@joshupetersen Currently studying this exact topic in my Social Justice 170 class in college and can confirm the US system is epicly broken. The War On Drugs that started in the 1980s was specifically designed to target poor blacks by giving harsher punishments to people possessing crack cocaine (typically possessed by blacks) versus powder cocaine (typically possessed and distributed by whites) to the point that so many blacks were incarcerated for "worse" offenses in jails to the point where when they were finally released from prison, they were so negatively labeled a felon that they couldn't (and can't) get jobs so that they'd wind up selling drugs again to make ends meet.
And when slaves were freed initially, in order to keep slavery legal, whites would arrest blacks for minor offenses and tell them they would stop being incarcerated once they paid their dues to society for their (innately minor) societal offenses. The blacks would work and work but would never be able to keep up with the dues they were charged with and would remain indentured because the debts they were assigned couldn't realistically be repaid. For more information, read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. She goes into the intricacies of how African Americans have subtly been repressed since the passing of the 5th and 15th Amendments.
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@joshupetersen Currently studying this exact topic in my Social Justice 170 class in college and can confirm the US system is epicly broken. The War On Drugs that started in the 1980s was specifically designed to target poor blacks by giving harsher punishments to people possessing crack cocaine (typically possessed by blacks) versus powder cocaine (typically possessed and distributed by whites) to the point that so many blacks were incarcerated for "worse" offenses in jails to the point where when they were finally released from prison, they were so negatively labeled a felon that they couldn't (and can't) get jobs so that they'd wind up selling drugs again to make ends meet.
And when slaves were freed initially, in order to keep slavery legal, whites would arrest blacks for minor offenses and tell them they would stop being incarcerated once they paid their dues to society for their (innately minor) societal offenses. The blacks would work and work but would never be able to keep up with the dues they were charged with and would remain indentured because the debts they were assigned couldn't realistically be repaid. For more information, read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. She goes into the intricacies of how African Americans have subtly been repressed since the passing of the 5th and 15th Amendments.