. Then you wouldn't have to deal with it at all. Black, white or candy apple red, if you're a criminal, you have to be punished. So if you don't want to deal with the justice system giving you an unfair sentence, follow the law.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Look at the bigger picture. Two hundred years ago, African-Americans were forced to the United States as slaves. Fifty years ago, they were still marching in the streets to have the same rights and freedoms as white people. Their ethnic group has been hampered by discrimination, which in the past has made it difficult for them to get jobs, finish school or get fair pay. Many of the young black men in gangs come from broken homes and end up adopting the gang as a family unit.
ReplyDeleteImagine walking down the street and having someone look at you as though you are going to jump them at any second, or being pulled over and harassed by the police because you are young and black. The schools in your neighborhoods are broke, so students have to share text books. An astonishing number of kids in your classes, maybe even one third, are illiterate even at a high school level. Drugs are sold in schools and the gangs infiltrate the parks and playgrounds so that you can’t feel safe going outside. Members of your own family are addicted to drugs and can often be violent or invite violent people into the one-room apartment you share with your mom and siblings. You end up getting a gun for protection. You’re desperate for money to pay rent, so you start stealing and selling drugs to put food on the table for your younger siblings. There never seems to be enough money, and eventually you do something stupid like rob a liquor store and get caught by the police and sent to jail. This is why there are so many black men in prison: they are a product of terrible environments that were created by Caucasian Americans who refused to let African Americans rise in society. Even in the twentieth century, blacks were forced to go to separate schools, could not drink at the same water fountains as whites or live in the same neighborhoods. They were forced to live in squalor while trying to survive a system designed to keep them down.
You say you’ve never been to jail. Good for you. But I’m willing to bet you’re the product of at least a middle class family living in a place with a low crime rate. You probably attend a school where you don’t have to worry about getting knifed in the hallways. You don’t have to worry about where you’re going to get your next meal or if you’re going to get kicked out of your house for not paying rent. But if you were a seventeen year old kid with a terrible education, no father, a mother who’s addicted to heroin and can’t work, three younger siblings under the age of twelve and a landlord threatening to evict you because you can’t pay rent for a crappy apartment on a $6 an hour salary at McDonalds and feed your siblings, would it be so easy to avoid a life of crime? You can’t imagine that everyone’s got the same life that you have. Black Americans have had to endure hardships you wouldn’t even know about unless you took a closer look. Please, take a closer look before you make an assumption about people. Yes, breaking the law is wrong. But tell me this: if a guy has to break a law trying to feed his family because past laws prevented his family from moving out of the ghetto, what is more wrong, the man or the law?