Ron Paul's racist comments

[fifield]

RedBean, also:

NY Times report commented on in Paul's newsletter

April 18, 1992 NY TIMES
42% of Young Black Males Go Through Capital's Courts
By JASON DEPARLE,
After a decade in which both the drug trade and police sweeps expanded with similar zeal, 42 percent of the black men in the District of Columbia, aged 18 through 35, were enmeshed in the criminal justice system on any given day last year, according to a study made public today.
"In effect, the social safety net has been replaced by a dragnet," said Jerome G. Miller, president of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, which conducted the study. The nonprofit group promotes alternatives to imprisonment. 21 Percent in Prison
The study found that 15 percent of Washington's black men in this age group were in prison, 21 percent were on probation or parole and 6 percent were out on bond or being sought by the police on any one day in 1991. Mr. Miller said a vast majority of these people had committed felonies.
As many as 70 percent of black men in Washington are arrested by the time they turn 35, the study estimated, and about 85 percent are arrested at some point in their lives. A large percentage of those arrests are for misdemeanor charges, Mr. Miller said.
The numbers -- higher than those reported in similar studies -- quickly set off a debate that goes to the heart of America's vexing inner city problems: Is society turning many of its young black men into criminals, or are these men doing it themselves? Or are, as John Wilson, the chairman of the City Council, contended today in discussing the study, "both things occurring"? Making Matters Worse
Mr. Miller said the study found that an emphasis in the 1980's on more arrests and mandatory sentences had not only failed to curb crime but might also have made matters worse by exposing young men to the brutal effects of arrest and imprisonment.
"We're criminalizing people we should be treating in other ways," he argued. "The majority of people we march through the system are people who have other problems -- the retarded, the mentally ill, the alcoholic, the homeless, the minor offenders."
Others concurred in calling the numbers depressingly high but said they saw few immediate options for reducing the role of criminal justice.
"What laws does he propose to repeal?" asked Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard who has written widely on drug laws. "If you said to people in the neighborhoods, 'Should we stop arresting the crack dealers?' I think they'd say no."
While there have been similar national studies of black men and criminal justice, today's study is the first to focus on a single major city.
In 1989, the Sentencing Project, a Washington research and advocacy group, found that almost one in four of the nation's black men age 20 to 29 were in prison, on probation or on parole. A year later, two private groups found a similar pattern holding true for black men in New York state. There, 23 percent of black men in the same age group were incarcerated or on probation or parole. More Expansive Definition
In arriving at the higher number of 42 percent, Mr. Miller's study not only focused on one city but used a more expansive definition: It included black men who were free on bond awaiting trial and those who were sought for arrest.
The study did not include corresponding figures for whites, Mr. Miller said, because that number "would have been negligible, less than 10 percent." As evidence, he cited the racial composition of the main prison in the District's Lorton correctional center, where 98 percent of the inmates in the main prison were black men and 1 percent were white men.
The 1990 study of New York found that 3 percent of young white men were in prison or on probation or parole. That study was conducted by the Correctional Association of New York and the New York State Coalition for Criminal Justice.
While there have been no studies of young black men in other cities, Mr. Miller suggested that the proportion in the criminal justice system would be the same as in Washington.
Mr. Kleiman, the Harvard professor, said he thought the numbers would hold true in other cities with many poor people, like Cleveland or Detroit, but not those like Miami, where the city limits include large suburban, middle-class areas. "A lot of this depends on where you draw the boundaries, where the black middle class lives," he said. Disbelief Over Numbers
In an interview on Thursday night with WRC-TV, Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly said, "I know that we've got a staggering problem," but added, "There are too many successful well-adjusted young people, young black men in this city for me to believe that 42 percent is a reliable number."
That sentiment was markedly different from the one expressed by Mr. Wilson, the council chairman. "I'm not skeptical of the numbers at all," he said. "It doesn't seem that whatever the programs we come up with there's any improvement in the situation at all."
Census figures for 1990 show that 65.8 of the District's 606,990 residents are black. Another 29.3 percent are white, and 5.4 percent are of Hispanic origin, a category that includes both blacks and whites.
The report found that on an average day 21,800 of the District's 53,377 young black men were involved with the criminal justice system. Of those 7,800 were in jail or prison, 6,000 were on local probation, 3,700 were on local parole and 1,300 were on Federal probation or parole. The report estimated that 3,000 others were awaiting trial on bond or being pursued on felony or misdemeanor warrants.
Mr. Miller arrived at these figures by taking the actual number of people in prison, or on probation or parole, and estimating the percentage who were black men between 18 and 35.
He said he based his estimates on a two-year-old study for the District's correction department that broke down the prison population by age, race and gender. "Those figures don't change much in two years," he said.
The report did not calculate how many of the men had been arrested for drug charges, but in an interview Mr. Miller said he would put the figure at 40 to 45 percent. That does not include those arrested for drug-related acts, like robbery to finance drug purchases.
Mr. Miller's numbers were of such magnitude that they astonished prominent blacks immersed in the very problems they describe.
C. Glenn Loury, an economist at Boston University, said, "What it suggests to me is an advanced breakdown of social order that even I had been unaware of."


I believe what Ron Paul claims in the Texas Monthly interview, that the comments were not his; he would not likely have been as careless.

Regardless of who authored these comments, though, what about the comments, to you, specifically, makes the person who authored them a racist?

[RedBean]

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Regardless of who authored these comments, though, what about the comments, to you, specifically, makes the person who authored them a racist?

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Um....you keep asking as if you don't understand why the comments are obviously racist....lemme ask you.....do you disagree that the comments express an obvious racist view?

Deleted

[Misfire]

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Regardless of who authored these comments, though, what about the comments, to you, specifically, makes the person who authored them a racist?

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Um....you keep asking as if you don't understand why the comments are obviously racist....lemme ask you.....do you disagree that the comments express an obvious racist view?

If so, maybe you can setup a carpool with Misfire to the next Klan rally. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

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"They're racist because they're obviously racist, and if you disagree with me or accuse me of circular logic, I'm going to associate you with white supremacists."

[RedBean]

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"They're racist because they're obviously racist, and if you disagree with me or accuse me of circular logic, I'm going to associate you with white supremacists."

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You left out the part about it being circular logic because my username RedBean is racist against American Indians and Mexicans. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

Seriously, though....we're just going to have to agree to disagree here. You don't think blatant racial prejudice and advocating harmful discrimination based on skin color is racism.

I disagree and think it's obvious racism, along with the majority of the objective free world, and we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this one.

Have a nice day. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Misfire]

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You left out the part about it being circular logic because my username RedBean is racist against American Indians and Mexicans. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

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Only if you think insensitivity = racism. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]
(not sure how that's circular, though)

[RedBean]

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Only if you think insensitivity = racism. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]
(not sure how that's circular, though)

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Don't look at me, McVeigh, you're the one who was whining and crying about my username being offensive to Indians and Mexicans....lol... [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]