LaVar Hosting Jeopardy July 26-30 Stan Account 👁

Well you see, decades of underpolicing murder and serious crimes, while overpolicing minor crimes and mental illness essentially led to a breakdown in the state monopoly on violence in certain African-american communities, resulting in the rise of gang culture...

Because if the police won't deter violence for you, you gotta deter it for yourself, and so we ended up in a kind of intimidation arms race that is, frankly, stable but costs a lot more lives---and facilitates a lot more petty crime---than the state monopoly on violence system.

And then on top of that, we had a massive---CIA-assisted!---infusion of capital into black inner cities in the form of cocaine. The---again, CIA-assisted!---glut of cocaine in the market led to the popularization of the more addictive "crack" form of the drug.

Any infusion of unregulated capital into any community---but especially one cut off from regulated capital by structural inequities, lack of wealth-building due to housing segregation/redlining, etc---will lead to violence to enforce legally unenforceable contracts, etc.

And of course the employ of that capital itself is... you guessed it! A crime! So we've got addicts fueling demand, committing a crime every time they succumb to their addiction, community small businesses with all employees committing crimes, violence underpinning it all...

And we haven't even gotten to lead poisoning and its effects on impulse control, broken school systems, the psychological effects of oppression... there's a LOT of reasons we commit crimes, friend.

The question you gotta ask yourself is: under all that pressure, would you stay clean? Or would you find yourself a "criminal" too? How about your siblings? Your cousins? Your friends? If they didn't all stay clean under that pressure, how would you want them treated?