Unless we're talking about something else and I'm just confused, I think the main problem people have has to do with racism.
"In 2016, there were 1,608 black prisoners for every 100,000 black adults – more than five times the imprisonment rate for whites (274 per 100,000) and nearly double the rate for Hispanics (856 per 100,000).
Gap between number of blacks, whites in prison narrows
"Despite roughly equal usage rates, Blacks are 3.73 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana."
The War on Marijuana in Black and White
Many years ago, I was driving slowly through LA to get to a concert, high on ecstasy and with more drugs on the floor of my car, because I'm stupid. But I'm also white! I drove past a cop hassling some angry looking black guy, the cop nodded and smiled as he looked into probably my freakishly dilated eyes, and I went to the concert!
Is this all related to profiling or is it something else?
One comment on your analogy with the black guy being 'harassed', you cannot know why he had been pulled over, the fact that he was pulled over in and of itself does not imply bias, it may have been justified, it may not have been - to assume he was being harassed without knowing why he had been pulled over actually implies a bias on your side
Like i said in my message, the statistics behind profiling and the laws behind the arrests have to be unbiased, otherwise it is racism, exactly like you said
To put it bluntly, if one group of people is overrepresented in a statistical population:
- then either the laws are biased against them, institutional racism
- the laws are unbiased, but bias is introduced while enforcing them, enforcement racism
- or the laws are unbiased, the enforcement are unbiased and the incarceration is justified but there must be an underlying reason that is causing the over representation but which is not inherently related to the law that led to their incarceration
when you see a clear overrepresentation of black prisoners in prisons, then people should try to better understand why that is and if racism is involved,
the racism i think is more indirect, laws are made by the representatives of the people,
that violent crime and the selling and buying of illegal drugs are a crime, are not a bad thing in my opinion, and personally i believe that the law should be enforced to the letter
where the problem starts in my opinion is that these crimes may conceivably be more prevalent in those parts of the society where long term poverty and the lack of opportunity have a painful and enduring impact on daily life and could conceivably drive people to theft or to fleeing reality in drugs, when this become a long term and generational phenomenon it becomes the new normal, a culture with winners and losers, not everyone would be stealing to feed their family, some would be doing it because it is very lucrative, which givers them power and a vested interest in resisting change and progress within the community itself, when people stop believing that an education can lead to a better life, then there is a problem
so the question in my opinion is: if racism were removed with regards to access to education and jobs, and if perceived value of an education and a regular job would be improved, would this 'correct' the statistics that the profiling is based on and result in a more balanced and representative prison population
this is why so much emphasis is put on education and access to jobs,
but it is not because the root causes of some crime (racisme ao) have not been solved,
resulting in a statistically accurate overrepresentation in a statistical population,
that the law should not be applied
arguably, no one would suggest splitting the budget to 'attack' the mass producers of drugs between Latin America on the one hand and Greenland on the other, that would just be considered the efficient use of funds to get a maximum result per dollar spent
but for the sake of clarity, of course racism should be condemned and prosecuted wherever it is found
(I know. 
