In other words, what can the state do to reduce the number of blacks being sent to prison? i have read a lot of articles that pertains to a disproportionate # of blacks being on capital punishment or sent to prison, n i was wondering how can the state govern prevent this from occuring??
125589
Blacks who commit crimes usually have a lower income level than white counterparts so cannot afford good attorneys. It all starts there. To fix this, the first thing would be to truly eliminate racism. And then promote economic development in impoverished comunities, and community and personal pride. Education would help, too. \n\nThe state won't do it - it starts with the individual. People feel hopeless and stop caring about themselves, their families, their communities.
169691
Not only to the great state of Georgia but the entire United States. Its a benchmark in race relations, a very disturbing one. One where the reverse is starting to show its ugly head. African Americans WAKE UP. Do not let the selfish aims of a few racists in your own community blind you.
480779
I've never heard anyone say that the death penalty was racist; I've heard and I agree that there APPEAR to be undertones of racism in its application when more Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately on death row for the same offenses that Whites often get 25-to-Life Imprisonment or Life Imprisonment terms for.  I can't make a generalization or blanket statement but it's most curious how unforgiving White juries are toward Blacks and Latinos (some who are also mentally deficient), and the harshness with which they're judged and sentenced, many times with the flimisiest possible evidence.\n\nAnd when minority members have their convictions overturned by higher courts, the circumstances too often involve exculpatory evidence that was hidden by overzealous prosecutors and/or police officers who deemed the accused guilty and chose to see to it that he/she be condemend.  Or eye-witnesses that were not notified or called upon to testify for the suspect and the DA and/or the police never made this known to the defense team.   Or, now with DNA evidence, some prosecutors STILL fight to have the new exculpatory evidence barred from being presented to the courts!  Gee, I wonder why...?
166927
Oh damnit, a political question, I was tricked. I think the main problem with the trust issue is mainly due to the iffy criminal justice system. In order for law to work it must be swift, severe, and gauranteed: People sit on death row for 15 years, child rapists have been released with simple probations for treatment and no punishment, and you can commit the same crime in 2 places, one gets you probation and the other gets you 20 years. I believe that until these issues are better delt with, people will not be able to believe that our justice system is efficient enough to "correct" anyone. Unfortunately our justice system is unique in the world, it is a system that would literally let 10 guilty people go than send one innocent person to jail, which I can't argue with, but hopefully in the future people will realize that it's a mess and someone will fix it.
223314
I agree wholeheartedly, and think it is a shame.\n\nTo make matters worse, prisoners come out worse than they went in--due to being labeled--and due to being made to live among worse criminals.
4701
Capitol punishment does not work as it is now. Punishments must be public, swift and severe in order to deter. Public hangings detered.\n\nPay per view electric chair a week after your last appeal...say give you 1 year tops to finish the process. Now THAT would work.\n\nOf course, the innate flaws to our "best attourney wins" court system creates the potential in which innocent people may get executed before the time in which their innocence may be proven. This is the unfortunate finality that comes with capital punishment. But capital punishment can work. However, without swift, severe punishment that is viewable by future criminals, capital punishment will not work, and does not work in our society (20 years on death row? ridiculous)\n\nI found myself torn in the case of Tookie Williams recently on this very topic. If Tookie was executed 23 years ago, there would not have been public outcry to save him. Sure he maintained that he was innocent of the murder of the 4 people he was convicted of. But who really believed it (clearly not the jury), and furthermore, that was simply the one crime he was brought to court on. God knows you don't form one of the most prolific gangs our time has known without taking out a few people in your way, and a few people for the hell of it probably too.  Beyond that, the Crips that he founded have gone on to kill likely in the thousands. So he should have been executed (provided you believe in capital punishment to begin with), no question, and it should have been a walk out of the court room straight to the chair. \n\nBut our system is flawed, we let him sit on death row for more than 2 decades and during that time he may have rethought his life. He did some great works trying to use his position to influence kids to make the right choices, the choices he didn't make. Now we choose to execute someone that is in the midst of making a positive influence of our kids instead of the thug that brought many children to hell with him.\n\nIf you execute him in 1982, many good works don't get done, but if you do it publicly, you may send a more real message, and save many kids and their victims for years to come. After 20 years, we probably shouldn't have executed him at all. It was a waste, two fold.
84355
The premise that capital punishment offers is all good, however the realities are far removed.  As part of my BA in Law and Criminology we covered a module on the death penalty in the U.S. Several facts about the death penalty and it's application are worrying.\n\nFirstly state representation in death penalty cases are usually substandard (Bright 1994).  As a result the mainly poor, black defendents are required to fight a case put together with the full resources of the state with as little as $3000 to fund their case (Paduano and Smith 1991).  The amount of funding required to fund a full defence is, at the most conservative $100,000, rising to £1,700,000 if you take less conservative estimations (Paduano and Smith 1991).\n\nThere is discrimination in the way that the death penalty is applied to ethnic minorities, with the most likely person to be facing the death penalty a indigent black person who has killed a white victim.\n\nThe cost of inflicting death on a person, when considering the costs of appeals, habeous corpus review and other elements of the case means that it is often cheaper to sentence an offender to life without the possibility of parole.\n\nThere is even research to suggest that rather than deter possible offenders the influence of an execution is the opposite, this is termed 'brutalization'.  Basically when the state executes somebody, the state devalues human life which can lead to other people following the example of the state in so much that for wrongs done against them they see the use of deadly violence as legitimate.\n\nOther objections are to do with the use of a paraletic agent in lethal injection so that the condemned is not able to show any pain and therefore any violation of his constitutional right to freedom from cruel and unusual punishment cannot be seen.\n\nI also take issue with the irreversability of the death penalty, there have been many incidents of innocent people being put to death, so many infact the Illinois Governor George Ryan has put a moratorium on any exectutions in his state.\n\nPublic opinion is a tricky one.  Some poles show that people are in favour of the death penalty and some not.  This depends on the framing of the question, support for the death penalty greatly reduces when the option of life without parole is included.  In order to abolish the death penalty the federal state needs to lead from the front, once the abolition is in place then public opinion will fall into place as has happened in the UK and western europe.\n\nAs you can probably tell I am against the death penalty, mainly for the above reasons but also because no civilized society should have the need to put people to death, especially people under 18 (although the supreme court did ban this a couple of years ago, at last) and mentally under developed people who cannot understand what they are about to recieve (this is also unconstitutional, but still occcurs).\n\nThe sources below are only a brief list, however the Sarat book just below this is quite excellent and will open your eyes, a must read!\n\nFor more information see the excellent book by Austin Sarat,\n(2001) "When The State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition" Princeton: Princeton University Press, and to find out the experiences of a lawyer working in capital cases see Scott Turow (2003) Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyers Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux\n\nIm just going to leave you with this to think about, as Ghandi said An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind, enough said really
537613
Well first I want to say this is because of ill-informed white liberals and unsophisticated Democrats as to why we have this proble in America...\nI'll proceed...\nLet me put it to you like this: there are lazy black people and there are hard working black people. The only problem is, there is a good majority of them that are lazy. This is unfortunate because like with anything, the ones that are lazy give the ones who are hard working a bad name. Now, I'm not a conservative but I'm not a liberal. I'm not a racist but I definately know what you're talking about. As a matter of fact I'm not even white, but that doesn't matter. Anyways, the problem isn't so much that they're lazy as it is the problem that lies behind the fact that the majority of them who are lazy don't want to take on the responsibilities of bettering themselves and their community and accepting their faults as to why they are poor, why they don't have black-owned businesses even in the cities that they live in, why so many of them are incarcerated, why they can't stop depending on the government to give them handouts. I could go on and on. The truth of the matter is (and this is not just coming from me but other African-Americans as well), the majority of black folk in America don't want to take on responsibility to make change. They'd rather complain and blame everything on the white man and everyone else who isn't black. I mean, when Martin Luther King rallied a Civil Rights movement, he intended that to better the lives of black folk and give way to equal opportunities for them. As a matter of fact, the very people who fought for those civil rights back in the sixties sacrificed their lives just so black folk could prosper in America. But its a shame to see a good number of black folk disgrace that legacy by allowing drugs, crime and a lack of work ethics to tarnish it. I always hear this left-wing rehtoric that blacks have it hard in this country because they're black. It's not because they're black, it's because they don't want succeed the right way. I'm sure a number of you want to call me a racist, a this or that. You know what, it doesn't really matter because I know for a fact that when the Chinese, Vietnamese, East Indian (who some that are darker than some of the black folk here), and other ethnic groups who immigrated here, worked their asses off and did what they had to do with the very little rights they had and actaully pulled through and ended up owning businesses, having the highest level of education and made names for themselves. Now why can't black people here do the same? Well, here are number of reasons why:\n\nFor one, they highly depend on the Liberals and Democrats to give them this warm feeling that everything is in good hands as long as it is trusted in the hands of Liberals and Democrats, when the truth of the matter lies behind the fact that Democrats don't encourage them to pull their weight, stop using race as an excuse for success, leave family guidance and morale to the side (after all, Bill Clinton was po' black folk's daddy), and brainwash them into thinking that communism is going to solve all the problems when in fact it'll only make things worse for blacks (after all, with communism, who needs to work hard?).\nThe second and foremost reason is because white liberals use their aethist, communist, anything goes, anarchist delusional theory driven ideas to confuse African Americans to believing that as long as they're poor and black, they can be used as puppets for deranged liberal marketing.\n\nSo, if African Americans actually think that the Democrats or the radical liberals are going to make things better for them, then they better start rethinking why they go to church, why they're in America and not in Africa and why they don't need schools at all. Because as far as I'm concerned, it's not the A
159859
It's people like you that make me not want to visit Yahoo answers. You're sick? No I'm sick of people categorizing all black people. I go out and work every single day and don't ask no one to support me and my children. I only ask to be treated with dignity and respect just like everyone else. White people did not lose their lives for 400 years bieng a slave and continue to lose their lives for being who they are and I'm not even counting the lives we lost on the boats getting here and no one fought for us on the boat. I am not dismissing any participation of white people in the fight for rights of black people it is greatly appreciated but the numbers of those who died are mostly black people. If your people and family were killed just because of their race, would it be easy to swallow and forget? You have been a victim yourself and I would never tell you to forget about it and treat it as something small. I don't complain and ask no one for nothing! Racism still exists and it did not happen a long time ago. Rosewood, Segregation, not having the right to vote, lynching, and The Tuskegee Experiment are examples. I am not on welfare and I don't ask for handouts so stop insulting me! For Jason aka J, we read history books while in school everyday, year after year, about white people contributions to this country. It is not just condensed in a month. We are always reminded of it in history class and how black people were percieved and treated in this country. Don't let the actions of some distort your perception of all.
578080
Those are all good points for the legislatures to consider but the constitution does not allow the court to simply decide that the death penalty is unwise.  State legislatures decide and then then Court decides if that penalty is barred as "cruel and unusual" punishment but the constitution doesn't preclude state laws that are merely "counterproductive."  so, run for your state legislature and vote to abolish the death penalty in your state.
517490
Unfortunately, due to the recent flash of facism these days, he will receive a completely unorthodox amount of time behind bars or probation.\n\nAll you can hope is that the people involved in his case are not a bunch of assholes and will either give him his first offence warning or maybe rehab.
319991
My grandfather told me about a cousin who did this back in the forties. The cousin went up North to live and didn't contact anyone.  My grandpa went to visit him one time; the cousin made him come at night and he had to enter the house through the back.  After that no one ever saw the cousin again.  My mother told me about some Blacks who "passed" for a time in order to get a better education, but then returned to their families once they were done.  I can see why some Blacks would pass in earlier times, but not now.  I don't agree with what they did, but to some extent I understand why.  Personally even if I could "pass" I wouldn't; I love my family, my people and my culture too much.  People who "pass" had to stay away from all Black people.  Can't take a chance on someone's "Blackdar" finding you out!
437969
When bad people  insist on doing bad and evil things\n    to other people, then something has to be done.  We\n    can't allow them to torture and kill other people and\n    then allow them to live in a society of other people who\n    want to live in peace. So, after they won't be good then\n    who needs them on this land......capitol punishment is\n    the only answer.
644537
I've never been there as a prisoner, but I have volunteered as an ex-offender advocate. Sometimes, that has involved going to the site of their incarceration before release. That is a great idea. Also, children of incarcerated people are a very often overlooked "need" group. Good luck to you.
484491
It's being challenged on its housing restrictions. Most of the bill to length sentences for child molesters has already been signed into law. The authors have already backtracked and admitted that they made a mistake when they didn't write the initiative clearly enough not to apply retroactively. While that may fly in some states like New York, New Jersey, Iowa and Georgia, in California, it does not. We may not be a fully blue state but we're far from a red state. We take our constitutional rights seriously, and there are many pissed off people fighting this initiative in court. \n\nThe California Department of Corrections is also not real happy about the parolees not being able to live within 2000 feet of schools and parks. It is saying it might have to build housing at public expense to house them - something like $132 million to start. This in a state which already has a multi billion budget (the governor didn't solve the budget problem - he just borrowed the funds by floating bonds.)\n\nAlthough 70 oercent of voters cast yes votes on it, the courts frown on initiatives that are popular but unconstitutional. Another example was an initiative which banned all public services to illegal aliens in 1994. The public voted for it; the courts threw it out. \n\nI agree with the 2nd poster - it is time for the legislators to stop trying to legislate these kinds of laws. They only look like idiots, especially when they can't even write the initiatives right.\n\nAlso below is a link to a Los Angeles Times editorial against Proposition 83. \n\nhttp://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-jessica12nov12,0,4249584.story?coll=la-opinion-leftrail
120491
yes they get priviledges.\n\nBlacks are incarcerated at a rate that is more than 6 times that of whites for the same crime. In total, between 1980 and 1999, the incarceration rate for Blacks more than tripled from 1156 per 100,000, to 3,620 per 100,000. This is more than 4 times the rate of incarceration of Blacks in South Africa during the apartheid era.The rate of imprisonment for Black women is more than 8 times that of white women for the same crime.The Black male homicide rate is 7 times the white male rate. Black women are 18 times more likely to be raped than white women. The death penalty has been imposed in 682 capital cases since 1995. The U.S. attorney recommended the death penalty in 183 of them-of those cases 26% involved white defendants, 74% "minority." Blacks make up 40% of the death row population. Black men are get jail time 3 times greater than that of white for the same crime.Blacks account for 30% of people with AIDS in America. 54% of children under age 13 with AIDS are Black. HIV/AIDS is the number 1 cause of death for Blacks aged 25 to 44.\nIn recent years, the estimated incidence of HIV/AIDS has declined for every race except Blacks. In 1997, four times as many Latinos and eight times as many Blacks as whites contracted AIDS. Whites with HIV are far more likely to receive advanced drug therapy-a trend that slowed the white death rate from AIDS by 28% from 1995 to 1996, but by only 10% for Blacks. Blacks account for 57% of new infections of HIV and by the year 2005, African Americans will account for 60% of AIDS cases.Whites are two-thirds more likely to receive kidney transplants than others.The Justice Department estimates that one out of every 21 Black men can expect to be murdered, a death rate double that of U. S. soldiers in World War II. A young Black male in America is more likely to die from gun fire than was any soldier in Vietnam.White males with a high-school diploma are just as likely to have a job, and tend to earn just as much as Black males with college degrees. Light-skinned Blacks have a 50% better chance of getting a job than dark-skinned Blacks. Blacks are rejected twice as often for small business loans than whites of comparable credit.
403077
The problem is much more complex and can't be solved by putting more people in prison.  Factors that determine when a person is released: Prison overcrowding, sentencing guidelines, parole board or special review board decisions, etc.  None of these factors can be controlled by a psychiatrists or parole officer, and rarely do psychiatrists or parole officers have a say in the matter.  What your fail to mention is all the successful releases, don't let a few bad apples paint a negative picture of the process as a whole.