A very long time ago, I messed up in my life, badly. I ultimately had to serve three years in federal prison.
I won’t go into the details of the crime itself. It was pretty bad. Needless to say, I deserved those three years. I was guilty as hell, and I knew it. My lawyers knew it, the prosecutor knew it, and the judge knew it.
But here’s the thing, I went through the system, and the system was fair to me. At no point, from going through the courts to being released from the BOP, can I honestly say that I was mistreated or abused.
I had my day in court. I said my piece. I made my case. The judge considered everything and ultimately sentenced me to three years instead of the eight years that had been on the table at the beginning.
The point I’m trying to make is that we really do have a functional judicial system. It is capable of prosecuting people who commit crimes while still providing them with due process and a fair opportunity to defend themselves.
If someone breaks the law in the United States, they should be prosecuted according to the law, fairly and consistently.
What we’re doing now, using the power of the state in ways that disregard those principles, is Draconian, totalitarian-state nonsense, and it needs to stop immediately.
It only really functions if the judge got enough sleep that day, your defender was paid well and is a good person, and you’re not a minority. More negatives if the jury is feeling particularly bored or youre in a rural area. A lot of urban areas have some pretty shit judges too.
Its about 100 coin flips weighted towards whether youre actually guilty or not.
I think this gives far too much weight to the imperfections of individual people while ignoring the entire purpose of having a judicial system in the first place.
Of course judges get tired, jurors get bored, attorneys vary in competence, and individual people bring their own biases and prejudices into the courtroom. There is no mechanism capable of removing human judgment from a system that necessarily requires human judgment. But that does not make the process a series of random coin flips.
The entire point of procedural rules, evidentiary standards, constitutional protections, appellate review, sentencing guidelines, jury instructions, disclosure requirements, standards of proof, and the adversarial process is to constrain individual discretion and make the outcome less dependent on any one person’s mood or personality. They don’t eliminate human error; nothing could. They create a framework within which human beings are required to operate.
And there’s an important distinction between saying “the system can produce unjust outcomes” and saying “the system is fundamentally arbitrary.” The first is obviously true. The second doesn’t follow from it.
If the judge has a bad day, that doesn’t mean the law disappears. If a defense attorney is incompetent, there are remedies for ineffective assistance. If a judge makes an error, there is appellate review. If a prosecutor violates the rules, there are consequences. If jurors disregard the law, the verdict can be challenged. None of these mechanisms are perfect, but they exist precisely because we understand that the people operating the system are imperfect.
My own experience actually illustrates this. I went through the system, I was guilty, and I deserved the sentence I received. I don’t remember the courts being perfect or every person involved being perfect. What I remember is that there was a process, there were rules, there were competing sides, and there were people whose job was to make sure those rules were followed.
That’s a much more accurate description of the justice system than “100 coin flips.” It’s a human institution deliberately constructed to put as many constraints as possible on human fallibility. Sometimes those constraints fail. Sometimes they work remarkably well. The fact that they cannot produce perfection doesn’t make them pointless.
Yes, I am white. In fact, my family hails from the Caucasus mountains in Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. Which, incidentally, is completely irrelevant to the point I was making.
You’re the second idiot under my original comment to make this same argument, and it’s every bit as ignorant and stupid as it sounds. It’s nothing more than empty pandering to the head-bobbers in the comment section who are apparently willing to agree with anything as long as it confirms what they already believe.
Yes, there are significant elements of systemic racism in the federal judicial system and in the judicial systems of many individual states. That is an entirely legitimate subject for discussion. But the existence of systemic racism does not mean that the United States justice system, as a whole, simply favors white people over people of color in every circumstance or that every individual interaction with the justice system can be reduced to race.
The American judicial system is a massive, chaotic machine made up of millions of people, millions of individual decisions, thousands of courts, and an enormous body of laws and procedures. It is physically incapable of producing perfectly consistent outcomes. Judges make mistakes. Prosecutors make mistakes. Defense attorneys make mistakes. Police officers make mistakes. Jurors make mistakes. Sometimes people receive excessive sentences, sometimes innocent people are convicted, and sometimes prejudice absolutely influences the outcome. None of that is particularly controversial.
But neither is the fact that, in general, the system does exactly what it is designed to do: determine guilt and impose punishment on people who have been found guilty under the law. My personal experience of receiving fair treatment through that system does not somehow become invalid because I happen to be white.
And this bizarre assumption that “the judicial system was kind to you, therefore you must be white” is not an argument. It’s an intellectually lazy attempt to dismiss someone’s actual experience without knowing anything about it.
If you want to discuss racial disparities in the American justice system, I’m perfectly happy to have that conversation. Bring statistics, case law, sentencing data, or credible research. But responding to an individual account with “you’re white, so of course the system treated you well” isn’t analysis. It’s just racial stereotyping dressed up as social commentary.
It’s relevant because what you experienced with the “justice” system is a very small minority of cases. As many as 95% of criminal cases end in a plea bargain, with an average of ten minutes or less for the defendant to speak with their public defender. This is before even getting into the suffering within prison. You are significantly more likely to experience abuse from this system if you are non-white.
I see though where you could say for your point that race is irrelevant if you were just showing that the system can be fair, but you say your experience shows we have a “functional judicial system”, that doesn’t necessarily follow. If it doesn’t function fairly in the majority of cases it isn’t functional as far as providing equitable justice for society.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Systemic racism (in some individual states, apparently) is real, but isn’t a foundational, structural issue ig. There are “elements of systemic racism”… what? Like, without the “systemic” part? Ain’t the fact that there IS systemic racism definitionally that we do NOT have a fair judicial system?? He got pretty butthurt u called him out lol
I knew you were going to do this, and I’m upset with myself for not calling you out on it in my original comment before you had the opportunity to go down this route. But then again, I thought to myself, perhaps I should just let you, and you’ve done exactly what I expected.
So yes, as I originally stated, I am quite white.
And thank you for bringing this up once again, since apparently you have absolutely nothing to rebut my argument with aside from pointing out the fact that I’m white. You’ve effectively admitted as much yourself.
So I would encourage you to carefully reread the comments, reconsider your approach, and perhaps reassess the conclusions you’re drawing from them. Because, believe it or not, you’re the one engaging in racial prejudice here.
Gonna be a tough argument for u, if your case is that your anecdote of good treatment as a white man is unrelated to non-white people infamously and consistently receiving piss poor treatment at every level of the judicial system. Sorry, better watch out against my “racial prejudice” against the “race” of people whose criteria of whiteness seems to fluctuate a lot through history.
I know a rat snitch federal informant when I read one. You’re either related to a cop or a mason or a snitch. The system is not nice and kind and understanding even to palest of the alabasters, who always fare better. Someone did a lot more time because of you. Eat shit and rest in an iron maiden where you belong.
A very long time ago, I messed up in my life, badly. I ultimately had to serve three years in federal prison.
I won’t go into the details of the crime itself. It was pretty bad. Needless to say, I deserved those three years. I was guilty as hell, and I knew it. My lawyers knew it, the prosecutor knew it, and the judge knew it.
But here’s the thing, I went through the system, and the system was fair to me. At no point, from going through the courts to being released from the BOP, can I honestly say that I was mistreated or abused.
I had my day in court. I said my piece. I made my case. The judge considered everything and ultimately sentenced me to three years instead of the eight years that had been on the table at the beginning.
The point I’m trying to make is that we really do have a functional judicial system. It is capable of prosecuting people who commit crimes while still providing them with due process and a fair opportunity to defend themselves.
If someone breaks the law in the United States, they should be prosecuted according to the law, fairly and consistently.
What we’re doing now, using the power of the state in ways that disregard those principles, is Draconian, totalitarian-state nonsense, and it needs to stop immediately.
Tell me you’re white without telling me you’re white
Tell me you’ve never been in the bop without telling me you’ve never been in the bop.
It only really functions if the judge got enough sleep that day, your defender was paid well and is a good person, and you’re not a minority. More negatives if the jury is feeling particularly bored or youre in a rural area. A lot of urban areas have some pretty shit judges too.
Its about 100 coin flips weighted towards whether youre actually guilty or not.
I think this gives far too much weight to the imperfections of individual people while ignoring the entire purpose of having a judicial system in the first place.
Of course judges get tired, jurors get bored, attorneys vary in competence, and individual people bring their own biases and prejudices into the courtroom. There is no mechanism capable of removing human judgment from a system that necessarily requires human judgment. But that does not make the process a series of random coin flips.
The entire point of procedural rules, evidentiary standards, constitutional protections, appellate review, sentencing guidelines, jury instructions, disclosure requirements, standards of proof, and the adversarial process is to constrain individual discretion and make the outcome less dependent on any one person’s mood or personality. They don’t eliminate human error; nothing could. They create a framework within which human beings are required to operate.
And there’s an important distinction between saying “the system can produce unjust outcomes” and saying “the system is fundamentally arbitrary.” The first is obviously true. The second doesn’t follow from it.
If the judge has a bad day, that doesn’t mean the law disappears. If a defense attorney is incompetent, there are remedies for ineffective assistance. If a judge makes an error, there is appellate review. If a prosecutor violates the rules, there are consequences. If jurors disregard the law, the verdict can be challenged. None of these mechanisms are perfect, but they exist precisely because we understand that the people operating the system are imperfect.
My own experience actually illustrates this. I went through the system, I was guilty, and I deserved the sentence I received. I don’t remember the courts being perfect or every person involved being perfect. What I remember is that there was a process, there were rules, there were competing sides, and there were people whose job was to make sure those rules were followed.
That’s a much more accurate description of the justice system than “100 coin flips.” It’s a human institution deliberately constructed to put as many constraints as possible on human fallibility. Sometimes those constraints fail. Sometimes they work remarkably well. The fact that they cannot produce perfection doesn’t make them pointless.
I’m going to hazard a guess here. You’re white?
Yes, I am white. In fact, my family hails from the Caucasus mountains in Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. Which, incidentally, is completely irrelevant to the point I was making.
You’re the second idiot under my original comment to make this same argument, and it’s every bit as ignorant and stupid as it sounds. It’s nothing more than empty pandering to the head-bobbers in the comment section who are apparently willing to agree with anything as long as it confirms what they already believe.
Yes, there are significant elements of systemic racism in the federal judicial system and in the judicial systems of many individual states. That is an entirely legitimate subject for discussion. But the existence of systemic racism does not mean that the United States justice system, as a whole, simply favors white people over people of color in every circumstance or that every individual interaction with the justice system can be reduced to race.
The American judicial system is a massive, chaotic machine made up of millions of people, millions of individual decisions, thousands of courts, and an enormous body of laws and procedures. It is physically incapable of producing perfectly consistent outcomes. Judges make mistakes. Prosecutors make mistakes. Defense attorneys make mistakes. Police officers make mistakes. Jurors make mistakes. Sometimes people receive excessive sentences, sometimes innocent people are convicted, and sometimes prejudice absolutely influences the outcome. None of that is particularly controversial.
But neither is the fact that, in general, the system does exactly what it is designed to do: determine guilt and impose punishment on people who have been found guilty under the law. My personal experience of receiving fair treatment through that system does not somehow become invalid because I happen to be white.
And this bizarre assumption that “the judicial system was kind to you, therefore you must be white” is not an argument. It’s an intellectually lazy attempt to dismiss someone’s actual experience without knowing anything about it.
If you want to discuss racial disparities in the American justice system, I’m perfectly happy to have that conversation. Bring statistics, case law, sentencing data, or credible research. But responding to an individual account with “you’re white, so of course the system treated you well” isn’t analysis. It’s just racial stereotyping dressed up as social commentary.
It’s relevant because what you experienced with the “justice” system is a very small minority of cases. As many as 95% of criminal cases end in a plea bargain, with an average of ten minutes or less for the defendant to speak with their public defender. This is before even getting into the suffering within prison. You are significantly more likely to experience abuse from this system if you are non-white.
I see though where you could say for your point that race is irrelevant if you were just showing that the system can be fair, but you say your experience shows we have a “functional judicial system”, that doesn’t necessarily follow. If it doesn’t function fairly in the majority of cases it isn’t functional as far as providing equitable justice for society.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes. I can agree with what you said here apart from the insults, but just to be clear here… You’re white, right?
Systemic racism (in some individual states, apparently) is real, but isn’t a foundational, structural issue ig. There are “elements of systemic racism”… what? Like, without the “systemic” part? Ain’t the fact that there IS systemic racism definitionally that we do NOT have a fair judicial system?? He got pretty butthurt u called him out lol
Quite literally the first 4 word sentence.
I knew you were going to do this, and I’m upset with myself for not calling you out on it in my original comment before you had the opportunity to go down this route. But then again, I thought to myself, perhaps I should just let you, and you’ve done exactly what I expected.
So yes, as I originally stated, I am quite white.
And thank you for bringing this up once again, since apparently you have absolutely nothing to rebut my argument with aside from pointing out the fact that I’m white. You’ve effectively admitted as much yourself.
So I would encourage you to carefully reread the comments, reconsider your approach, and perhaps reassess the conclusions you’re drawing from them. Because, believe it or not, you’re the one engaging in racial prejudice here.
Gonna be a tough argument for u, if your case is that your anecdote of good treatment as a white man is unrelated to non-white people infamously and consistently receiving piss poor treatment at every level of the judicial system. Sorry, better watch out against my “racial prejudice” against the “race” of people whose criteria of whiteness seems to fluctuate a lot through history.
Right. So still nothing.
I don’t care if you are correct in this point or not. Just wanted to say this is an amazing rebuttal to a comment.
O well thank you… I think.
What does race have to do with it? Can we leave that out of this?
Not when it comes to incarceration, no.
I know a rat snitch federal informant when I read one. You’re either related to a cop or a mason or a snitch. The system is not nice and kind and understanding even to palest of the alabasters, who always fare better. Someone did a lot more time because of you. Eat shit and rest in an iron maiden where you belong.
Youre probably right…
deleted by creator
And everyone clapped…