Is the War-on-Drugs about Race?

[CaramonLS]

Here is my favorite stat:

Not committing drug related crimes or using drugs = chance of getting incarcerated for these crimes, 0%.

Incarceration rates have a lot more to do with social demographics (which has a very strong racial component).

[Gozer]

Originally Posted by bizaro86

You have one data point of a country with private prisons, and argue that the private prisons are increasing incarceration. I think it's just as likely that the US has private prisons BECAUSE they incarcerate so many people. Correlation doesn't prove causation.

Why do they incarcerate so many people?

Is America just making the best of a bad situation - where they are saddled with so many citizens* with inferior* "genes and culture" that imprisoning them at jaw-dropping rates for petty crimes and paying them pennies* for involuntary servitude as part of a $1.31B industry is the best option they have available??

*Actually citizens can vote. As of 2004, more African American men were disfranchised than in 1870, the year the 15th amendment was ratified
*quote is not from bizaro, whom I've quoted
*minimum wage for the rodeo cited in the OP is $0.02

Originally Posted by bizaro86

As to your next point, you need to read what I'm replying to. I was responding to your assertion that more white people should go to jail. My point was that if the problem is too many black guys in jail, you don't fix that problem by incarcerating more white people. You fix it by solving the underlying causes of that incarceration, which is sub-optimum educational and economic outcomes of Blacks in the US.

I was making a different argument, this is where scattering counter-arguments from debates with other people doesn't work.

I was not advocating arresting more white people to "it's a small world" prisons - I was extending the argument that if people are in jail because they deserve it then their racial counterparts are endangering society while roaming the streets.

Originally Posted by bizaro86

The over-zealous focus on those elements reduce the credibility of the rest of your arguments.

Since the latter argument was only presented as a counter-argument, I doubt the sincerity of that assertion.
edit: after re-reading your posts, I'm off base on this last comment

[Gozer]

http://rethinkamerica.net/2010/06/23...incarceration/

When slavery was banned in 1865, there was a big shortage of cheap labor for the Reconstruction, so in 1868 they came up with a plan where you could stop by the prison and lease inmates for $1 to $4 per month ($13 to $55 per month in 2009 dollars), compared to a slave which cost $30,000 to $40,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars and work them as hard as you liked; until they either died from exhaustion, committed suicide, or cut off their own hands/feet in order to be sent back to the prison as defective.

Customers loved it- they were even cheaper than slaves and required less upkeep, since as the saying went “one dies, get another.” This predictably caused an explosion in the prison population (tenfold in Georgia for example), and an increase in percentage of black inmates from 33% to 60% in the South. This practice went on until 1928 when Alabama finally let it end.

It's not a new phenomenon.