Confessions of a Public Defender

[Loren Pechtel]

Assuming that guy exists and what he writes is true, I see it more as proof of the existence of a race problem in the US (and a slew of other countries including mine, but this discussion is about the US) than a proof for "scientific racism".
He's a public defender! If it works in the US as around here, that means he doesn't see the average criminal, who's able to pay for his own lawyer. He only sees the destitute. How come they are 90% black?

Actually, a large percent of criminals are destitute. They live by crime, they have nothing extra to pay for lawyers.

The ones that can pay their own lawyers are the generally law-abiding that did something wrong, the rich drug user whose actions finally came to the attention of law enforcement and the drug dealer who has previous profits to pay the lawyer with. The career criminal other than the dealer won't have money.

I don't see how you say this is proof of a race problem. Rather, it's caused by the guy generalizing from the blacks he sees (scum) to the race at large. It's a problem of not understanding sampling error.

 

[Keith&Co.]

I don't see how you say this is proof of a race problem.

What?
If 90% of the criminals are of a given race, far above the racial distribution of his city (not just his clients, but his impression of the entire courthouse)(Which i tend to suspect as far as robust accounting goes, but still, 'IF' his estimates are anywhere near accurate), then something's causing problems for that race. Whether it's the economic conditions that drive it, or police bias, or the district attorney chooses to prosecute by use of a color wheel or by use of the voter polls of the last election or by the donations for teh policeman's ball as distributed by neighborhood, whatever the reason, there's still a race problem.
Just not the one the quoted jackass has identified.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I don't see how you say this is proof of a race problem.

What?
If 90% of the criminals are of a given race, far above the racial distribution of his city (not just his clients, but his impression of the entire courthouse)(Which i tend to suspect as far as robust accounting goes, but still, 'IF' his estimates are anywhere near accurate), then something's causing problems for that race. Whether it's the economic conditions that drive it, or police bias, or the district attorney chooses to prosecute by use of a color wheel or by use of the voter polls of the last election or by the donations for teh policeman's ball as distributed by neighborhood, whatever the reason, there's still a race problem.
Just not the one the quoted jackass has identified.

1) We don't know the actual distribution of criminals from his data--sampling bias.

2) Even if 90% of criminals are black (which isn't the case) it doesn't prove it's racial. When you look at supposedly racial patterns you almost inevitably find race is actually just a proxy for something else--when you find that something else race will drop out of the picture. (A statistician looks for those variables that can be used to improve the prediction. Consider a real world example: On average blacks get less treatment and have less good outcomes in the ER. Race? Nope--once you more carefully you'll find it's the ERs, not the patients. You'll get less treatment and have a less good outcome at an overcrowded ER no matter what your race. ER + race is no more predictive than ER alone.)

He's describing an extremely destructive culture. It's not a surprise that people from that background become criminals. Yes, it's a culture held by black people but it's not because they are black.

 

[doubtingt]

I don't see how you say this is proof of a race problem.

What?
If 90% of the criminals are of a given race, far above the racial distribution of his city (not just his clients, but his impression of the entire courthouse)(Which i tend to suspect as far as robust accounting goes, but still, 'IF' his estimates are anywhere near accurate), then something's causing problems for that race. Whether it's the economic conditions that drive it, or police bias, or the district attorney chooses to prosecute by use of a color wheel or by use of the voter polls of the last election or by the donations for teh policeman's ball as distributed by neighborhood, whatever the reason, there's still a race problem.
Just not the one the quoted jackass has identified.

1) We don't know the actual distribution of criminals from his data--sampling bias.

2) Even if 90% of criminals are black (which isn't the case) it doesn't prove it's racial. When you look at supposedly racial patterns you almost inevitably find race is actually just a proxy for something else--when you find that something else race will drop out of the picture. (A statistician looks for those variables that can be used to improve the prediction. Consider a real world example: On average blacks get less treatment and have less good outcomes in the ER. Race? Nope--once you more carefully you'll find it's the ERs, not the patients. You'll get less treatment and have a less good outcome at an overcrowded ER no matter what your race. ER + race is no more predictive than ER alone.)

He's describing an extremely destructive culture. It's not a surprise that people from that background become criminals. Yes, it's a culture held by black people but it's not because they are black.

By "that background" you mean slavery and constant oppression by the majority white culture, right? The "culture" most responsible for such behaviors is not "held by black people". It is reactionary sub-culture nested within and a product of the majority US culture. Cultures, especially minority cultures, are not some deliberate conscious creation but an emergent reaction (often rational and natural psychological reactions) to a larger context.
When a child is severely abused their whole life, this creates destructive (to themselves and others) tendencies in the child. Get a group of such former abused kids together and you have a group of people who share these destructive tendencies, but is that a culture "held by the abused"? Sure, there are ways in which people within and without the community can exacerbate and prevent healing of those psycho-social wounds and I do think they are often those claiming to be the champions and defenders of such communities. But to claim the people most harmed by such destructive environments "hold" them as though they could just drop them and essentially flip a switch and erase all history if they just really wanted to improve their situation is absurd.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

The Legalmen, however, saw a different Navy than i did. They saw scum. Day in, day out, people who were being processed out of the Navy for Federal crimes, personal crimes, insubordination, sex crimes, showing up for work naked, rape, rape of other sailors, homosexuality (a crime for my whole tour), and beating up homosexuals.
But then, their sample source was different than mine. I was with The Navy, they were with The Navy That's Causing Trouble. And a subset of those. They generally didn't see the troublemakers that got turned around at Captain's mast or lesser frames of punishment/rehabilitation. They certainly never got asked to professionally investigate anyone getting an award for their performance.

Exactly. This guy is giving a pretty good description of how the black criminal class operates and what causes them to behave that way. Where he's going badly wrong is generalizing that to blacks in general.

and how does the black criminal class differ from the white, brown, or purple criminal classes?

 

[braces_for_impact]

This reminds me of various jobs I've had. You know, I've worked in a variety of customer service positions in my time, and every single one of those companies sucked. I know this because the only phone calls we ever got were complaints.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

and how does the black criminal class differ from the white, brown, or purple criminal classes?

I don't know about the rest, but the white criminal class tends to wear expensive suits and their crimes involve a lot of hanging around in casinos and dog racing tracks. Also, if you don't have expensive artwork or untraceable bearer bonds in your condo, they're likely not going to bother you.

 

[arkirk]

If I were a black man, I certainly would not want this opinionated lawyer to defend me. He is a racist. He not only characterized black people as unable to reason; he also made out Hispanics as sexual perverts. His confession just means he should not have his job. The stuff he points to only indicates he is dealing with an underclass without resources whites and Asians have. His complaint about being disrespected by blacks is particularly telling. If you are being defended by somebody who thinks of you as a stupid unreasonable subhuman, you may have a few choice words for him too.

It is my guess he wears a tie and suit at all times and drives a Beemer...and despite his long association with blacks, has absolutely no concept of what shapes their lives, their knowledge, and attitudes.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

It is not unusual for a 19-year-old black to refer to me as “dog.”

This liberal doesn't seem to understand what they are calling him.

So apparently blacks are not human because the black presumably criminals are not human while in court and council. But the whites aren't as bad because while they may commit all sorts of crimes, they behave well in court and don't crowd the hallways.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Who here thinks this guy is an actual attorney?

 

[scombrid]

Who here thinks this guy is an actual attorney?

Not me.

His characterization of courthouse behavior read like a ridiculous charicature.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I don't see how you say this is proof of a race problem.

What?
If 90% of the criminals are of a given race, far above the racial distribution of his city (not just his clients, but his impression of the entire courthouse)(Which i tend to suspect as far as robust accounting goes, but still, 'IF' his estimates are anywhere near accurate), then something's causing problems for that race. Whether it's the economic conditions that drive it, or police bias, or the district attorney chooses to prosecute by use of a color wheel or by use of the voter polls of the last election or by the donations for teh policeman's ball as distributed by neighborhood, whatever the reason, there's still a race problem.
Just not the one the quoted jackass has identified.

1) We don't know the actual distribution of criminals from his data--sampling bias.

2) Even if 90% of criminals are black (which isn't the case) it doesn't prove it's racial. When you look at supposedly racial patterns you almost inevitably find race is actually just a proxy for something else--when you find that something else race will drop out of the picture. (A statistician looks for those variables that can be used to improve the prediction. Consider a real world example: On average blacks get less treatment and have less good outcomes in the ER. Race? Nope--once you more carefully you'll find it's the ERs, not the patients. You'll get less treatment and have a less good outcome at an overcrowded ER no matter what your race. ER + race is no more predictive than ER alone.)

He's describing an extremely destructive culture. It's not a surprise that people from that background become criminals. Yes, it's a culture held by black people but it's not because they are black.

By "that background" you mean slavery and constant oppression by the majority white culture, right? The "culture" most responsible for such behaviors is not "held by black people". It is reactionary sub-culture nested within and a product of the majority US culture. Cultures, especially minority cultures, are not some deliberate conscious creation but an emergent reaction (often rational and natural psychological reactions) to a larger context.

You're not rebutting what I'm saying so I think you misunderstand what I said.

I'm talking about the culture he described. It's not held by most black people, but the people that hold it are mostly black. Cultures are normally not deliberate, I'm not saying this one is. I'm saying it's the root cause of the problem he's seeing--as always, a cultural problem, not a racial one.

When a child is severely abused their whole life, this creates destructive (to themselves and others) tendencies in the child. Get a group of such former abused kids together and you have a group of people who share these destructive tendencies, but is that a culture "held by the abused"? Sure, there are ways in which people within and without the community can exacerbate and prevent healing of those psycho-social wounds and I do think they are often those claiming to be the champions and defenders of such communities. But to claim the people most harmed by such destructive environments "hold" them as though they could just drop them and essentially flip a switch and erase all history if they just really wanted to improve their situation is absurd.

I said nothing about how to fix it--I don't know how to fix it (beyond the fact that throwing money at the problem isn't an answer.) I'm just saying it's the cause of the problem.

- - - Updated - - -

The Legalmen, however, saw a different Navy than i did. They saw scum. Day in, day out, people who were being processed out of the Navy for Federal crimes, personal crimes, insubordination, sex crimes, showing up for work naked, rape, rape of other sailors, homosexuality (a crime for my whole tour), and beating up homosexuals.
But then, their sample source was different than mine. I was with The Navy, they were with The Navy That's Causing Trouble. And a subset of those. They generally didn't see the troublemakers that got turned around at Captain's mast or lesser frames of punishment/rehabilitation. They certainly never got asked to professionally investigate anyone getting an award for their performance.

Exactly. This guy is giving a pretty good description of how the black criminal class operates and what causes them to behave that way. Where he's going badly wrong is generalizing that to blacks in general.

and how does the black criminal class differ from the white, brown, or purple criminal classes?

Did you not actually read the article in the OP? You no doubt branded him as a racist and dismissed it--when in reality almost everything he's saying is true. There's only one substantial error in what he said--his generalizing from him highly biased sample to the population at large.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

I don't see how you say this is proof of a race problem.

What?
If 90% of the criminals are of a given race, far above the racial distribution of his city (not just his clients, but his impression of the entire courthouse)(Which i tend to suspect as far as robust accounting goes, but still, 'IF' his estimates are anywhere near accurate), then something's causing problems for that race. Whether it's the economic conditions that drive it, or police bias, or the district attorney chooses to prosecute by use of a color wheel or by use of the voter polls of the last election or by the donations for teh policeman's ball as distributed by neighborhood, whatever the reason, there's still a race problem.
Just not the one the quoted jackass has identified.

1) We don't know the actual distribution of criminals from his data--sampling bias.

2) Even if 90% of criminals are black (which isn't the case) it doesn't prove it's racial. When you look at supposedly racial patterns you almost inevitably find race is actually just a proxy for something else--when you find that something else race will drop out of the picture. (A statistician looks for those variables that can be used to improve the prediction. Consider a real world example: On average blacks get less treatment and have less good outcomes in the ER. Race? Nope--once you more carefully you'll find it's the ERs, not the patients. You'll get less treatment and have a less good outcome at an overcrowded ER no matter what your race. ER + race is no more predictive than ER alone.)

He's describing an extremely destructive culture. It's not a surprise that people from that background become criminals. Yes, it's a culture held by black people but it's not because they are black.

By "that background" you mean slavery and constant oppression by the majority white culture, right? The "culture" most responsible for such behaviors is not "held by black people". It is reactionary sub-culture nested within and a product of the majority US culture. Cultures, especially minority cultures, are not some deliberate conscious creation but an emergent reaction (often rational and natural psychological reactions) to a larger context.

You're not rebutting what I'm saying so I think you misunderstand what I said.

I'm talking about the culture he described. It's not held by most black people, but the people that hold it are mostly black. Cultures are normally not deliberate, I'm not saying this one is. I'm saying it's the root cause of the problem he's seeing--as always, a cultural problem, not a racial one.

When a child is severely abused their whole life, this creates destructive (to themselves and others) tendencies in the child. Get a group of such former abused kids together and you have a group of people who share these destructive tendencies, but is that a culture "held by the abused"? Sure, there are ways in which people within and without the community can exacerbate and prevent healing of those psycho-social wounds and I do think they are often those claiming to be the champions and defenders of such communities. But to claim the people most harmed by such destructive environments "hold" them as though they could just drop them and essentially flip a switch and erase all history if they just really wanted to improve their situation is absurd.

I said nothing about how to fix it--I don't know how to fix it (beyond the fact that throwing money at the problem isn't an answer.) I'm just saying it's the cause of the problem.

- - - Updated - - -

The Legalmen, however, saw a different Navy than i did. They saw scum. Day in, day out, people who were being processed out of the Navy for Federal crimes, personal crimes, insubordination, sex crimes, showing up for work naked, rape, rape of other sailors, homosexuality (a crime for my whole tour), and beating up homosexuals.
But then, their sample source was different than mine. I was with The Navy, they were with The Navy That's Causing Trouble. And a subset of those. They generally didn't see the troublemakers that got turned around at Captain's mast or lesser frames of punishment/rehabilitation. They certainly never got asked to professionally investigate anyone getting an award for their performance.

Exactly. This guy is giving a pretty good description of how the black criminal class operates and what causes them to behave that way. Where he's going badly wrong is generalizing that to blacks in general.

and how does the black criminal class differ from the white, brown, or purple criminal classes?

Did you not actually read the article in the OP? You no doubt branded him as a racist and dismissed it--when in reality almost everything he's saying is true. There's only one substantial error in what he said--his generalizing from him highly biased sample to the population at large.

wrong again sunshine.

I have not branded him anything.

I suspect he is a fraud

A fiction created to lend credence to a simplistioc stereotype that lets a certain type of person rest easy at night knowing that he is not racist but culturist. And that's better. (please note sarcasm in last sentence)

 

[Unbeatable]

Who here thinks this guy is an actual attorney?

I think he could be, but then, I don't claim to know anything about attorneys. To me it's practically 50/50 in terms of plausibility. This reads like one of those testimonials of Christians who claim that they were once the worst sinner you could imagine but have now seen the light, but OTOH I can imagine all sorts of idiots with poor reasoning and writing skills working in any number of professions, including law.

My bigger doubt, when reading, was about whether he's an actual liberal. I think he may just be a bigot pretending he used to be a liberal in order to get attention from his white supremacist buddies.

 

[Duke Leto]

Interesting fact. According to state by state racial incarceration rates, we can compare the number of each race incarcerated to the general population of the state. These figures date to 2005, but crime has not significantly increased since the depression began.

The state that has the nearest to a proportionate number of Blacks and Whites in jail is Hawaii. This is because the percentage of Hawaiian Blacks that are in jail is far below the national average, while the Whites in jail is about the national average. You are still twice as likely to be in jail if you are Black in Hawaii than you are if you are White.

The runners up are roughly a three way tie between Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas. All three have above average White incarceration rates and below average Black ones. The ratio here is about 3.5-4 to 1. South Carolina is only slightly less evenhanded at 4.5:1, the result of lower White incarceration rates.

The author claimed to be from a major Southern Metropolitan area, so that eliminates the three above states. Only Alabama comes close to having a metropolitan area. The choices would therefore seem to be in order of probability Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, Virginia and North Carolina, perhaps Memphis, Tennessee as a last option. The metropolitan portion of Florida is a joint colony of NYC and Cuba. Georgia and Texas both have significantly higher than average White incarceration rates, while Georgia's Black incarceration rate is slightly below average and Texas is greatly above average. Louisiana has an above average rate of White and Black Incarceration, and a surprisingly low Hispanic one. North Carolina is below average in both its Black and White incarceration rate. Tennessee is roughly comparable to Alabama.

The states where you least want to be Black to avoid jail time are South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. In each, over 4% of the Black population is incarcerated. No Southern State approaches the Mid-Atlantic ratios of Black to White per capita incarceration, which tend toward 10:1 or 9:1. In the case of DC, it is 20:1. This is in spite of the fact that both New York and DC have Black incarceration rates that are less than Mississippi's, their White incarceration rates are far below the national average.

Conclusion: Either the author of the Public Defender tract is lying through his teeth when he claims to have few White criminal clients, or he is serving a municipal jurisdiction in the South with virtually no White population.

I suppose the latter is remotely possible, but I tend to agree with AthenaAwakened and regard the article as an inflammatory fabrication.

 

[RavenSky]

and how does the black criminal class differ from the white, brown, or purple criminal classes?

I don't know about the rest, but the white criminal class tends to wear expensive suits and their crimes involve a lot of hanging around in casinos and dog racing tracks Wall Street.

FIFY

- - - Updated - - -

Who here thinks this guy is an actual attorney?

nope

 

[Wiploc]

... I'm not doubting the writer's sincerity ...

Really?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Conclusion: Either the author of the Public Defender tract is lying through his teeth when he claims to have few White criminal clients, or he is serving a municipal jurisdiction in the South with virtually no White population.

I suppose the latter is remotely possible, but I tend to agree with AthenaAwakened and regard the article as an inflammatory fabrication.

Remember, though, that he's a public defender. He doesn't see all criminals, only those with no means to pay for their own lawyer. A white defendant is much more likely to have family that will help.

 

[Duke Leto]

Conclusion: Either the author of the Public Defender tract is lying through his teeth when he claims to have few White criminal clients, or he is serving a municipal jurisdiction in the South with virtually no White population.

I suppose the latter is remotely possible, but I tend to agree with AthenaAwakened and regard the article as an inflammatory fabrication.

Remember, though, that he's a public defender. He doesn't see all criminals, only those with no means to pay for their own lawyer. A white defendant is much more likely to have family that will help.

As usual Loren, your pathetic reasoning skills fail you miserably.

Click through to the goddamned chart in my post. You'll see that all the Southern states have way above average White inmate populations. Especially the Appalachian ones where the Whites are really poor as hell that are the only ones where the "metropolitan areas" have the demographic mix described by the alleged author. Would you like to explain to me how Georgia has something more than twice as many White inmates as a percentage of the population while than Pennsylvania while they share similar crime rates? (See links here.)

It'd seem pretty goddamned likely that rather a lot of Southern Whites can't afford the services of a Defense Attorney and are at the mercy of public defenders, since many more Whites per capita get convicted in Georgia in spite of comparable per capita rates of crime. Your hypothesis ignores the facts.

What should get our attention straight away, of course, is the claimed demography of the writers municipality. It is a 10% Black part of a Southern Metropolitan are. Here's a list of the big Southern Metropolitan Areas.

We can safely eliminate DC Metro and the Miami metro as the former is sufficiently non-Southern and the latter has too many Hispanics to match the description.

Atlanta's Metro is 30% Black.
Orlando+Daytona Beach will be something on the order of 25%.
Charlotte's is going to be ~30%.
Raleigh/Durham at least 25%.
Nashville is going to be in the department of 20% Black.
Virginia Beach/Norfolk is about 30% Black.

To find a metropolitan area close to fitting the 10% Black requirement in the South, you are looking at Knoxville Tennessee or the larger urbanized areas in Kentucky and West Virginia, which is pushing the definition of metropolitan are to its limits.

In other words: it is extremely unlikely that a county level public defender in the US South will have a jurisdiction with as low a percentage of the population being Black as this guy claims up front.

He's lying.

 

[Duke Leto]

Devil his due though, it is quite possible to be a White Southern "economic liberal" in the New Deal sense and still be an ignorant racist.

That describes a very significant portion of West Virginia and Kentucky and Arkansas' populations.