mechoman444 comments on AOC: "ICE is a new agency, created in the surveillance-state establishment after 9/11. ICE is Palantir. ICE is AI. ICE is facial recognition. ICE is surveillance. And ICE is coming after you..."

[–] mechoman444@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Once again, our judicial system is a gargantuan, messy machine with thousands of moving parts and millions of people trying to interpret and apply millions of laws across millions of cases, each with its own circumstances.

I am not equating my personal experience with the BOP and federal court system to evidence that our justice system is perfect or inherently fair. I have explicitly acknowledged that wrongful prosecutions happen, innocent people go to prison, and judges, prosecutors, police officers, and other officials make serious mistakes. My point has always been narrower: the justice system is, for the most part, functional at determining guilt and administering punishment for crimes.

The reason I brought up my own experience is simple: it is the experience I actually have. The prison system is an entirely different world and culture a society within society. And once you're inside, being white isn't necessarily some automatic advantage.

I was sentenced under the law and served my time because I committed a crime. The idea that I somehow received a special benefit simply because I am white doesn't comport with my actual experience. I went to prison because I broke the law, and I was punished for it.

The cognitive dissonance here is remarkable. It is one thing to look at the system from the outside and form conclusions about it; it is another to actually live through it. I can tell you that, in my experience, the overwhelming majority of the people I did time with had committed serious crimes and deserved to be incarcerated. That doesn't mean the system is incapable of injustice, nor does it excuse the horrific things I witnessed while I was in the BOP. I saw things nobody should have to see and met people nobody should have to meet.

And yet, after experiencing all of that firsthand, I still came out believing that our judicial system is, for the most part, functional.

That's the point I don't think people are understanding. I served time in prison for a crime I committed, experienced the system from the inside, and I'm still capable of assessing it objectively rather than simply condemning it because I had a terrible experience.

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[–] tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 point 1 month ago (2 children)

The idea that I somehow received a special benefit simply because I am white doesn’t comport with my actual experience. I went to prison because I broke the law, and I was punished for it.

That isn't what people are saying, that can be true, and you can still experience what is called "white privilege" in that people that aren't white are much more likely to experience racist treatment from authority figures in the US than white people. It wouldn't be noticed because the system worked fine for you but not necessarily for most people.

There are many instances where you can see the system treats people unfairly especially those without money and people of color. Anecdotally and statistically I could go on for a while. Your experience alone is just one of millions. Just the sheer number of people imprisoned in the US is itself proof of the abusive nature of the US police state.

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[–] mechoman444@lemmy.world 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

My experience with the federal court system and the Bureau of Prisons has given me a perspective that is very different from someone who has only observed the system from the outside.

I can tell you from personal experience that the BOP, the federal courts, and the various law-enforcement agencies operating within the federal justice system do not operate according to some simple racial hierarchy. In my experience, your skin color is not what determines how the federal system treats you. I would go even further and argue that “white privilege,” as it is commonly used today, is an oversimplified framework for understanding what actually happens inside the federal justice system.

What we absolutely do have and what I believe is considerably more consequential is wealth privilege.

The more money you have, the more resources you can put behind your defense. You can hire better attorneys, retain experts, investigate your case more thoroughly, challenge evidence, negotiate more effectively, and generally make the government work harder to obtain a conviction. In some circumstances, having sufficient money and resources can mean avoiding prison entirely. Someone without those resources simply does not have the same ability to fight the government.

That disparity is very real, and I saw it firsthand.

Where I disagree strongly is with the idea that the federal justice system is primarily organized around race. The system is enormous, bureaucratic, imperfect, and frequently driven by institutional incentives. America has also built an enormous incarceration infrastructure around the idea that imprisonment is the default response to a wide range of offenses. Once you have that much infrastructure, that many institutions, that many employees, and that much money tied to incarceration, there are inevitably powerful incentives to keep the machinery operating.

I am not claiming that every person in the system is corrupt or that every case is unjust. Quite the opposite. My experience showed me that the system is generally functional, but it is also an enormous machine with thousands of moving parts and institutional incentives that have little to do with the simplistic racial narratives people often use to explain it.

If you want to understand where privilege actually matters in the federal justice system, I would start with money.

The person who can afford an exceptional defense has a fundamentally different set of options from the person who cannot. That difference can affect everything from pretrial litigation to sentencing to the amount of time someone ultimately spends incarcerated.

In my experience, the most consequential privilege in the federal justice system isn't the color of your skin. It's the depth of your wallet.

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[–] tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 point 1 month ago

It's not a literal racial hierarchy, since segregation and slavery were abolished the systemic racism in the US operates mostly in a de facto manner through things like biased sentencing and a higher likelihood of being arrested. And you do agree that money is a big factor, look at the wealth distribution in US. White people on average hold more wealth than people of color. Therefore white people are more likely to afford a good lawyer. This is one way in which racism turns into material effects for people even if the system states "all men are created equal". A wealthy black person in the US may be able to have a fair trial with a good defense, but all other things equal, the data shows that the system favors white people over others.

This is why sociological research is important, for each individual there may be no clear way to see the level of disparity. A black person may feel that they were given a fair trial but won't be aware that a white person charged with the same crime is likely to be sentenced more leniently.

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