The reason those are all bad ideas is that they're all attempting to treat the symptom rather than the problem.
If the problem is that people are dumping alkali waste into the reservoir, your suggestion is to ignore that and then dump in acid to even it out. Making the pH neutral isn't the same thing as making the water clean.
Solve the underlying problem? Babies exhibit racial bias. We're going to need some serious genetic engineering applied to the brain to solve the underlying problem. I don't think that's happening any time soon.
Your solution is to ignore this and instead offer a platitude so you don't have to think about an actual solution. I'm not saying I know the perfect solution, but I'm pretty sure it's not a platitude.
If you ask "why" up the chain enough times you eventually end up at some immutable law of nature. But that's completely missing the point.
Fixing the cause rather than the symptom doesn't mean you have to go study evolutionary biology. "Babies exhibit racial bias" doesn't inherently lead to mass incarceration and murder. There is a whole system of causes between one and the other.
And as for an actual solution, the top voted comment has already provided it. You can't have bias in drug cases or police shootings if there are no drug cases or police shootings. End the war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentences. Demilitarize the police.
The problem we're discussing isn't that there are too many minorities imprisoned for drug crimes. The problem is systemic disparate impact throughout the entire criminal justice system.
Getting rid of drug crimes does nothing to solve that, because you see the same pattern in basically every type of crime. Legalizing drugs would reduce the number of crimes, but not the racial bias.
You could just as easily "solve" the problem of racial bias by getting rid of any class of crimes. Like, let's legalize speeding because more blacks are pulled over for speeding than whites. Great. But the fundamental problem of inequality still remains in every other area of the criminal justice system.
Also, how do mandatory minimum sentences lead to more bias? Wouldn't that lead to less bias, since it removes biaased human judgement from part of the process? Otherwise you'd probably see whites getting more lenient sentences than they already do.
> Getting rid of drug crimes does nothing to solve that, because you see the same pattern in basically every type of crime.
No you don't. There is no epidemic of black men being convicted of insider trading or wire fraud.
> Like, let's legalize speeding because more blacks are pulled over for speeding than whites.
You're saying that like it's a completely ridiculous suggestion, but there is truth in it. Most traffic engineering manuals recommend that speed limits normally be set at the 85th percentile traffic speed but most speed limits in the US are set around 10MPH below that speed, resulting in widespread lawbreaking. Having laws that most people violate but only some people are punished for is not the rule of law and is exactly what facilitates racially biased selective enforcement.
> Also, how do mandatory minimum sentences lead to more bias? Wouldn't that lead to less bias, since it removes biaased human judgement from part of the process?
Mandatory minimum sentences amplify the biases in who is arrested, charged and convicted by increasing the average penalties. They also don't eliminate bias in sentencing because a biased decision maker can still give black defendants more than the mandatory minimum.
The only extent to which they could be said to reduce bias is in reducing the possible range of penalties imposed, but the same range reduction could be achieved by lowering the maximum rather than raising the minimum.
> There is no epidemic of black men being convicted of insider trading or wire fraud.
I'm willing to bet that the few black men that are caught for this type of crime are more likely to face court and have more severe punishment imposed.
> I'm willing to bet that the few black men that are caught for this type of crime are more likely to face court and have more severe punishment imposed.
Even if that were true, constricting the scope of the problem to that sort of rare case would be a thousand fold improvement from the status quo.
> Getting rid of drug crimes does nothing to solve that, because you see the same pattern in basically every type of crime. Legalizing drugs would reduce the number of crimes, but not the racial bias.
That's true, but since drug crime is used as a tool by the people who discriminate it's still useful to remove that tool of discrimination.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
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I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
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Except for black people... who are innocent without capable of being guilty. And Chinese who deserve a 10% increase in jail-time for being better at math. White people deserve a minimum sentence of 5 years, hard labor, for millenia of whiteprivildge.
* Judges and juries are only allowed to be the same race as the defendant.
* Increase/decrease the sentencing guidelines by X% for a certain race. 20 years max for a certain offense for Race Y, 15 years max for Race Z.
* Preferentially give better public defenders to people of certain races, or maybe just give them money to hire non-public defenders.
* Pick some small percentage of cases, say 5%. For people of Race Z, just let them go free 5% of the time. Don't even have a trial.
* Give nicer prison accommodations to people based on race. Similarly, make early release requirements less stringent for people based on race.
* For people of the privileged race, randomly arrest some innocent ones and try your best to pin the crime on them.
Like I said, these are all bad ideas, but they would counteract unconscious racial bias.