Comment by culi
3 days ago
It's wild that you think the problem with the US is too low of an incarceration rate. 25% of all prisoners in the world are in the US
3 days ago
It's wild that you think the problem with the US is too low of an incarceration rate. 25% of all prisoners in the world are in the US
You have to understand that the people who want mass incarceration/neo slavery are never going to want to stop locking people up.
Of course he thinks the incarceration rate is too low; people who express this opinion are at some level a justification for incarceration rates continuing to rise.
If there is no real penalty for being a career criminal, people will continue to be career criminals.
If someone knows they can rob people and get away with it, why would they do honest work for a living?
What is your solution to prevent crime without incarceration as a possible outcome for people breaking the law… especially those who do it repeatedly? It’s easy to talk down to solutions being used today, but without offering up a realistic alternative, this provides no value.
> If there is no real penalty for being a career criminal, people will continue to be career criminals.
I know this is a wild idea, but what if they had better options than career criminal for a living?
Americans are so invested in the penalties they can’t imagine the incentives approach.
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Those people are getting locked up more in the US than in any other country. Yet the crimes rates are not lower. In fact they're higher
> If there is no real penalty for being a career criminal
When did I say there should be no penalty for crime? When did I say there should be no penalty for a career of crime?
> What is your solution to prevent crime without incarceration
When did I say we should eliminate incarceration?
You're putting words in my mouth. You're creating a strawman.
What does crime mean to you?
What does crime look like?
What sorts of people commit crimes? Why do they commit crimes? What crimes do they commit?
5 replies →
Why would you want someone who commits a violent crime to avoid prison?
Most offenders in the U.S. prison system that U.S. citizens tax dollars are paying for are not violent offenders, at least not until they've been in and out of the prison system at least once, then their chances of committing additional crimes sky rocket.
So to answer your sneakily worded question (throwing in the word violent like some kind of gotcha for the first time): I personally don't want more people in prison because I think it is wasteful both in terms of capital and in terms of human experience, there are proven better alternatives like rehabilitation that work for most people and have significantly better outcomes, and finally because the united states prison system is effectively captured by corporate interests which is antithetical to a society that should be against cruel punishments.
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Why is your focus so narrow on ensuring people get punished for crimes rather than ensuring there is no crime? We have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Increasing that isn't going to turn us into Iceland.
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Did I say that someone who commits a violent crime should avoid prison?
Why are you putting words in my mouth?
In my opinion the problem is extreme sentences for non-violent crimes and a society that encourages recidivism by excluding the possibility for felons to re-enter society.
2 replies →
It can be true (and likely is) that both:
a) much more time and effort should be focused on catching and stopping the most persistent repeat offenders (sometimes by locking them up); and
b) orders of magnitude too many Americans are currently in prison.
From the outside, it looks like the US's society and culture fosters an unusually large criminal class compared to other western countries? If people had access to education, healthcare, jobs that aren't shipped overseas, minimum wage that wasn't laughable, etc, there wouldn't be so much problems? Arguing over severity of punishment while ignoring systemic issues is silly.
Non-developed countries do not have functional law enforcement and they are highly corrupt, so any statistics outside of developed countries should be ignored.
For developed countries, none but America have such high levels of immigration nor the racial diversity America has. It is much easier to convince society to promote high-trust empathetic solutions when society is racially homogenous and shares cultural background. It’s impossible to compare America to any European country, although soon it may be possible if immigration continues
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If the only crime--at all--in America was rape and murder, America would still have a higher incarceration rate than Germany.
America has a lot of criminals and therefore America needs a lot of incarceration.
Who do you think those people are that are incarcerated in the USA?
I come across this rather frequently among people from sheltered backgrounds like those who graduated from mom and dad taking care of them, all the way through to Mega Corp/university taking care of them, and absolutely cannot fathom why everyone doesn’t just eat cake.
I have a working theory that this effect, whatever one wants to call it, of people being too abstracted from reality, is ultimately the source of collapse of all kinds of organizations of humans… including civilizations.
It is, for example also why America can have so many vile warmongering people, because not only do they not have to lead troops into battle, have their children drafted into the front lines, or pay for the invariable disaster and murder they perpetrated and orchestrated; but in the most grotesque way, they profit from it and immensely; usually also combining it with other types of fraud like “money printing”, i.e., counterfeiting, which they use to plunder the wealth they accumulated through murder, mayhem, and fraud.
This isn't a new complaint. People have been identifying this group as the source of a lot of bad stuff at least as far back as Marx. The petty or petite bourgeoisie, the professional managerial class, Karens, the name changes with the times. But the constant derision for these groups is rooted in people observing that these groups are disposed to the sort of "driving society off a cliff" behavior you are listing examples of.
The real problem is people who don't want to be victims of crime, not the people doing the crime?
Now you're getting it. You have exactly identified the problem.
Instead of identifying and addressing the real problems--mass unemployment, homelessness, hopelessness--your dystopic "solution" is simply more and bigger jails, more and better armed cops with surveillance cameras attached, more laws, more weapons, more bondage and discipline, more "you will do what I say or else."
Doesn't work. Never works.
Read the essay "Fate of Empires" by Sir John Glubb to see how things this time are not in fact any different than what came before.
> Who do you think those people are that are incarcerated in the USA?
Say it then cowardly racist. Stop hiding behind rhetorical devices to justify an institution that has its historical origins in slave patrols
Or maybe repeat offenders can be put in jail, and other people could be let out. Just a random thought that occurred to me.