For those of you who consider themselves to be fluent in Spanish, try each of these three times quickly:

1.        Tres tristes tigres

Tragan trigo en un trigal

2.        Avisa al public de la republica

Que el agua publica se va a secar

Para que el publico de la republica

Coja agaua publica de la republica

De Panama

3.        Ponsio pilato pide permiso

Para ponerse puluca postiza

Porque paraece Puerco pelado

4.       Compadre comprene coco

Coco no compro compadre

Porque poco coco como

Compadre no compre coco

5.        El cuero del cuerpo

Del puerco

6.        El cielo esta enladrillado

Quien lo desenladrillara

Aquel que lo desenladrillare

Un buen desenladrillador sera

7.        No nos miremos, cuando miremos

Que nos miran, que nos miramos,

Nos miraremos, cuando miremos

Que no nos miran que nos miramos

8.        El amore s una locura, que ni el cura

Lo cura, y si el cura lo cura

Es una lovura del cura

9.        Pedro, Pablo Puga Perez

Pinta paredes, puertas

Persianas, por poco

Precio puede progarlo

Como hiciste?

This is not a statistic. The names that follow are individuals–real persons who died at the hands of another–and essentially nothing was said by the public or the press in 2014:

1. March 21. 13-month-old Antonio Santiago was shot in the face and killed while sitting in his stroller by a young Black man—part of a duo of Black thugs–and the baby’s mother, Sherry West, was gravely wounded. The mother, a White resident of a predominately Black neighborhood, was walking home from the post office. A Brunswick County, Georgia grand jury did not find sufficient cause for the Black teen to face the death penalty. The murder and its aftermath were briefly mentioned in the news. President Obama and Attorney General Holder did not comment. No Black Leader nor White racist stepped up to protest. There was no group that put up a bounty on the two Black killers. There was no righteous indignation, let alone rioting. It was just a White baby.
2. June 1. William Headley, White male, murdered by a Black male. There was no national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
3. June 2. Robert Mohler, White male, murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
4. June 5. Laura Bachman, White female, murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
5.  June 7. Harry Briggs, White male, murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
6. June 11. Nathan Hall, White male, murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
7. June 11. Angela Cook, White female, murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
8. June 15. Michael Beaver, White male, murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
9. June 17. Allyn Reeves, White male, murdered by a Black male No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
10. June18. John Yingling, White male, murdered by a Black male. No national news.
11. June 20. John Whitmore, White male, murdered by a Black male No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
12. June 22. Jonathan Price, White male, murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
13. June 24. Nathan Dasher, White male, murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
14. June 25. Gina Burger, White female, murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
15. June 26. Jake Rameau, White male, murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
16. June 27. Inga Evans, White female, murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
17. June 27. Penelope Spencer, White female, murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
18. June 27. Shirley Barone, White female, murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
19. June 29. Paul Shephard, White male, murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
20. June 30. Jim Brennan, White male, murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
21. July 2. Jennifer Kingeter, White female murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
22. July 2. Rupert Anderson, White male murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
23. July 3. Laurey Kennedy, White female still in coma from beating by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
24. July 3. Eric Mollet, White male murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
25. July 5. Perry Renn, White male murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
26. July 10. Jeffrey Westerfield, White male murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
27. July 6. Sarah Goode, White female murdered by a Black male No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
28. July 10. Brittany Simpson, White female murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
29.  July 11. Luis Aguilar, 91 year old Hispanic male murdered by a Black male. No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
30. July 17. Cindy Raygoza, a White female was murdered by a Black male No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
31. July 18. Jimmie Norman, a White male was murdered by a Black male No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.
32. July 18. Terry Taylor, a White male was murdered by a Black male No national news, no public outcry, no cries of racism.

“In 2012, 123 African-Americans were shot dead by police. In the same year, 326 Whites were killed by police,” according to Bill O'Reilly. “Let's take a good look at this plague of White cops acting violently against Blacks, as (professor and liberal columnist Michael Eric) Dyson puts it…In the past 50 years, the rate of Black Americans killed by police has dropped 70 percent. There are currently more than 43 million Blacks living in the U.S.A. Same year, 326 Whites were killed by police bullets. Those are the latest stats available…That's not an epidemic. It's not crazy. It's not a hunting-down of Black youth.”

Now, the present author will attempt to make some sense out of the disparate facts presented and to offer what suggestions seem reasonable. Reasonableness has been in short supply on the part of contending factions, and perhaps it is time to make the changes necessary to achieve fairness, safety, reduced crime rates, reduced violent interactions between minorities and law enforcement officers. There are two sides—at least—in the controversy posed in the question that is the title. It is not the present author’s intention to dwell on who is right or who is wrong. There are well-paid and passionate proponents of any side that may enter the discussion. Rather, what follows is my opinion, presumably a set of ideas that will make me appear to be an equal opportunity target.

I conclude–after intermittent investigation of the racial implications of crime–that there is too much crime, especially violent crime, in the United States and too many people in the penal system—perhaps five times as many as in other developed countries.

I conclude that crime is a scourge for citizens of central parts of cities predominately populated by minorities. Crime, arrests, trials, sentencing, and incarcerations are a terrible drain on scarce resources, including those of human potential.

I conclude that our approach must change; i.e. there must be a sea-change in American society as profound as the civil rights movement. That statement is likely to seem naïve to almost everyone who reads it, but it is nonetheless true. We can ill afford more violent exchanges between law-enforcement officials or even an intolerant and fractious social climate. Certainly, we could do without further race riots with death, injury, arrests, incarcerations, and burning down the cities—usually the homes of poor and mostly law-abiding minority people who are just trying to make a living and get by in a hostile world.

My suggestions are as follows:

1. There have been 45 deaths and at the hands of police officers; and since August 9, 2014 when the officer involved shooting took place in Ferguson, Missouri, 37 police officers have died in the line of duty and 52,901 officers assaulted (out of 520,047 officers in the country). For the year, 108 officers died in the line of duty—61 of those deaths were related to assault, pursuit, and murder. Are those facts cause for alarm? Indeed. The alarm should affect Blacks and White liberals to the same extent that White conservatives should be concerned. There has been too much killing; and, unfortunately, too often for the wrong reason. It is time to set aside the political rhetoric which is designed to keep corrupt politicians in office, sensation mongering wannabe celebrities in the spotlight [include here, the usual suspects posing as “Black Leaders”], the anti-gunners, the “everybody should have unlimited access to guns” crowd, and the strident outcries of the law-and-order über alles on the opposite end of the spectrum. All of it happens in every state; so, no one has the right to trumpet the success of one state or to cry “shame” at any other. This is a national problem for the United States.
2. Instead of “Black leaders” fomenting hatred and blame on Whites and excusing bad behavior by Blacks because of racism, a new way of thinking and a new way of doing must be introduced and nurtured for the next several decades. Yes, slavery was a hideous and ultimately destructive social and economic enterprise. Yes, minorities have endured the harmful effects of racism and all that it has taken from them. Both malign historical entities were reprehensible. To the extent that racism persists—and here I include intolerance by any race against any other race—it is reprehensible. However, slavery is gone. There are effective laws that guarantee equal treatment under the law. Most law-abiding minority people have the opportunity to find work, do that work, and to support their families. It is time for educational effort and opportunity to become a national priority. Ignorance breeds fear, a sense of impotence, anger, despair, and a cycle of crime and violence. Minorities must learn not only the basics of reading, writing, and mathematics to be able to cope; but they must learn to assimilate into productive American society. Yes, it is valuable to keep one’s own racial, ethnic, and social identity; but it is entirely possible for minorities to succeed in noncriminal American societies—witness the phenomenal success of minority politicians, clergy, sports and entertainment enterprises, and the professions. Those people should be the role models instead of the drug lords or angry, full of hate “Black leaders”.
3. Minorities must very vigorously espouse and practice a policy of sexual abstinence before marriage. They must elevate the institution of marriage to a religious level. It is no longer acceptable for men to impregnate girls, rape girls, and exploit girls and thereby produce children who are parented by children or by a grandmother. Men must step up and take responsibility if the cycle of poverty and violence is to cease. Too many young minority men die too young. Mothers and grandmothers do their best, but the odds against them seem insurmountable at present. A sea-change in life styles is imperative.
4. The concepts of doing a good day’s work for a good day’s pay, responsibility, accountability, and overall decency needs to be the focus of the true Black leaders. They are around; let them have the chance to succeed. Let the children have childhoods unmolested, safe, and which include living in decent housing with enough to eat. The world does not need another drug lord, corner drug salesman, or junkie. It does not need another prostitute. What it does need is families who stay together and provide support: a father who picks up his lunch pail and goes to work five or six days a week for eight or more hours a day, a mother with an education who can direct her children, and sons and fathers who value and protect the females in their lives.
5. Other changes that need to take place in minority communities that would curb the number of arrests are to obey the law, do not argue with society’s laws, and do not argue with law enforcement officers. There is an orderly time, and a place where civility can dominate—a place where community leaders and citizens sit face to face with law enforcement officials and discuss in rational terms with an emphasis on finding solutions over placing blame, cursing, calling names, or shouting. Courtrooms are also venues where civility can dominate, and both sides of questions get to be aired. The street is not such a place.

Minority communities must do their part to get over the gulf that exists between law enforcement and the citizens of predominately minority communities. There is a substantial majority of those citizens who are courteous, helpful, and respectful of police officers and who value the protection offered by those officers. By and large, those officers are more inclined to return civility, courtesy, and real help when they perceive that they are respected; and their help is valued. Criminals need to be reported; police need to protect citizens who provide such help. And law enforcement needs to be trained and made accountable to a color-blind standard of equality at all steps of the interaction. While there are other factors—such as socioeconomic status, the environment in which a person was reared and lives, and the highest educational level a person achieves—in the end, what matters the most is that there be true fairness and equality, which is a complicated multifactorial issue which begs a careful and nuanced system and an education for everyone involved in the system. There can be no contradiction between law enforcement and civil rights. On the other hand, there can be no excuse for bad behavior on the part of the public. Law enforcement and the public alike are obligated to obey the law, and that means that individuals stopped by police are required to respond promptly, courteously, and without evasion or violence.

6. The Ferguson and New York examples are only the most recent major events; there will surely be more, and they will occur in the near future. Police have been too slow to learn how to treat minorities. It is time for a considerable effort towards civility be incorporated in the training of law enforcement officers. I experienced mandatory minority awareness during my stint in the navy. The message was: minorities are an integral part of the navy and of society; they are here to stay; and the navy will not tolerate racism or discrimination in any form. In my experience that policy was regular navy life, and the policy worked.

Several proposals to ameliorate the racial disparities that dominate the criminal justice system have been made, but are usually one-sided with the general law-abiding public and the law enforcement system making all of the adjustments. Those proposals include establishing accreditation for law enforcement, increased statistical compilation, the diversification of law enforcement, body cameras for all police, abolishing or suspending the death penalty, reforming sentencing guidelines, repealing felony disenfranchisement laws and repealing efforts to move juveniles into the adult justice system. I do not disagree with any of those proposals. However, nothing effective will happen unless or until minority communities and citizens become cooperative and law abiding. Change requires a bilateral effort, give and take, and compromise.

It is probably–and sadly–true that officer body cameras should be an integral part of a police officer’s equipment. Well intentioned community leaders, including the successful grandmother, shopkeeper, school teacher, and religious leader should be involved in regular meetings with the police officers who patrol their neighborhoods. The meetings should be conducted in mutual civility. Those police officers should be made to feel that they are reasonably safe to come into the neighborhood to protect and to serve. Brutal, insensitive, racist, and ignorant police officers and administrators should be considered dinosaurs and that their time to behave badly is over. The “blue wall” needs to step up to discipline malefactors who besmirch the reputation of good cops and make all law enforcement officers’ lives less safe.

7. Attitudes must change: No more stops for Driving While Black. No more refusal to be a forthright witness of a crime. No more acceptance of bad behavior on any side or by any individual. The attitude that cops are enemies is a highly unproductive one. It leads police officers to mutter sarcastically, “If you don’t want the cops to come, call Al Sharpton or Jessie Jackson. They’ll take care of the problem, which is caused by racism anyway.” Remember the 1992 Los Angeles riots where the police just stayed away and let the city burn down. I do, I was there. It was a terrible time for minorities who lost their businesses, their jobs, and their very lives at the hands of their neighbors who were in the vast majority minorities—in fact, their neighbors. The first month after the riots started, suburbanites bought 200,000 guns to protect themselves against their fear of minority criminals.
8. Teach religion. Teach peace. Teach abstinence—no drugs, no alcohol, no sex before marriage, no cohabitation–which is abusive to women. Teach fundamental honesty. Teach common courtesy. Teach patience and forbearance. Teach community. Teach boys and men to respect girls and women. Teach law enforcement to understand and to respect diversity. Teach anything that promotes safety, civility, and cooperation. Teach any of those concepts and get rid of racism, the supremacy of gangs, intolerance, and the corrupt value of “every-one-for-himself”. Racism is a shameful remnant of a dark past. Get over the fact and join America where even unintentional, subtle, and nuanced racism is stupid and harmful.
9. The system must find ways to rehabilitate minority people when they leave jail and prison–to keep them away from gangs, drugs, and alcohol, to get them into educational programs, to convince employees to give the ex-cons a chance, and to find ways for minority peoples to break out of the self and community destructive cycles that are now so much a part of American inner city life. Here is a radical, probably naïve suggestion: let’s require a two-year stint of physical work at a useful trade or skill-set for every minority person at age eighteen who is not by then enrolled in a technical educational institution or an institution of higher learning. Make that opportunity available to the general population, but it is crucial for minorities. It would be like the draft, but not for the military—for the young man and woman who needs a chance to get out and up, just as the CCCs did in the Great Depression.
10. We all need to do something, and we need to do it now. It is a process, and more vigorous first steps must be taken; and long-term follow-up, accountability, and revision of plans and activities must be included in that process.

Critics target the federal crack penalties because of the fact that crack defendants are more likely to be Black. In 2006, eighty-one percent of federal crack defendants were Black, while only twenty-seven percent of federal powder-cocaine defendants were. Since federal crack rules are more severe than those for powder, and crack offenders are disproportionately Black, those rules must explain why so many Blacks are in prison, the conventional wisdom holds without further investigation.

However the actual number of crack sellers sentenced in federal court each year is an enlightening piece of information in the discussion. In 2006, 5,619 cases were tried federally–4,495 of them black. From 1996 to 2000, the federal courts sentenced more powder traffickers–23,743–than crack traffickers–23,121. The approximately 5,600 crack defendants a year who enter the system fail to account for the 562,000 Black prisoners in state and federal facilities at the end of 2006—or the 858,000 Black prisoners in custody overall, if one includes the population of county and city jails. Nor do crack/powder disparities at the state level explain Black incarceration rates: only 13 states distinguish between crack and powder sentences, and they employ much smaller sentence differentials.

Federal methamphetamine-trafficking penalties are nearly identical to those for crack: possession of five grams of meth carries a mandatory minimum five-year sentence. In 2006, the 5,391 sentenced federal meth defendants–nearly as many as the crack defendants–were fifty-four percent White, thirty-nine percent Hispanic, and two percent Black. There seems to be no protest against the federal meth laws for being either anti-Hispanic or anti-White.

Nevertheless, the federal crack penalties dominate discussions on race and incarceration because they are presumed to be concrete examples of egregious racial disparity. This leads to a commonly expressed syllogism: crack penalties have a disparate impact on blacks; disparate impact is racist; therefore, crack penalties are racist. This syllogism has been particularly prominent recently, thanks to the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s 2007 decision to lighten federal crack penalties retroactively in the name of racial equity.

Critics blame drug enforcement for rising racial disparities in prison. Again, the facts say otherwise. In 2006, Blacks were 37.5 percent of the 1,274,600 state prisoners. If prisoners incarcerated for drug offenses were removed from the prison population, the percentage of Black prisoners would drop to 37 percent—half of a percentage point–hardly a significant difference.

5.  Sentencing Phase:

The question of whether the trial and sentencing stages of the justice system are plagued by racism has been studied extensively for several decades. As early as 1983, the Panel on Sentencing Research–which was established by the liberal-leaning National Academy of Sciences (NAS) on request of the U.S. Justice Department—reviewed more than seventy studies on sentencing patterns and concluded: “Our overall assessment of the available research suggests that factors other than racial discrimination in the sentencing process account for most of the disproportionate representation of Black males in U.S. prisons …”  Further, the NAS reported that it had found “no evidence of a widespread systematic pattern of discrimination in sentencing.”

In 1985 the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology concluded that a disproportionate number of blacks were in prison not because of a double standard of justice, but because of the disproportionate number of crimes they committed. That same year, a federal government statistician conducted an exhaustive study of Black and White incarceration rates and found that “even if racism [in sentencing] exists, it might explain only a small part” [of the black overrepresentation among prison inmates]. In a 1987 review essay of the three most comprehensive books examining the role of race in the American criminal-justice system, the journal Criminology concluded that there was little evidence of anti-black discrimination. In his 1987 book The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System, William Wilbanks presented a summary of “what is known about race and sentencing,” and wrote:

• “Extralegal variables (for example, race, sex, age, socioeconomic status of defendant) are not as predictive of sentence as legal variables (for example, type of crime, strength of evidence).”
• “The Black/White variation in sentences is generally reduced to near zero when several legal variables are introduced as controls.”
• “There is no evidence that Black judges are less likely than White judges to send Blacks to prison or to give them lengthy terms.”

The most exhaustive, best-designed study of sentencing patterns ever conducted—a 1990 analysis of more than 11,000 recently convicted criminals in California—found that the severity of sentences depended heavily on such factors as prior criminal records, the seriousness of the crimes, and whether guns were used in the commission of those crimes; race was found to have no effect whatsoever. Likewise, a 1991 RAND Corporation study found that a defendant's racial or ethnic background bore little or no relationship to conviction rates; far more important than race were such factors as the amount of evidence presented, and whether or not a credible eyewitness testified.

In 1993 a Justice Department study tracked the experience of more than 10,000 accused felons in America's seventy-five largest cities found that Black defendants actually fared better than their White counterparts: 66% of Black defendants were actually prosecuted, versus 69% of White defendants. Among those prosecuted, 75% of Blacks were convicted, as compared to 78% of Whites. Also in 1993, a criminologist found that when comparing Black arrests for homicide and the presence of Blacks in prison for that crime, African-Americans were significantly underrepresented among incarcerated inmates. Liberal criminologist Michael Tonry wrote in 1995: “Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned.”

A 1996 analysis of 55,000 big-city felony cases found that Black defendants were convicted at a lower rate than Whites in 12 of the 14 federally designated felony categories. This finding was consistent with the overwhelming consensus of other, previous, well-designed studies, most of which indicated that Black defendants were slightly less likely to be convicted of criminal charges against them than White defendants. In 1997, liberal criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen undertook a painstaking review of the voluminous literature on charging and sentencing, and concluded that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” explained why proportionately more Blacks than whites were in prison—and for longer terms.

There is a grim and objective statistic, one not part of histrionic outcry: Between 1976 and 2005, the number of blacks murdered per 100,000 per year varied from a high of 37-38 in 1976 to a low of 20 per 100,000 in 2005 (with an unfortunate jump in the numbers to 40/100,000 between 1990 and 1995). That is in contrast to a fairly steady rate of Whites being murdered of 3-5/100,000/year during the same period of time. The great majority of the deaths in Blacks came from Black-on-Black violence, not from police inflicted death.

There is most certainly a double standard on the part of the American public, the Black community, and the news media. A few minutes after a large Black youth robbed a convenience store, then accosted a police officer and was killed in a justifiable homicide—according to a grand jury that saw and heard evidence for months—there was a nationwide, even world-wide, violent protest which was excused by law enforcement, governments, and a majority of the general public because of the color of the young man’s skin. Trayvon and Michael are household names as icons of the injustice suffered by people of color in the system despite no finding of fault on the part of the White persons involved. A frighteningly high number of White people were murdered by Black men in 2014—facts established. There has been no public outcry, no rioting in the streets, no equivalent of Al Sharpton rabble rousing in protest over these killings. The news media have been all but silent about them; it is simply not politically correct, therefore not newsworthy or profitable to speak of them.

This is the second set of six blogposts on the inflammatory subject of the interaction between African-Americans and the United States Justice System. The first three considered the arguments of the critics of the American system; and the second set of three, presented now, will take up the counter argument.

The apologists for the U.S. Judicial System—the critics of the critics of the U.S. Judicial System say no.

The mantra that African-Americans and Hispanics are treated unfairly and unequally is so frequently repeated that the repetition has led to these allegations gradually acquiring the status of conventional wisdom. There is another side to the issue.

Here is the case against the concept that African–Americans are treated unfairly in the American Justice system:

The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)—an extensive, scientific survey of U.S. residents conducted annually by the Bureau of Justice Statistics–determined that:

1.  During the Arrest Phase: Victims of violent crimes–including  robbery, rape, and assault–are usually able to see an attacker well enough to identify at a minimum the perpetrator’s skin color and usually additional features such as other distinguishing physical characteristics, such as sex, height, weight, and clothing. Since these descriptions are generally what enable the police to make arrests in such cases, even the most racist officer has very little room for discretion; i.e., he or she cannot arbitrarily arrest a Black person if a victim identifies a White offender.

NCVS data show that—statistically–the average Black is far more likely than the average White to be identified by a victim as the perpetrator of a violent crime. This racial gap, moreover, is approximately equal to the racial gap in actual arrest rates. The earliest solid evidence for this dates back to 1978, when a study of robbery and aggravated assault in eight cities found that the rates at which victims and witnesses identified Blacks and Whites, respectively, as perpetrators were essentially equal to the rates at which Blacks and Whites were arrested for those particular crimes, not surprisingly. There is no plausible argument as to why crime victims would be biased in their reports.

Furthermore, the race of the police officers does not appear to play a role in the aforementioned figures. If it were true that racial discrimination by White police officers contributes to the high arrest rate of Blacks, it would logically follow that the arrest-related decisions of Black officers should differ significantly from those of their White colleagues; i.e., one would expect Black officers to arrest Blacks a lower rate than do White officers. There is no evidence of such a difference, however. Black and White officers have very similar arrest patterns whether they are arresting Whites or Blacks.

In 2005, the black homicide rate was over seven times higher than that of whites and Hispanics combined.

2.  Police brutality. As described in Blogpost I, the vast majority of Blacks and the critics of the criminal justice system in the U.S. consider police brutality to be common and more likely to be directed at them than at Whites.  On the contrary, there is a considerable body of empirical evidence suggesting that Black suspects are treated no worse than White suspects in similar situations, i.e. when their demeanors toward the police are similar, and their crimes are equivalent. Research further shows that both White and Black police officers are more likely to use excessive force against antagonists of their own race than against those of another race. Black officers as a group are more likely than their White colleagues to shoot black suspects. While this may be partly because black officers more frequently patrol black neighborhoods, Black and White officers who work only in Black neighborhoods are equally likely to shoot black civilians.

3.  Disposition and Prosecution Phase: After an arrest is made, the next decision points in the criminal-justice process are: whether or not to indict and bind over to trial an accused person, whether to go to trial, whether to convict a defendant, and then finally, whether to impose a harsh or a mild sentence. Critics of the judicial system contend that White defendants are not only acquitted more regularly than their black counterparts, but are treated more leniently even in cases where they are found guilty, all because of racism. Such disparate treatment, say the critics, explains why, as of December 31, 2010, Blacks—seventeen percent of the U.S. population–constituted nearly thirty-eight percent of all prisoners under state and federal jurisdiction—whereas non-Hispanic whites—sixty-four percent of the population–were just thirty-two percent of prisoners, and Hispanics—sixteen percent  of the population–were twenty-two percent of prisoners. While Black males were incarcerated at a rate of 3,074 per 100,000, the corresponding rates for White and Hispanic males were 459 and 1,258 per 100,000, respectively.

However, there are studies that differ with the critics’ point of view. In 1997, two criminologists reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They concluded that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism per se, explained why more Blacks were in prison proportionately than Whites and for longer terms. Contrary to the information coming from the critics, there is a 1987 analysis of Georgia felony convictions–as one example–which found that Blacks frequently received disproportionately lenient punishment. A 1990 study of 11,000 California cases found that slight racial disparities in sentence length resulted from Blacks’ prior records and other legally relevant variables. A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s seventy-five largest urban areas discovered that Blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than Whites did and that they were less likely to be found guilty at trial. Following conviction, Blacks were more likely to receive prison sentences, however—an outcome that reflected the gravity of their offenses as well as their criminal records. In those studies, no element of racial discrimination appeared to play a role.

Criminologist, Alfred Blumstein, found in 1993 that Blacks were significantly underrepresented in prison for homicide compared with their presence at arrest.

4.  Drugs: Unfair drug policies are an equally popular explanation for black incarceration rates. Veritable legions of pundits, activists, academics, and self-appointed “Black leaders”, charge that the war on drugs is a war on minorities—a de facto war at best, and an intentional one at worst.

It is true that drugs are significant throughout the judiciary process. Playing a starring role in this issue are federal crack-cocaine penalties which form the source of the greatest amount of argument, misinformation, and complaints by African-Americans in the race and incarceration debate. Crack is a smokeable and highly addictive cocaine concentrate, created by cooking powder cocaine until it hardens into pellets called “rocks.” Crack produces a faster—and more potent—high than powder cocaine, it’s less expensive, and it’s easier to use, since smoking avoids the unpleasantness of needles and is more efficient than snorting. Under the 1986 federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act, getting caught with five grams of crack carries a mandatory minimum five-year sentence in federal court; to trigger the same five-year minimum, powder-cocaine traffickers would have to get caught with 500 grams. On average, federal crack sentences are three to six times longer than powder sentences for equivalent amounts.

There is disproportionately harsh treatment of minorities in the juvenile justice system, and that imposes ominous consequences for minority communities. A study of minority youths disproportionately targeted for arrest in the war on drugs in Baltimore, Maryland identified eighteen White youths and eighty-six Black youths who were arrested for selling drugs in 1980. One decade later, juvenile drug sale arrests increased more than 100 percent overall, and the almost 5-to-1 racial disparity that existed a decade earlier had become a 100-to-1 disparity. By 1990 White youths were arrested thirteen times for selling drugs, actually less than in 1980, but Black youths were arrested 1304 times. That is an astounding 1400 percent increase from 1980, and a disaster for the inner city of Baltimore.

These numbers from Baltimore are not unique. They reflect the broader national experience: Nationally–from 1986 to 1991–arrests of White juveniles for drug offenses decreased thirty-four percent, while arrests of minority juveniles increased seventy-eight percent. All this is despite data indicating that drug use rates among White, Black, and Hispanic youths are nearly the same. In fact, drug use has been lower among Black youths than White youths for the last twenty years. Similar disparities appear in relation to non-drug-related crimes. This can only be accounted for by institutional racism.

The United States has five percent of the world's population but a twenty-five percent of the world's prisoners with over 2.3 million people incarcerated. The U.S. rate of incarceration is five to eight times higher than other highly developed countries and Black males are the largest percentage of inmates. Race continues to be a dominating factor even after convicts are released from prison. A University of Wisconsin study found that seventeen percent of White job applicants with criminal records received call backs from employers while only five percent of Black job applicants with criminal records received call backs. Race was so prominent in that study that Whites with criminal records actually received better treatment than Blacks without criminal records. This is clear-cut, if not entirely intentional, racism. The result for African-Americans is a vicious cycle that has evolved into a self-fulfilling prophecy for recidivism: More minority arrests and convictions perpetuate the belief among the general public and among law enforcement authorities that minorities commit more crimes, which in turn leads to racial profiling—however subtle–and more minority arrests. Data from the Washington State Department of Corrections and Employment Insurance records show how “the wages of black ex-inmates grow about twenty-one percent more slowly each quarter after release than the wages of white ex-inmates.” Black ex-inmates earn ten percent less than white ex-inmates post incarceration.

There can be no dispute over the fact that a major challenge for prisoners re-entering society is obtaining employment, especially for individuals with a felony on their record. This is also a major ongoing challenge for society A study utilizing U.S. Census occupational data in New Jersey and Minnesota in 2000 found that “individuals with felon status would have been disqualified from approximately one out of every 6.5 occupations in New Jersey and one out of every 8.5 positions in Minnesota”. Since African-Americans and Hispanics are disproportionately affected by felon status, these additional limitations on employment opportunity were shown to exacerbate racial disparities in the labor market.

These factors all impact released prisoners who try to reintegrate into society. According to a national study, within three years of release, almost seven out of ten former convicts will have been rearrested. Many released prisoners have difficulty transitioning back into societies and communities from state and federal prisons because the social environment of peers, family, community, and state level policies all impact prison reentry; the process of leaving prison or jail and returning to society. Men eventually released from prison will most likely return to their same communities, putting additional strain on already scarce resources as they attempt to garner the assistance they need to successfully reenter society. Due to the lack of resources, these same men will continue along this perpetuating cycle.

With crime tendencies high in these areas, drugs are also prevalent. This means that a greater percentage of those in prison are going to be Black because law enforcement is already concentrated in the areas with high violent crime and drug crime. With this new drug legislation, the U.S. government has increased the use of incarceration for social control which has resulted in sharper disproportionate effects on African-Americans. With violent crime on the rise in the late 20th century coupled with the war on drugs violations, penal population growth sent shockwaves through the most fragile families and neighborhoods in the country that were least equipped to deal with the attendant problems. Since the majority of people in the prison population are minorities and lower class individuals, the people they leave behind have to deal with extraordinarily difficult circumstances. This created burden has left many families broken and children are the victims of dysfunctional single-parent homes which increases the percentage of these children going to jail earlier than most. With the majority of the prison population being men, women are left dangling in society to rear families and later to contend with ex-prisoners returning home after release who are bitter, often abusive, and educated in a criminal life-style.

Children reared in single-parent homes anywhere in the country are less supervised which leads to less emphasis on education and self-determination. This effect is compounded in predominately minority communities with all of the attendant crime and danger. The result of this situation is that American society is damaged and has to take on the financial burden of children growing up in crime-ridden neighborhoods and going to prison. Taxpayers throughout the nation are increasingly burdened with the costs of the problems generated by the judicial system and its impact on minority communities. When a family member is arrested, the family loses not only that person's income, but also acquire additional expenses involved in keeping contact with the incarcerated family member

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, forty-six percent of Black female jail and prison inmates were likely to have grown up in a home with only their mothers or their grandmothers. A study by Bresler and Lewis shows how incarcerated African-American women were more likely to have been raised in a single female headed household while incarcerated. White women were more likely to have been reared in a two parent household. Education, fertility, and employment for Black women are affected due to increased mass incarceration. Black women’s employment rates were increased, due to increased education and vice versa. Higher rates of black male incarceration lower the odds against nonmarital teenage motherhood and Black women’s ability to get an educational degree, thus resulting in early and less profitable employment.

This dysfunctional system all too often causes disintegration of familial life and structure. Black and Latino youth are more likely to be incarcerated after coming in contact with the American juvenile justice system, which is an altogether too common experience. Furthermore–and most unfortunately–societal institutions whose purpose is to uplift the lives of children–such as schools, families, and community centers—too often impact youth by initiating them into this system of criminalization from an early age. These institutions–traditionally set up to protect the youth–contribute to mass incarceration by mimicking the criminal justice system. Parents in prison face further moral and emotional dilemmas because they are separated from their children. Both Black and White women face difficulty with where to place their children while incarcerated and how to maintain contact with them.

Studies reveal that Black women are more likely to leave their children with related kin whereas White women’s children are likely to be placed in foster care. In a report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics revealed how in 1999, seven percent of Black children had a parent in prison, making them nine times more likely to have an incarcerated parent than White children. The impact on families of all races is highly deleterious and self-perpetuating. The Black children left in the care of overburdened grandmothers and aunts are left alone and unsupervised all too often and become prey of gangs, rapists, and the criminal industry that prevails in the poor minority communities. The children of White women who become wards of the state become increasingly separated from their families, from loving nurturing, and from the institutions that further their opportunities for success. Reactive detachment disorder is not a rare occurrence, and that leads to life-long impaired ability to relate positively to other people and to a higher crime rate than exists in the general White society.

Setting aside statistics to consider actual numbers, disparate and unfair treatment based on race within the criminal justice system is not rational: The majority of crimes are not committed by minorities, and most minorities are not criminals. Less than ten percent of all Black Americans are even arrested in a given year, let alone convicted, sentenced, or serve time.

Critics of the judicial system argue that racial and ethnic discrimination must stop or else the nation will continue to harbor an increasingly angry and desperate subset of our population and will see periodic violent outbursts such as have occurred in Watts, California in 1965 with thousands wounded, arrested, thirty-four killed, and millions of dollars in damages; in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in 1991; in the Rodney King riots in South Central Los Angeles in 1992 with assaults, riots, lootings, arsons, murder, and other civil disturbances which lasted five days and overwhelmed police services. The disturbance was not quelled until the National Guard and the Marines were brought in. The financial cost was in the billions of dollars.  Similar riots occurred in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1996, Cincinnati, Ohio in April, 2001, in Toledo, Ohio in 2005, Oakland, California, 2009, and Ferguson, Missouri and New York City, in 2014. The critics, including very recently the chief of police of Brooklyn have expressed understanding at the anger and the pent-up deep antagonism that erupts when a catalyst such as happened in Ferguson and New York presents itself. That understanding is translated into at least quasi justification.

As examples of other catalytic events, the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund Twitter posted a series of tweets naming 76 men and women who were killed in police custody since the 1999 death of Amadou Diallo in New York. Essayist Sally John says, “Maybe you know that a black man or boy is killed every 28 hours in America by police or vigilantes.

Law enforcement officers stop Blacks and Latinos at rates that are much higher than whites. In New York City, where people of color make up about half of the population, 80% of the NYPD stops were of Blacks and Latinos. When Whites were stopped, only 8% were frisked. When Blacks and Latinos are stopped, 85% were frisked according to the NYPD. A California study by the ACLU found that Blacks are three times more likely to be stopped than Whites.

Since 1970-1971, drug arrests have skyrocketed rising from 320,000 in 1970 to nearly 1.6 million currently. African-Americans are arrested for drug offenses at rates two to eleven times higher than the rate for Whites, according to a May, 2009 report on disparity in drug arrests by Human Rights Watch. Once arrested, Blacks are more likely to remain in jail awaiting trial than Whites; and when Whites are detained, it is for a shorter period of time. A 1995 New York state division of criminal justice review of disparities in processing felony arrests showed that in some parts of New York, Blacks are 33% more likely to be detained awaiting felony trials than Whites facing felony trials.

The arrest stage establishes the pattern, a downward spiral.  Blacks are 17% of the U.S. population; but they account for 38.9% of all violent crime arrests nationwide—including 32.5% of all rapes, 55.5% of all robberies, and 33.9% of all aggravated assaults; and Blacks are arrested for 29.8% of all property-crime. Critics of the system consider these statistics to be self-evident proof of the bias of the U.S. system where racism prevails, and where Blacks begin the process of being unfairly targeted by the police, appear before judges and juries, and end up in jail and prison with harsher sentences than their White counterparts. It is apparent to the critics that the issue of racial profiling and other law enforcement strategies and practices single out Blacks and Hispanics as objects of suspicion solely on the basis of the color of their skin or their accent.

In 1991 the San Jose Mercury News reviewed almost 700,000 criminal cases from California between 1981 and 1990 and uncovered statistically significant disparities at several different stages of the criminal justice process. Among the study’s findings was that six percent of Whites, as compared to only four percent of minorities, won “interest of justice” dismissals, in which prosecutors dropped a criminal case entirely. Moreover, the study found, twenty percent of White defendants charged with crimes providing for the option of diversion received that benefit, while only fourteen percent of similarly situated Blacks and eleven percent of similarly situated Hispanics were placed in such programs. The same study revealed consistent discrepancies in the treatment of White and non-white criminal defendants at the pretrial negotiation stage of the criminal process. During 1989-1990, a White felony defendant with no criminal record stood a thirty-three percent chance of having the charge reduced to a misdemeanor or infraction, compared to twenty-five percent for a similarly situated Black or Hispanic.

Scrutiny of the role of Congress and other legislative bodies in shaping and implementing criminal justice policies reveals that–in aggregate–all such bodies fall short of the trumpeted commitment to equal treatment under the law. The decision to sentence a convicted criminal to prison has—until relatively recently–been viewed as a profound responsibility, one entrusted solely to impartial judges. Increasingly of late—however–sentencing has become mundane and mechanistic, a decision effectively controlled by legislators, prosecutors, and sentencing commissioners. This change in the culture of sentencing has had disastrous consequences for minorities in the United States.

One of the most thorough studies of sentencing disparities was undertaken by the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, which studied felony sentencing outcomes in New York courts between 1990 and 1992. The state concluded that one-third of minorities sentenced to prison would have received a shorter or non-incarcerative sentence if they had been treated like similarly situated White defendants. If probation-eligible Blacks had been treated like their white counterparts–the report found–more than 8000 fewer Black defendants would have received prison in that two year period, resulting in a five percent decline in the percentage of Blacks sentenced to jail as a percentage of the entire sentenced population, i.e., the study found that Blacks are sentenced to prison more frequently than Whites for the same conduct.

There is a more egregious aspect of the treatment of Blacks. Some of the failure by legislative and judiciary bodies might be excused because of overwork, too few officers, too few judges and courts, or policies, laws, and rules that in effect bind the judiciary’s hands. However, there is an intentional failure on the part of the judiciaries in some (many) jurisdictions to redress obvious injustices by curbing access to and restricting the use of data that reflect the disparate impact on minorities of law enforcement and prosecutorial practices. Courts bear significant responsibility for the injustices suffered by minorities in the U.S. criminal system, despite this era of mandatory sentencing laws and sentencing guidelines in which judges have less authority to affect the outcome of criminal cases through the exercise of judicial discretion. In the face of the overwhelming racial disparities created by policing tactics, prosecutorial decision-making, and unjust sentencing laws, courts have generally declined to examine or redress racial inequality in the criminal justice system, and have made it harder for litigants to expose such flaws.

The consequences of unequal treatment of minority Americans in the criminal justice system impacts those directly caught up in the system, their families and communities, and society as a whole. Innocent minority people are stopped, detained, and interrogated more than innocent Whites. Minorities who violate the law are more likely to be targeted for arrest, less likely to be offered leniency and are subject to harsher punishment when compared to similarly situated White offenders. Each successive measure of unequal treatment compounds the prior disparities. Minority youths are disproportionately vulnerable to politicians’ efforts to “adultify” juvenile justice, and are therefore more likely than White youths to be transformed into adult criminals by being exposed to hardened adult offenders in prisons.

This disproportionate targeting of minorities as criminal suspects skews–at the outset of a young Black or Hispanic’s contact with law enforcement–the racial composition of the population ultimately charged, convicted, and incarcerated, and later suffering from the stigma of being an ex-convict. Consider these examples from the literature:

After years of accusations by minority citizens, a federal court consent decree was issued that required traffic stops by Maryland State Police on Interstate 95 to be monitored. From January, 1995 to December 1997, seventy percent of all drivers stopped and searched by the police were Black, while only seventeen and a half percent of overall drivers–as well as overall speeders–were Black.

A similar study in Volusia County, Florida, in 1992, found that nearly seventy percent of individuals stopped by police on a selected interstate highway in Central Florida were Black or Hispanic, despite the fact that only five percent of the drivers on that highway were Black or Hispanic. The minorities were detained for longer periods of time per stop than Whites; Blacks and Hispanics were eighty percent of those whose cars were searched after being stopped. The discriminatory treatment of minority drivers was duly noted by Volusia County law enforcement.

Once arrested, eighty percent of the people of all races in the criminal justice system get a public defender for their lawyer since ignorance, inadequate education, and poverty play a significant role in the choice to commit crime. Separately, race plays a large role as well. Despite great effort by public defenders, the system gives them much more work and much less money than the prosecution. The American Bar Association reviewed the U.S. public defender system in 2004 and concluded, “All too often, defendants plead guilty, even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights or what is occurring…The fundamental right to a lawyer that America assumes applies to everyone accused of criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the U.S. This fact is compounded by the often inadequate defense mounted by beleaguered and often young and green defenders, not long out of law school. And minorities suffer more significantly than Whites from these inadequacies and failures of representation.

National studies–such as the Equal Justice Initiative–reveal that African-Americans are frequently illegally excluded from criminal jury service which compromises the chances for minorities to be tried by a jury of their peers. A report from Houston County, Alabama, revealed that eight out of ten African-Americans qualified for jury service were struck [excluded] by prosecutors from serving on death penalty case juries. Part of the problem is the diminished number actually eligible due their own negative involvement in the justice system.

Contrary to the impression one might get from television, trials in the United States are fairly uncommon, even rare. Only three to five percent of all criminal cases go to trial; the rest are plea-bargained. There is a strong incentive for prosecutors and the judicial system itself to deal with the large backlog of cases by the expediency of plea bargaining, which, in addition, is a far less costly way of dealing with criminal prosecution. Most African-Americans defendants never get a trial. Most plea bargains consist of threat of a much longer sentence if a person exercises his or her constitutional right to a trial. The American Bar Association points out that–as a result–people caught up in the criminal legal system who have limited resources, education, or power, plead guilty despite knowing they are innocent. The logic is disturbingly simple and unfair: A person would have to be stupid not to accept a two or three year sentence—possibly with time off for good behavior–for a crime they did not commit rather than to risk a twenty-five year sentence for a crime they did not commit. That is the logic, but the long term consequences for the individual, for his family, and for the community in which he lives are highly degrading; and the impact of minorities is seriously more egregious.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in March 2010 that in the federal system Black offenders receive sentences that are ten percent longer than the sentences for white offenders for the same crimes. African-Americans are twenty-one percent more likely to receive minimum mandatory sentences than White defendants and twenty percent more likely to be sentenced to prison than Whites in drug related cases. The longer the sentence, the more likely it is that non-white people will be the ones receiving it. The Sentencing Project Report 2009 found that two-thirds of the people in the U.S. with life sentences are non-white. In New York State, it is eighty-three As a result, African-Americans–who are seventeen percent of the population and fourteen percent of drug users–constitute thirty-seven percent of the people arrested for drugs and fifty-six percent of the people in state prisons for drug offenses.

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics concludes that the chance of a Black male born in 2001 of going to jail is thirty-two percent; Latino males have a seventeen percent chance, and White males have a six percent chance. Thus Black boys are five times and Latino boys nearly three times as likely as White boys to go to jail sometime in their lives. Again, according to the 2009 Sentencing Project related to juveniles, the seventeen percent of African-American juveniles make up twenty-eight percent of juvenile arrests, thirty-seven percent of the inmates in juvenile detention, and fifty-eight percent of the youth who are sent to adult prisons.

This is the first of six blogposts on the inflammatory subject of the interaction between African-Americans and the United States Justice System. The first three will consider the arguments of the critics of the American system, and the second set of three will take up the counter argument.

The critics of the U.S. System say yes—Part One.

There are two definitions of fairness in the United States: the right side of the political spectrum sees fairness as a simple dictum: there is one law for everyone, and the letter of the law should be obeyed, enforced, and when broken, the perpetrator should face punishment under the law. The left side of the spectrum sees the law as more complicated. Mitigation should form part of the equation such that the core issues behind breaking of the law ought to be taken into consideration and the past history of the treatment of minorities as a whole also be considered. Unfairness would result from a young African-American male being arrested and ultimately convicted for possession or selling crack cocaine and receiving a harsh sentence without recognizing that crack is cheaper and more abundantly available in the area where he lives, and the young White man receives a lesser sentence for possession or selling powder cocaine.

Bringing Negro people from Africa to the United States for enslavement occurred and has marred the subsequent history of the country ever since. Its offspring were racial discrimination, anti-miscegenation laws, endemic poverty, disrupted and dysfunctional family structure, and racial violence. The practices of slavery and of overt discrimination against people of color were heinous and reprehensible, to put it mildly; and the country will never see nor hear the end of the problems which resulted. However, the United States has made significant progress toward the objective of ensuring equal treatment under law for all citizens after a long struggle carried on by people of all ethnic backgrounds. The right to vote, the right to be free from discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations, anti-segregation legislation, and integration of educational facilities are now carved in statutory stone. The number of minorities in positions of authority in public and private life is nothing short of remarkable and continues to grow. America’s minorities now enjoy greater economic, political, and educational opportunities than at any time in history. U.S. civil rights laws abolished Jim Crow laws and other vestiges of segregation, and guaranteed minority citizens the right to travel and utilize public accommodations freely. People of color are not only free to engage in any and all areas of life leading to financial gain, but they excel in most of them: medicine, law, clergy, sports, and entertainment, to name a few. There are laws governing every stage of the criminal justice process–from the initial investigation of a crime by the police officer, to the prosecution and due process of the courtroom procedures, to verdicts and punishments of crime by prosecutors, judges, and juries which guarantee that individuals in like circumstances are treated fairly and alike, consistent with the Constitution’s guarantees and the weight of years of local, state, and federal legislation enacted to provide equal treatment under the law.

The above comments notwithstanding, there remains one critical area of American life where there are powerful and fractious questions posed about whether or not there is racial equality, and that is the criminal justice system. Many people assert that racial inequality is growing, not receding, and is the rule not the exception. U.S. criminal laws are–on the surface–color-blind and neutral. A substantial proportion of Americans, and a strong emphasis from news media are convinced that criminal laws are enforced in a manner that is massively and pervasively biased at all steps in the process. Those who hold that view are fearful that the injustices of the criminal justice system threaten to render irrelevant fifty+ years of hard-fought civil rights progress.

Others take a diametrically opposite point of view and see the almost constant litany of accusations that the country’s system is flawed, biased, and harmful to people of color as not only inaccurate and misguided; but the endless promulgation of the concept is harmful and prevents action to correct the actual problems facing African-Americans and other racial minorities. In addition, respect for laws and law-enforcement is rapidly diminishing which creates fear among law-abiding citizens who see a hobbling of law enforcement personnel increasing exponentially.

In this blogpost (I) the point of view of those who believe that there is a profound and uncompromising degree of discrimination against minorities will be summarized.

1. In 1964, the Congress of the United States passed into law the Civil Rights Act which prohibited discrimination in employment. Nevertheless, currently, three out of every ten African-American males born in the United States will serve time in prison, a status that renders their prospects for legitimate employment bleak and often bars them from obtaining professional licenses.
2. In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. Yet today, 31 percent of all Black men in Alabama and Florida are permanently disenfranchised as a result of felony convictions. Nationally, 1.4 million Black men have lost the right to vote under these laws.
3. In 1965, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which sought to eliminate the vestiges of racial discrimination in the nation's immigration laws. Yet today, Hispanic and Asian-Americans are routinely and sometimes explicitly singled out for immigration enforcement.
4. In 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act. Yet today, the current housing for approximately 2 million Americans–two-thirds of them African American or Hispanic–is a prison or jail cell.

Racial disparities negatively affect both innocent and guilty minority citizens and undocumented immigrants. Innocent minority citizens are detained by the police on the street and in their cars far more frequently than are Caucasians. Such interchanges with law enforcement officers cause inconvenience, humiliation, and a loss of privacy. It is presumed by many—probably most minority individuals–that all of those negative impacts are heightened by the presumption that the rationale for the police action is the color of a motorist’s skin or a pedestrian’s accent—being charged with DWB [Driving while Black]. There is unequal treatment of minorities in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion, focusing on charging decisions in drug cases and racial disparity in the administration of capital punishment. At every subsequent stage of the criminal process—from the subtle biases and stereotypes that cause police officers to rely on racial profiling to the first plea negotiations with a prosecutor, to the imposition of a prison sentence by a judge– are compounded by the racially skewed decisions by other antecedent or extraneous but key factors. Regrettably, the evidence is clear that prosecutorial discretion is systematically exercised to the disadvantage of black and Hispanic Americans. It should be said that prosecutors are not–by and large—intentionally or overtly bigoted. But as with police activity, prosecutorial judgment is shaped by a set of self-perpetuating racial assumptions and by the factual information that is before them regarding the records of the minority defendants.

Even minority people and their supporters do not posit that all people of color who are arrested are innocent. In fact, some may actually be guilty of Black-on-Black crime. But it is outrageous that there is an egregious and disparate treatment of minority citizens who have been accused of having violated the law. All defendants surrender many of their civil rights upon conviction, and African-Americans take great umbrage that they are singled out for disproportionately harsh treatment. They point out, rightly so—that equal protection under the laws is not one of the civil rights they have to surrender. It is an affront to all minority citizens, innocent or guilty–when a minority defendant is treated unfairly by the police, by prosecutors, by their inadequate court-appointed attorneys, and at sentencing by a judge, because of race or ethnicity.

This sense of being treated unfairly is not mere feeling; there are salient facts to back up the argument. Minority defendants are charged with crimes requiring a mandatory minimum prison sentence more often–in both relative and absolute terms–and for both African-Americans and Hispanics which leads to significant racial disparities in incarceration. Bureau of Justice data from 2002 showed that there were 3,042 Black male prisoners per 100,000 Black males, 1,261 Hispanic male prisoners per 100,000 Hispanic males, and only 487 White male prisoners per 100,000 White males in the general population of the United States. African-Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population and make up 37.4% of incarcerated individuals. African-Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of Whites. Hispanics make up 20.6%, and Whites 59.2%.

The report showed that the likelihood of Black males going to prison in their lifetime to be twenty-eight percent compared to sixteen percent for Hispanic males and only four percent for White males. Similarly, federal death penalty data released by the United States Department of Justice for 1995–2000 shows that 682 defendants were sentenced to death. Out of those defendants, forty-eight percent were African-American, twenty-nine percent were Hispanic, and Whites accounted for twenty percent of the executions.

The incarceration figures fly in the face of the racial demographics of the general population of 317 million people in America: 77.7% white,  50.8% female, 49.2% male, 13.2% Black, 17.1% Hispanic, 5.3% Asian, 2.4% mixed races, 1.4% American Indian, Alaska Native, Hawaiian, and other Pacific Islanders. The disproportionate prison population with Blacks being the substantial majority is considered to be prima facie evidence of discrimination in the system.

The unequal treatment of minorities in our criminal justice system manifests itself in a mushrooming prison population—the largest in the world–that is overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic; in the decay of minority communities that have given up entire generations of young men to prison, a large percentage of Black men who are not permitted to vote or, often, to hold political office, a high and rising crime rate growing out of disenfranchisement and despair, and in a widely-held fear of law-enforcement and belief among Black and Hispanic Americans that the criminal justice system is deserving neither of trust nor of support. It is not inconsequential that another of the results of this unequal treatment is the biased perception that lawlessness is a “colored person” problem, and that the disproportionate treatment of Blacks and Hispanics within the criminal justice system is a rational response to a flawed level of society leading to a statistical imperative.

During the arrest phase: The U.S. has experienced an overall surge in arrests and putting people in jail over the last four decades, and the arrest phase establishes the bias that will affect Black youth for the rest of their lives and the lives of their families. Most of the reason for that increase is the war on drugs, a result of a crusade which gained a huge impetus starting in 1971. According to a report on race and drug enforcement published by Human Rights Watch in May, 2008, Whites and Blacks engage in drug offenses, including both possession and sales, at roughly comparable rates. African Americans comprise 17% of the U.S .population and 14% of monthly drug users. Yet, they are 37% of the people arrested for drug offenses according to the 2009 Sentencing Project.

Iran is in the news again for several reasons, and here is my two-bits worth. First from the American point of view: The average American has almost nothing to gain out of an agreement by Iran with the P5+1 nations: United States, European Union (EU), France, Germany, China, Russia, and the United Kingdom (UK). The likelihood of war, albeit not nuclear, will be increased because lifting of economic sanctions will allow Iran to rebuild its large armed forces and to relieve the strain the country is enduring with its Hezbollah and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)s’ involvement in fighting ISIL, supporting the Houthi insurgents in Yemen, and carrying on its wide spread terrorist activities against the West and against Sunni Arabs—such as Saudi Arabia in the current conflict in Yemen. Saudi Arabia, remember, is Iran’s rival for regional hegemony. Sanctions have halved Iran’s export earnings (even before the fall in oil prices) and have crippled the economy.
America and the average American young person especially will be more at risk for being involved in a major armed conflict between Iran and Israel, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying to explain to an inattentive Obama administration. As a point of historical fact, Iran has been secretive and uncooperative for decades with the rest of the civilized world with regards to its nuclear arms program. They are more likely than not to continue their research and clandestine activities once the sanctions and worldwide scrutiny are relaxed. The term of close scrutiny is slated to last ten years—a paltry number for the patient Iranians.

From the point of view of the government of Iran and the citizens enriched by the 1979 revolution, lifting of sanctions is worth almost any concession. The kleptocratic religious government and its cronies will be able to skim far more money from the increase in GDP than ever before. Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is one of the richest men in the world having expropriated the former Shah’s holdings and by siphoning taxes for himself and his family. The nuclear agreement will be a boon for all of those kleptocrats. The average citizen and the country’s infrastructure have suffered significantly from the sanctions; and as soon as the agreement is finalized, it is possible that the average citizens will be dropped a crumb or two. It is even possible that average citizens may be able to resume foreign travel which will lessen internal tensions in Iran.

The Iranians demand immediate lifting of sanctions and are angered by the so-called “flip-back” clause insisted upon by the other side wherein failure would result in immediate resumption of sanctions. On a practical level, that is highly unlikely to happen once the deal is sealed. President Obama will have earned his chance for a second Nobel Peace Prize; U.S. and European parliaments will be very reluctant to try and finance and re-energize the machinery of sanctions. China and Russia have indicated almost total disinterest in joining a flip-back process. For them, it is easier and more profitable to let sleeping dogs lie. As a cynic and skeptic, I would predict that the executive branches of the western nations will give in to almost anything Iran demands in the end. However, those holding the purse-strings and the interest of the people are likely to balk at any concessions for Iran. That is particularly true of the right-wing hawks who appear to be in control of the Republican party. They have already sent a letter to Iran announcing that they will kill the accord if they get into power, and they have a list of more stringent demands that will never be agreed to by the Iranians.

Iran has stated that the vague and incomplete agreement constituting the nuclear accord meets its so-called red-line deal breaker requirements. However, no accord was reached in the deadline period because Iran demands that “ambiguities” over the lifting of sanctions must be resolved. The two sides have only agreed in very vague and abstract terms and are oceans apart on what the final deal will be. The United States has said that sanctions removal on Iran will be phased in gradually, but Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, are firmly on the record that sanctions on Iran must be lifted as soon as a final agreement is concluded. Mohammad Ali Jafari, the commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has made that point painfully clear. Hardliners on the western side demand more details on the parameters of the agreement to remove sanctions and insist that their parliaments be involved. The Republicans in the U.S. Congress have vowed to sabotage the agreement. It is fairly apparent that Iranian hardliners are in agreement at least with the U.S. Republicans on that one point.

Most level-headed western officials and students of the Iran v. The West issues since 1979 caution that it is definitely not yet time to break out the champagne. The government of Iran is controlled by unyielding religious zealots who have been following a terrorism supporting national policy which is the will of God. Right-wing Christian zealots in U.S. politics bear sway on a grand scale in U.S. political decisions. They have political, religious, historical, and military agendae that oppose everything the Iranian Islamic State stands for and have vowed to have near absolute guarantees that the Iranian nuclear armament program is entirely dismantled before substantive agreement can be achieved and also stringent levels of verification at all steps along the way—forever, if they were to get their way. As some sage said, “There’ll have to be a heap of compromisin’ before we meet that horizon.”

In other ways—the Iranians have done pretty well, albeit not as well as they claim. America’s initial position had been that sanctions would come off only in stages, and would depend on Iran establishing a record of strict compliance. It now seems likely that American and European sanctions will be suspended at roughly the same time, not least because extraterritorial provisions in the American measures would otherwise expose European firms to lawsuits.

The Iranians say that “at the same time as the start of Iran’s nuclear-related implementation work, all of the sanctions will be annulled on a single specified day”. In other words, all sanctions would go within days of the signing of the final agreement. By contrast, America and its European co-negotiators (France, Britain and Germany) are insisting that sanctions will only be suspended after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) “has verified that Iran has taken all of its key nuclear-related steps”—ie, at the end of the first stage of implementation, not at the beginning. Lifting sanctions could take between six months and a year, according to John Kerry, America’s secretary of state.

A further disagreement is over reimposing sanctions should Iran violate the terms of the accord. The Iranians bridle at the mention of it, but the principle of sanctions “snapback” is key for the West and is reflected in the careful wording of the undertakings. The EU will “terminate the implementation” of nuclear-related sanctions; America will cease their “application”. While Iran can rejoice that sanctions have gone, the reality is that their architecture will remain in place. The UN sanctions are less painful in economic terms (they deal mainly with arms and technology transfers, and target individual people and firms), but trickier politically. Once lifted through a new Security Council resolution they may be well-nigh impossible to slap back on unless the Iranian violation is both severe and flagrant enough even for Russia to refrain from using its veto.

An interactive guide to the Middle East's tangled politics

Lastly, some of the (mainly American) sanctions on Iran have nothing to do with its nuclear activities, but have accumulated over the past four decades in response to abuses of human rights, the promotion of terrorism and the country’s threatening missile programme. If ordinary Iranians think that all these will disappear too, they are in for a disappointment.

On inspection arrangements, the Iranian fact-sheet is silent, beyond the commitment voluntarily to implement the “additional protocol” of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s system of safeguards. Yet for the agreement to be credible, Iran must be willing to go even further and allow international inspectors to visit any sites deemed “suspicious”, while answering the many questions the agency has asked about past and possibly continuing research on nuclear weapons.

Disagreements over verification give opponents of the deal on both sides their best chance of undermining it. If leaders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard block access to some military sites, or if there is a refusal to engage with the IAEA on the “possible military dimensions” of the programme, Mr Obama might lose the votes he needs to head off critics in Congress who want the right both to review the deal and to introduce new sanctions should agreement on all issues not be reached by the deadline of June 30th. A lot has gone right, but there is plenty that could still go wrong

Iran held a presidential election in June 2013 that was won by Hassan Rouhani

·  Iran
Mohammad Javad Zarif, Minister of Foreign Affairs

The opponents of the death penalty have created a highly successful campaign against judicial executions over the past two decades. Death by hanging, the guillotine, the electric chair, and firing squad have all but disappeared in this country; and the death penalty has been outright abolished in most European countries. Most recently–in order to make execution all but impossible to accomplish—death penalty opponents have succeeded in creating serious questions about lethal injection as a method. Two botched executions and the refusal of domestic and foreign pharmaceutical companies to supply the necessary cocktail of drugs for the purpose has brought about another de-facto moratorium. The last figurative nail in the coffin of execution appears to be ready to be driven; the Supreme Court of the United States is poised to hear arguments that lethal injection is truly cruel and unusual punishment. Most scholars on the subject have come to the opinion that SCOTUS will establish a final ban on lethal injections. That should bring down the curtain on the use of the death penalty as the punishment for the most heinous of crimes for which it has been considered justifiable in the past.

Not so fast. It is possible that the opponents of lethal injection may have been hoist by their own petard and have created the perfect segue for the preservation of the death penalty itself. It is now generally accepted that no drugs for execution will be available in the future. Texas has the last dose left in the states. Utah—facing the same pragmatic problem—has an answer. The state still has legal capital punishment on its books with the only crime subject to the death penalty being aggravated murder, a set of crimes that are clearly set out in Utah law. While lethal injection remains the state’s method of choice, it is not the only choice. The firing squad is also available under certain circumstances. The determination of Utah to continue its program of execution for aggravated murder is reflected in the fact that Utah was the first state in the union to resume executions after the end of the decade long national moratorium which ended in 1976.

At the time the moratorium went into effect in 1967, Utah was the only state which allowed the use of firing squads and gave convicted murderers a choice of method, including hanging and the firing squad. In 1977, the first execution in the United States after the lifting of the moratorium took place in Utah; and it was the killer’s choice to die by firing squad. At the time of this blogpost, the state has nine occupants of death row awaiting execution.

In 1980, when lethal injection became available around the country, Utah let lapse the option of hanging and replaced it with the option—in addition to the firing squad—to die by lethal injection. In 1996, the Utah House proposed elimination of the firing squad option; and in 2004, the legislature removed the right of the condemned to choose the method of execution leaving lethal injection the only option left in Utah. However, three inmates had chosen the firing squad before the change in the law was enacted; and they are all slated to die by bullets, not chemicals. On June 18, 2010, one of them was executed by firing squad, becoming the country’s first sanctioned shooting death in fourteen years.

Because of the furor in the country over lethal injection and the practical fact that the chemicals were—for all intents and purposes—unavailable, the Utah legislature passed a bill requiring the firing squad to be the legal method of execution if the state is unable to obtain the necessary drugs. The bill was signed into law by the governor in March, 2015. Inmates are no longer offered an option if the drugs are not available. In Utah, Firing squads are made up of volunteers chosen from the area where the crime was committed, and there are always far more volunteers than there are actual positions on the squads available. In preparation for the legal defense of the death penalty itself should lethal injection be prohibited by SCOTUS, the sponsor of the Utah firing squad bill, argued that a team of trained marksmen is faster and more humane than the drawn-out deaths involved when—in the unusual case–lethal injections go awry. Since the opponents of lethal injections consider all such executions to be cruel and unusual punishments, even if they go as planned, that only strengthens the arguments in favor of the firing squad.

Currently, Nevada is the only other state besides Utah to have ever used the firing squad; but now, in response to botched lethal injection executions in Oklahoma and Arizona in the recent past, several other states are scrambling to modify their laws. Texas has the most imminent deadline. With impending prohibition of lethal injection to join electrocution as being unconstitutional, other methods are being vigorously pursued.

Oklahoma legislators believe they have come up with a novel—even unique—method which they consider to be foolproof, painless, and humane–nitrogen gas hypoxia. Added benefits are that nitrogen is easy to access, readily available in the United States, inexpensive; and medical experts do need to be involved in the process.

Final legislative approval was given by the Oklahoma Senate without a single dissenting vote on April 9, 2015. Now the Republican governor must make the final decision on the new and untried method to be used if lethal injection is ruled unconstitutional or if the deadly drugs become unavailable. The governor is known to support the death penalty. The sentiment is strong enough in the legislature in favor of using nitrogen gas hypoxia, that even a veto by the governor could be overridden. Critics of using nitrogen gas have valid issues. One obvious concern is that the method has never been tested in humans, and there are even some states which ban its use even to put animals to death (put them to “sleep” as the euphemism goes). There are no reports of nitrogen gas ever being used to execute humans.

If firing squad executions are deemed legal by default with lethal injections being determined to be unconstitutional, the United States will not be a lone pariah country still having the death penalty or even the firing squad. Outside the U.S., fifty-four countries allow executions by gunshot, including China, Vietnam, Uganda, and Afghanistan, according to Cornell University Law School's Death Penalty Worldwide project. Forty-one countries allow full firing squads and others have different procedures, such as by a single bullet at close range. Only nine of those countries are known to have actually carried out a firing squad execution in the last decade. Equally sanguine arguments can be made in favor of other methods of execution if studies are carefully done—guillotine and judicial hanging come to mind quickly. There appears to be no evidence of pain; and at least historically, those methods do not rise to the level of being cruel or unusual punishment.

This lethal injection issue may be a case of “be careful what you wish for” on the part of death penalty advocates. They may well win in the Supreme Court and thereby push the door wide open for firing squads, nitrogen gas hypoxia, or even other methods of execution, some of which remain undiscovered. It is the suggestion of this blogger that the law be changed to read “deserving of the death penalty” but to establish a permanent ban on actual executions. Rather, the person condemned to “death” would be placed on death row without privileges for the rest of his or her natural life. For a convicted mass murder like the Muslim terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev—who perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombing in which two women in their 20s and a little boy were murdered and 250 other people were scarred and maimed for life and changed countless lives for the worse forever–such a penalty may well be the ultimate punishment since he seeks entrance into an afterlife full of rich rewards because he will be a martyr to his twisted cause. The financial savings for such an alternative would be enormous.

Medicare Part D provides additional opportunities for Medicare patients to have access to a less restricted array of beneficial drugs. Part D qui tam False Claims Act violations for whistleblower exposure have been identified including: billing for drugs not provided; billing for brand name drugs when generics are dispensed; billing for non-covered drugs as covered; billing multiple payers for the same prescription; splitting prescriptions to receive additional fees; failure to apply “maximum allowable cost” pricing to drugs; submitting claims for drugs that have expired; billing for prescriptions with false physician identifiers; billing for drugs dispensed without prior authorization; submitting claims for brand-name drugs when generics were dispensed; and submitting claims for quantities of drugs over approved limits. Manufacturer Part D fraud can also take the form of unlawful kickbacks to either the dispensing provider or the submission of false information in connection with its obligation under the Discount Program Agreement.

In addition, pharmaceutical fraud includes such additional practices as: a healthcare provider or pharmacy waives the patient’s copay amount and overbills the insurance plan to recoup the cost; a pharmacy bills for prescriptions that were not dispensed; prescription drug shorting by the pharmacy; i.e., billing for sixty tablets, but dispensing only thirty; a pharmacy adds unauthorized refills to prescriptions; drug diversion; and a pharmacy, beneficiary, or policy holder may forge or alter a prescription. Less often recognized forms of fraud include: a beneficiary or policyholder misrepresenting their personal information such as identity, eligibility, or medical condition in order to receive a benefit illegally; an individual steals or purchases a beneficiary’s or policyholder’s personal information to submit false or phantom claims to obtain the insurance benefit; a beneficiary or policyholder allows a third party to use their benefit information to obtain medication and/or medical services.

Medical equipment fraud is another source of criminal behavior that ratchets up the cost of medical care in the United States. The fraudulent practices include: failure to report adverse events, off-label marketing, and the provision of financial inducements/kickbacks. The usual origin of the fraud comes from pressure being brought to bear on company employees–particularly sales representatives–to produce results and to cultivate business—irrespective of the actual benefit or cost effectiveness for the patient or the insurance company.

The specific area of hospital fraud includes: inpatient, outpatient, and cost report fraud. Whistleblower cases related to these forms of violation of the False Claims Act exposing this system-wide fraud are increasing in numbers yearly.

Inpatient services must be medically necessary and constitute an appropriate level of care. Claims for patient admissions must be medically necessary, and implicit within the payment, is that patient discharges are not premature. Claims for inpatients must also avoid upcoding, unbundling of services, or contain duplicates.

The intentional manipulation of code assignments for outpatient hospital claims to maximize payments and avoid NCCI [National Correct Coding Initiative] edits constitutes fraud. Unintentional misapplication of NCCI coding and billing guidelines may also give rise to overpayments or civil liability for hospitals that have developed a pattern of inappropriate billing. OPPS [Outpatient Prospective Payment System] rules require hospitals to submit claims for all OPPS services provided at the same hospital, to the same patient, on the same day, unless certain conditions are met. The submission of multiple claims for OPPS services delivered to the same patient on the same day may violate the False Claims Act.

Patient transfers to certain post-acute care settings for certain designated DRGs [Diagnosis Related Groups] must be properly coded so that a hospital will receive a per diem transfer payment, rather than the full DRG payment, or the False Claims Act may be violated. Inappropriate transferring of patients between the host hospital and a hospital-within-a-hospital–such as a rehabilitation center–also runs afoul of the False Claims Act. Other outpatient hospital fraud can take the form of falsely coding hospital-affiliated entities and clinics, as “provider-based.”

Cost report fraud includes improper reporting of “pass-through” new technology and drugs, including costs not related to organ acquisition, and false calculations with regard to GME  [Graduate Medical Education] and IME  [Indirect Graduate Medical Education] costs.

The PPACA [Obamacare] is here to stay. Nothing the Republicans do to undermine funding or to repeal the law will survive a veto by President Obama, and by the time a new president takes office, far too many participants in the systems created by the law will be in place to tempt even the most egregious of politicians to attempt to create a massively unpopular major change. Instead, We the People can use our voting power to force serious changes which will be popular: control of insurance company powers of premium escalation and coverage decreases, establish panels of experts (mostly nurses) to award cash payments for losses suffered by patients who suffer adverse consequences of treatment rather than having to resort to entering malpractice suits which are eminently unfair all around, retaining the concept of punitive damages—the designation to be part of the ongoing panel work—but to place reasonable caps for such things as pain and suffering; abolish fee-for-service as the basis for payment and substitute coded value driven measures; establish fair medical malpractice insurance premium rates; create federal contributions to the training of medical care providers and control the level of income of those providers. And, last but not least, establish stronger, faster, more effective controls of waste, abuse, and fraud which will necessitate a larger policing force with a more powerful mandate to deal with wrongdoers. Failure to do those things, however unpopular they may be with the far right, will result in bankruptcy of the health care system and eventually even the nation.