Total questions: 3
Do you not think that when you're poor, you actually have more exposure to and need for crime? Don't you also think when you're rich and connected, it's far easier to get away with crime?
Yes, rich people have better access to resources needed to hold one's own as the accused in criminal proceedings. Indigent defense (a word used to describe the work done by public defenders in the context of the US legal system) is typically of poor quality, and so results are often abysmal for the lower classes who have to depend on such in legal settings.
These kinds of comparisons are commonplace. "Black people get harsher sentences for drug possession even though white people use drugs as much as they do", for example.
But they miss the point. Very rarely is a disadvantaged group's problems going to be solved by intervention from the government. Focusing on disproportionate sentencing is not going to solve economic problems, and in fact it might take much needed attention away from economic problems. I'll take it a step further: focusing on disproportionate sentencing can keep a group from actually taking steps to improve their collective standing with the law, because they'll only see themselves as victims instead of as problem solvers, even though lowering in-group crime rates may be necessary to help break harmful stereotypes, keep felonies off records, maintain reasonably OK credit scores, and so on. Keeping imprisonment from happening in the first place is vastly preferable to reducing the length of imprisonment. Or, as it were, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".
Let's be frank. It's not impossible for a poor person to find work. If you live in an area where decent-paying jobs are scarce, perhaps you could consider moving? Or commuting. For example, gas prices in Detroit right now are about $2.70 per gallon. Let's say the car you're driving has a gas mileage of 25 MPG in cities, and then a little better on the highway. Let's say 2 hours can get you 90 miles out.
Combine this with the internet, which about 90% of US adults use (accounting for the likes of old people and technophobes, access is higher), and you have a 90 mile radius of businesses where you can submit an online application for a job, and commute every day for less than $21.60 per work day (or, assuming you find a job where you make $15/hr, you de facto have to give less than 1 1/2 unpaid hours per work day).
There's another catch, obviously. You'd have to spend up to 4 hours a day in a car just driving to and from work. This really sucks. But first generation immigrants have always had a tendency to suck it up and undergo this anyway, so that their children might be able to have a better life. And this has virtually always paid off in the long run.
Certain groups in the US, however, have too much self-respect to undergo this, because they rightfully point out that it's unfair their group should have to leap through these hurdles when most whites don't. But if they should so refuse, then nothing will get done.
Their group will not move out of poverty otherwise, because richer people (the middle class included) have too much hold over the government to allow radical redistribution to happen with impunity, and wherever poor people have the numbers and solidarity to control the government the richer classes vote with their feet to leave for lower tax areas.
In short, nobody's gonna truly help the poor except for the poor themselves. The elites claim to care for the poor but all they really want are votes and influence. "Liberation" and "pride" ideologies foster indignation and outrage, in turn stifling action. Group disadvantages are real but can be overcome with enough time and effort, as people who came here with nothing but the clothes on their backs, from non-white societies like China, Japan, and India, proved. Heck, at this point even African immigrants are climbing the economic ladder, and they've got skin blacker than that of the average Black-American (also, despite that they come from countries with much crappier education systems than the US has).
Empowerment for disadvantaged minorities stems from the cultivation of personal virtue. That's not to say that they're less virtuous than, say, white Americans, but they'll need extra virtue and determination to break out of the rut they're in. That's a sad fact, but a true one. If they don't start now then they'll just be wasting more time, and existing racial disparities will only continue to widen, rather than shrink.
It will be readable publicly, is that an issue?
I sent you a PM. I'd like to have this discussion there.
Why Christianity? Some of what you say makes you seem like an agnostic at least wouldn't you say?
Is this private? Or will what I say here be readable publicly?