The Link Between Sagging Pants Laws and the Drug War

[RealityPortal]

Radley Balko points out that police in Flint, MI have started going after people whose pants sag below their boxer shorts:

Leaving aside the absurdity of telling people how to wear their pants, just contemplate the ironic path that brought us here. The style itself is an artifact of prison culture, where inmates' belts and shoelaces are confiscated and the standard-issue clothes never fit right. The style made its way back onto the streets where it entered popular culture. Now, in 2008, you can go to jail for 93 days to a year just for dressing like an inmate.

In an urban landscape already ravaged by decades of racial profiling and drug war demolition tactics, police have codified their own authority to stop and frisk people whose style of dress is already stigmatized by presumed criminality. The number of things young people in America can't get arrested for approaches zero at an exponential rate.

More links:
http://www.realityportal.info/content/view/335/73/

Quoted from: http://stopthedrugwar.org/speakeasy/chronicle

 

[GOD]

High Kev ,

Where`ve you been lately ???


I think that the baggy pants also came whene poor kids had to wear their older brothers un fitting old clothes and clothes from rumage sales/flea markets . I had to and it was realy big shit . Like walking round with a ten pound turd in your pants .

 

[Caduceus Mercurius]

Anyone here wear sagging pants?

 

[Forkbender]

I'm not wearing any pants at the moment.

 

[GOD]

Not that blisters on the hand 8 hour trip again ????

 

[Forkbender]

No. There are no blisters on my HANDS.

 

[LaughingHenkeH]

baggy pants are really ok if you just wear a belt and don't try to show off your boxers, don't show people your underwear unless they ask for it, if they do ask you it's fine
P.S. War's bad too but it doesn't affect my daily life as much as that damn underwear-showing youth

 

[????????]

I suck at buying jeans so they start to sag weeks after I get them

 

[JustinNed]

LOL. I say LOL at the baggy pant law because it is just COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS and absurd. I have a couple of pairs of pants that don't fit right and sag below my waste, and if an officer arrested me for it I would bring hell fire in to the court room. Too bad Johnny Cochran is dead.

So: To those of you who wear baggy pants and it's illegal where you live, just take them off and walk around in your briefs, no law against that. (As long as your stuff is still tucked in.)

 

[Miffymon]

I blame the reporter for not coming up with better news.

:wink:

Quite honestly, people who sag their pants in the ghettos are creating a typical stereotype by committing crimes and using certian styles to signify their relation in crime.

 

[forgetoz]

You mispelled "incinerated" :twisted: