Did Edwards say what I thought he said? (Video at #31)

A lib buddy of mine called me and told me to turn on MTV. John Edwards was taking questions from young students. I wasn't but half way paying attention when I heard a young lady ask him something about his solution for inner city crime. Edwards said something like we can't build enough prisons to hold all of the criminals or eventualy there will be no black people left because they would either be in jail or dead. I'm paraphrasing of course and I don't want to start something that's not accurate but if that is what he said that has got to be either one of the most racist or stupidest things I've ever heard a politician say. Did anyone else hear it?

The original video link was the wrong one: had to do stricty with “europeanized” school curricula, as opposed to “diverse” ones. More BS. However, hearing now this “controversial” answer to the question, I think you’re all barking up the wrong tree. While it may be true that a Conservative candidate would be taken to task for
uttering the same words , Edwards’s words, in or out of context, were only making the self-evident point that if “society” keeps “incarcerating and incarcerating” black youth, sooner or later they’ll all be in jail. NO KIDDING. BY DEFINITION THEY’LL ALL BE IN JAIL. Maybe it was the carelessness of saying “all”, I don’t know, but for anyone who wants to nail John Edwards on something, it’s not this statement. This is an innocuous statement by itself. The more conservatives harp on these out of context words, the worse they look-—the more they look like Democrats./

Slow morning, I have time to rant about this for a bit.

The question dealt with how he was going to eliminate kids being involved with inter-city violence.

Race or gender was not part of the question.

The first part of his answer was your typical liberal excuse, blame Bush. First and foremost, it and everything else, is Bush’s fault. (No, I am not a BushBot. But, I am getting tired of hearing this lame excuse.)

The second part of his answer dealt with incarceration. Why do we do that? Because that person was convicted of a crime. But, he didn’t stop there. He mentioned race (black) and gender (male) as not only who, but people with those credentials were the only ones that were being arrested and put in jail. And if we continue to arrest and incarcerate them “...we are not going to have a young African American male population, they are all going to be in prison, or dead.”

This is the context.

So, what is out of context?

1. That Mr. Edwards used racial profiling to answer the question? (Only young black males are committing crimes?)
2. Mr. Edwards feels that young black males are being victimized because they are the only ones being incarcerated for the crimes they commit? (Pandering Alert?)
3. It is all George Bush’s fault for failed policies on education, universal health care and the judicial system for sentencing for drugs. Because, “..if you are African American living in the inter-city, you are more likely to be charged with a crime...”

No. Because someone broke the law. Not because they are black, white, brown or yellow. They broke the law. The question was what he was going to do about inter-city kids partaking in violence.

If anything was taken out of context, it was the question itself.

TRANSLATED:

Question: What would you do to help eliminate inner city kids partake in violence?

Answer: That’s a good question, the answer is a little long, so bare with me, because I don’t think there’s a silver bullet for this, um…we start with the President of the United States, saying to America, “We cannot build enough prisons to solve this problem”. And the idea that we can just keep incarcerating, keep incarcerating, pretty soon we’re not gonna have, a young African-American male population in America, they’re all gonna be in prison….or dead. One of the two…uh….and so I think there are a lot of things that we need to do.

First, we need to have an education system that’s fair, for people who live in the inner city, because right now we have two school public systems in America. One for fluent suburban neighborhoods and one for the inner city and another ….and the same for poor rural areas…and that’s not right, so….a lot of things…

We should have universal, ah, early childhood education. We should give, incentive pay for good teachers who go into the inner city and teach, uh…improving the schools….ok

Universal Health Care, which I spoke about just a few minutes ago, says that everyone gets quality health care from the time their born, so they don’t have to worry about that.

We have to change our Citizen Laws in America, they’re not fair. Because there’s a, for example, there’s a huge disparity between the sentencing uh…for crack and powder cocaine. Well, inner city youth are much more likely to be involved with crack cocaine. The result is, they get much harsher sentences. If you are, living in the inner city and African-American, you are more likely to get charged with a crime, you are more likely to be convicted of that crime and more likely to get a harsher punishment for that crime. That is the world of our judicial system today. And then on top of that, on top of that, when you go, if it is a non-violent offense, if you go to jail for six months or a year or two years, whatever the sentence turns out to be, when you get back out, the great likelihood, is you’re gonna turn right back to the place that got you in trouble to start with and there’s nothing to help. So instead of building more prisons, what America should be doing is creating a structure that allows young people who have a brush with law, who get in some trouble, to be able to turn their lives around and become productive again, and that means a lot of different things. In some cases, it might mean drug counseling and drug rehabilitation. Our probation system doesn’t work. Our probation officers are responsible for anywhere from 700 to 1,000 people, that means their paying no attention individually to these people. We need to make sure if they come out of jail, or out of prison, out of incarceration, if they need more education, they get it, if they need more job training, they get it.

And what I’ve been told, over and over, from young men who’ve had a brush with the law, who’ve been to jail, they come back out, they apply for work and they say “you got it, you just answered the question”. They will be, employers will be nice to them, they’ll meet with them, they’ll interview them, and they just never hear back from them again, they don’t get the job. And I think America should actually be reaching out, to try to get employment for young people who are trying to turn their lives around.

So, get away from the idea that imprisonment is gonna solve all these problems, that building prisons is gonna solve these problems and actually create an opportunity for these young folks.

JOHN EDWARDS IS A MORON!!

Everything Edwards said was par for the course for any and every Democratic candidate: it’s all there , from the obligatory “bash Bush” angle ( of course, they are all running against the legacy of 7 years of Bush, so any rhetorical example will do for the purposes), to the assumption that we are ONLY talking about “African-American” males ( consider, he may have been led there automatically because his questioner was a young Black woman, and she obviously had a “target group” in mind,) to all the usual pandering, to the implicit assumption that all African American males are prone to crime anyway,and “there won’t be any left” if the answer is seen as “incarceration”. THIS particular assumption IS in fact the most cynical, because , at one and the same time he distorts Bush’s statement, yet proves his point, and also reveals himself as being too stupid to understand that Bush said incarceration and the building of prisons is NOT the answer.

This is nothing. He was talking about how we lock too many people up and saying that blacks are not treated fairly in the system. Having worked in the criminal justice system a long time myself, I can’t say I completely disagree with those sentiments. I don’t know that our laws are racist (although the huge disparity in prison terms for crack cocaine and powdered cocaine are ridiculous) and I think that the biggest reason young blacks end up in prison so often is because they are in point of fact more likely to engage in criminal conduct than young whites. Not saying blacks are inherently criminal or anything, that’s just the way things work out and I don’t doubt at all that a lot of it has to do with poverty, lack of a decent education, lack of strong family structure, etc, and young blacks are much more likely than young whites to have been born into these circumstances. It is true, especially in the part of the South where I live that blacks are not treated as well as whites in the system. We have very few blacks in our county. We have no black police officers in my town, no blacks working anywhere in the county courthouse or for the prosecutor’s office, public defender’s office, etc. I don’t know that we have any black city employees. Some of our officers will pull people over and search them just for D.W.B (driving while black). When blacks are arrested they are less likely to get offered good plea deals. We rarely ever have any blacks on our juries. Our juries tend to be all white and they don’t tend to sympathetic to blacks or Hispanics if these people take their cases to jury trial. The defense attorneys and prosecutors all know this, as do black defendants. I wouldn’t want to get in trouble period, but I sure as heck wouldn’t want to get in trouble around here or in a lot of other fairly similar places throughout the country if I was black.

No he probably wouldn’t say that young black males are more likely to engage in criminal conduct than young whites. What he was basically saying here is that if he doesn’t get elected Republicans are going lock up all young black men, implying not so much that young blacks are criminals, but that the “Republican system” is unfair to blacks. Personally, I tend to think that we have gone crazy with locking people up in this country. What we’ve done in the past three decades or so is entirely unprecedented. Incarceration rates were relatively flat throughout the twentieth century until the last quarter of the century. We hit a new incarceration rate record back in 1979 and since then the incarceration rate and total number of people behind bars in this country has gone up several fold. We now have the highest incarceration rate in the world, far higher than the average for industrialized Western nations, and we have more people behind bars than any other country in the world, even those with much larger population than ours. We have around 5% of the world’s population yet around 25% of those behind bars in this world are locked up right here in the land of the free. I don’t think there is anything conservative about this radical departure from the way we used to do things. It’s big government at its worst. But the fact of the matter is that Democrats are a lot more responsible for the policies we have now more than Republicans. Jimmy Carter was president when we hit the new per capita incarceration rate record in 1979. Incarceration rates kept climbing during the Reagan years, but Reagan didn’t write the laws that contributed to the increase. The Democrat Congress did that. In fact, Democrats in Congress sponsored and passed Anti-Drug Abuse Act that created the 100 to 1 sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powdered cocaine that Edwards complained about in the video, not Republicans. Incarceration rates zoomed on up during the Clinton years as a result of laws Democrats passed. The growth in incarceration rates actually slowed some after Bush took over and we had Republicans in the House and the Senate and the Oval Office. For Democrats to get up there and blame our policies on mean ole’ Republicans and insinuate that Republicans want to lock all the blacks up is just plain ridiculous. But that’s what Edwards was doing, basically.

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