I agree with the vast majority of what you said. The statistic I sited is mentioned and discussed here but comes from a more scholarly article which I have been unable to access the full text to.
The study was based on data up to 2010, so it's a bit outdated, but as discussed in the linked article, more recent reliable stats are pretty hard to find. The 8% referenced includes all Americans with felony convictions, even those who served their sentence without going to prison.
Here's another interesting article from the Bureau of Justice Statistics which discusses an American's likelihood of being incarcerated at some point in their lives. If you are black, your odds are about 28.5% according to the study, while a white person only has a 4.4% chance. This study provides an overall chance of 5.1% that you will go to prison, but breaks it down ever further by race and gender. As a woman in her mid-thirties, I only have a .8% chance of going to prison.
So while your number of 1 in 4 is accurate for one demographic, it doesn't hold if you average the population as a whole. That in itself is incredibly alarming and demonstrates how skewed the laws and application of law is here in this country.
Thank you so much for commenting. Are you from the US or elsewhere? I'm curious which laws you see as being punished differently.
No, I am Dutch. Smoking or having cannabis is allowed in the Netherlands and you will not end up in prison for it. Also, small chance you will if you have sex with a minor (16 years old and up).
In Holland, you can be a serial killer and they give you 8 times a new identity and you not end up in prison, you can beat your wife up, drag her behind your car through the streets and set her at fire and the police won't show up unless... you are white.
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The drug laws here are certainly some of the most discriminatory laws that we've got.
I'd never heard that convicted killers can get a new identity. Can you send me a link with more information? To me, that sounds insane - but perhaps there is more logic to it than I realize.
And are you saying that white people have more leeway or less leeway in Holland?