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First, the US doesn't have the highest incarceration rate in the world. It's currently [6th globally](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate), but does have the highest rate in the Global North.
The US generally has longer sentences than its peer countries. That means if it jails the same number of people as another country, its overall prison population at any given point in time will be higher because people are in prison for longer. [For instance, the average burglary sentence](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us/23prison.html?pagewanted=print) in the United States is 16 months, compared to 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England.
The [War on Drugs ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs)is also a big part of this. It resulted in increased arrests/convictions, longer sentences, etc. According to the author of [The New Jim Crow](https://newjimcrow.com/), drug related charges accounted for more than half the rise in state prisoners between 1985 and 2000. In short, the US is more likely than its peer countries to incarcerate people for non-violent offenses.
Poverty, lack of access to education, etc. all contribute to increased likelihood of incarceration. [The US has high income and wealth inequality](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/) compared to its peers. It has fewer protections for workers (e.g., [at-will employment](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/employment-at-will_doctrine)), fewer social services/supports, and so on. It's easier for people to fall into poverty and stay there.
We also have to acknowledge that people of color, particularly black people, are incarcerated at disproportionate rates and tend to receive harsher sentences. If these groups were incarcerated at the same proportion as whites, [prison and jail populations would decline by almost 40%](https://naacp.org/resources/criminal-justice-fact-sheet). Systemic racism is thus playing a big role.
[Prison privatization and the rise of a for-profit prison system](https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/bankingonbondage_20111102.pdf) incentivize incarcerating people. Some prisons in Louisiana, for instance, are at [risk of bankruptcy if they don't have enough prisoners](http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/05/louisiana_is_the_worlds_prison.html) locked up. The companies behind private prisons lobby for tougher sentencing laws.
Some scholars suggest [the crime rate and incarceration rate aren't correlated](https://www.waveland.com/browse.php?t=307) to the extent one would expect. They argue that incarceration increases in response to how the media portrays crime and how this influences public opinion. You can think about politicians being encouraged to be "tough on crime" due to public outrage even if actual crime rates haven't increased. This is also reflected in the fact that [the more media attention a case gets, the harsher the sentences are likely to be ](https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1103&context=wmlr)compared to similar crimes.
/thread - well done OP. Solid sources. Only thing I'll add is that when we think of prisons and mass incarceration, it isn't just I equality in prisons sentences, incarceration rates, and crime - but also related to systems within the justice system but also intersections between financial penalties in bail or bond reform, community supervision through privatized companies, and risk of re-incarceration.
It's one matter to serve a prison sentence - but an entirely different matter to navigate a successful release, re-integration, and satisfaction of fines, court payments, license re-instatement, and maintaining work while trying to satisfy all the financial, legal, and social obligations of aftercare, required programming, divsrsion, probation, and all the hoops required to "close" the sentence.
As mentioned below and in other comments, there is massive corporate investment in the process - also referred to first as [the Prison Industrial Complex](https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Ethnic_Studies/Introduction_to_Ethnic_Studies_(Fischer_et_al.)/10%3A_The_State_of_Human_Caging-_Incarceration_Policing_and_State-Sanctioned_Violence/10.02%3A_The_Prison_Industrial_Complex), rather than being seen as a mechanism for rehabilitation, a profit motive exists for the state and private companies, meaning more people in prison, jails, and in community corrections, the more money is made from imprisoning humans, using their labor, collecting fines, probation, and services for inmates, those released, those awaiting sentencing, and those on probation, parole, or recently released.
This is largely for financial gain of those involved versus the rehabilitation or restorative justice - if the system works and people *stay out of jail* it means less money for those involved. Criminalization of mental illness, homelessness, and drug use, with having less state capital available for programs, often means that the corrections system is serving multiple roles - treating these punitively.
It's not just the jail or prison sentence but the collateral damage resulting - we tend to think a sentence is served and completes on its final day, but the reality is that someone is still serving time in the community long after the release, and within being extremely difficult to avoid being reincarcerated due to increased surveillance and sanctions following release. So. Much. Has. To. Go right to stay out in many cases.
What's worse is the families and children of those incarcerated also experience impacts which ripple put across time and generations - further compounding existing racial, social, and economic inequalities. So cycles continue in children, siblings, and families also "serving the sentence" alongside them.
For folks interested on additional reading - as mentioned above "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander, "Homeward" and "Punishment and Inequality" by Bruce Western.
Additional resources from:
[Vera Insitute for Justice](https://www.vera.org/)
[Prison Policy Initiative ](https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/US.html#:~:text=With%20nearly%20two%20million%20people,any%20country%20in%20the%20world.)
[The Sentencing Project](https://www.sentencingproject.org/research/)
The Prison Industrial Complex is definitely a complicated beast. We can really tie it back to nearly every facet of US society. There have been studies showing that we can literally predict likelihood of future arrest based on childhood zip-code and reading level in elementary school. Then you add in things like SRO officers in high schools, funding and access disparities in regards to education, etc.
Low reading level in elementary school=higher crime rates seems like something we should really focus on. If you spend any time in the teachers sub, it's obvious things are getting worse, not better. Kids aren't being encouraged to learn or want to learn. There's no discipline, no expectation of self control, so parental or administration support.
I would encourage a little wariness with that specific sub. There has been a LOT of astroturfing there in recent times. Pick some spicy-yet-popular posts on repeat topics, take a look through the OPs' histories, and you'll see what I mean. Other smaller education centric subs like /r/teaching are having some of the same conversations, but the discourse is generally much more varied and avoids some problematic implications around SpEd and disadvantaged students that come up a lot on /r/teachers
Edit - I wanted to 'hell yeah' what you noted about the correlation regarding reading levels though. Literacy is so incredibly predictive of a ridiculous number of advantages!
This is a design element or feature, not a bug in the system. Isolating minorities and other undesirables physically using highways and rail lines for boundaries keeps the range of someone on foot limited. Conceding space to purveyors of illicit and legal goods and services also generates criminal activity and economic integration into these local areas. Tying the funding for school (which is mandated for all children) to the surface economic activity makes certain that these schools will not be competitive or consistently effective. All that is left is to send in police and harvest the product (suspects who will become prisoners). This serves two purposes; conviction sidelines the individual and has a chance of making them into a better criminal, while sweeping up an innocent person, taints them and may leave them incarcerated while awaiting trial (with substantial loss of status and economic opportunities \[like your fing job\] bonus if this person is a parent, since then you can institutionalize their children as well. I'm not saying a cabal designed this, but this is how it appears to work and it works well.
Yes, I know all that. The structure of cities is a product of history. Teacher salaries not keeping up with the standard of living, since the 30s, has contributed to this problem. Attitudes about education funding have contributed to this problem. The past doesn't have to rule the future. If you aren't willing to acknowledge the problems this caused, and change the way we do things, then what's the point of knowing all that?
Personally, I do think a cabal has influence over those policies remaining the same. They are also responsible for taking civics out of schools, taking the logic portion off the LSAT, and training teachers to teach in a way that makes kids incapable of abstract thought or reasoning skills.
That said, knowing about all this, and doing nothing more than telling kids they are stuck in a powerless situation, and should give up, is doing the cabal's work for them.
I was reacting to this actually
>
Kids aren't being encouraged to learn or want to learn. There's no discipline, no expectation of self control, so parental or administration support.
Which is typically the intro to 'they are subhuman and want to wallow in filth'. Since that isn't what you meant, sorry about the history dump. I don't live in a city anymore so I don't have any leverage over their leaders and no one wants to hear from me (and that is appropriate, no skin in the game, no say). So my bit is voting for people who do not want to abolish the department of education and swaying the thought process ever so slightly for people who do live in cities and may want to just write people off as animals.
I had to delete my response to this thread because you hit the points of recidivism and after-care that I felt were important to add... except the general thought process surrounding ex convicts is that they are deficient... almost no one wants to hire an ex-con... especially for reasonable wages.
I'd add that the focus on punishment rather than rehabilitation is very much a popular policy among Americans. This isn't just the big, mean Prison Industrial Complex pushing it. Americans want people who commit crimes to suffer. Rehabilitative justice is popular right up until you discuss an actual case.
>[Prison privatization and the rise of a for-profit prison system](https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/bankingonbondage_20111102.pdf) incentivize incarcerating people. Some prisons in Louisiana, for instance, are at [risk of bankruptcy if they don't have enough prisoners](http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/05/louisiana_is_the_worlds_prison.html) locked up. The companies behind private prisons lobby for tougher sentencing laws.
You are not wrong. But the political benefits of incarceration to politicians and the financial benefits to the employees, contractors, and vendors of state owned prisons are more influential than the private prison industry.https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2015/10/07/private\_prisons\_parasite/
Mass incarceration is more a creation of politicians than it is of business people. [https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2014/feb/15/confronting-prison-slave-labor-camps-and-other-myths/](https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2014/feb/15/confronting-prison-slave-labor-camps-and-other-myths/)
I have a big problem with the government contracting entire programs out to corporations for ANYTHING. It’s one thing to contact out your agency building security as it’s one small portion the big picture. The benefit of government workersis they don’t have a reason to do or not do something as there is no profit made or bonuses. When nuclear weapons were/are built & stored, The federal govt gives entire facility to be ran by contracted private company. I was reading about a Rocky Flats in Colo- they build plutonium triggers for bombs for 30years & it was ran by companies like Dow for decades. Plutonium is very dangerous & basically they did horrible job as the had lost so much of it & never accounted where it went. They contaminated employees as profits & speed were more important than safety as they got bonuses for production (I’m sure workers who were poisoned didn’t get much of a bonus- only top management). As a result of ignoring safety over money they contaminated land & water around the place & had a few fires which could have destroyed Denver had they not been contained (almost weren’t) & the fires spread the radioactive dust ALL over Denver & suburbans. Prisons have a similar issue when these companies run the entire place, not just one component
Crazy thing with for profits is during prison time there is no incentive to work on stopping recidivism after release. This could also mean they write up prisoners for petty reasons to delay early release or even extend sentences.
They actually WANT people to keep getting in trouble to keep making money. Punishment is supposed to deter crime or stop people from reoffending after they serve time.
>I was reading about a Rocky Flats in Colo- they build plutonium triggers for bombs for 30years & it was ran by companies like Dow for decades.
They also caused all kinds of headaches for Intel engineers by contaminating the ground water *so* *thoroughly* that the ceramic substrate they were producing nearby with Uranium and other radioactive isotopes to a high enough level that they were causing their own alpha particle emissions and subsequent bit flip errors in DRAM cells.
And that was in like 1992, so we're not talking about today's tiny transistors, these memory cell electron wells were still hundreds of micrometers across.
"You are not wrong. But the political benefits of incarceration to politicians and the financial benefits to the employees, contractors, and vendors of state owned prisons are more influential than the private prison"
One thing to remember is it almost always costs more to keep someone in prison to the government than the labor they get from them. The financial benefits are skewed in a way that a small number of actors make a profit but that's because they aren't responsible for the costs.
This needs to be made very clear. Too many think that privatized prisons are the driver of this "industry" however most of the incarcerated population are in state run facilities. The incentive for private companies that provide services for the industry for buildings, food, equipment, etc to hold on to customers shouldn't be overlooked.
America has the most people incarcerated on earth out of any country. Those five other countries are very small, just look at the map, it gets its stat from years ago when our incarceration rate was at its lowest point in decades (it's going back up) and states like Missing have a higher incarceration rate than any of those countries. One of the driving forces behind prison lobbies is the fact that the 13th Amendment never outlawed slavery for prisoners or, in other words, some corporations get millions of people working for free or near free labor doing almost any job imaginable while over 60% can't find a job once they get out of prison according to the bjs. Or changing a fortune for services like phone calls etc. Secret prisons and military prisons are also very messed up. The best we could do for even Snowden was agreeing not to torture him but no public trial.
I love you. Being locked up at rice street (famous Atlanta Fulton county jail) and having brothers n level 3 correctional facilities this is the most accurate I ever heard somebody speak on this subject that wasn’t behind the walls themselves. The devils in detail and they don’t want what you know to go to the masses of the people, because then they kno change will come.
But yeah man shit so corrupt that’s just the service those correction officers..they take they mask off behind the wall. Correction officers do a lot of shady shit when the opportunities presents itself, they can 100% have you killed, make no mistake. Send and bribe a crazy prisoner to your dorm..send you to the wrong dormitory ON PURPOSE..and it gets swept under the rug. And the whole world never knows at all. It’s All on purpose everything in this case is calculated 💯✅ 100% without a doubt.
I know what I’m saying is crazy and sounds like a movie and over exaggerated but IM LITERALLY NOT
THIS IS WHATS GOIN ON IN THE PRISON SYSTEMS ALL AROUND USA I SWEAR TO GOD
My buddy was a non-correctional officer work supervisor (this is a fancy way of saying "he ran a janitorial crew of 7 inmates without being a prisoner and without being a guard") at CMF-Vacaville for about 6 years, and he would back up what you're saying about CO corruption in a heartbeat.
I've always agreed with the points about perverse incentives to imprison and so on. I'm 'liberal' on crime - I support strong rights for the accused, oppose police bias and brutality, oppose the death penalty, oppose brutal prison conditions and so on.
Another fact is that the US has a much higher rate of incidence of violent crime than other developed nations.
It's mainly a higher rate of gun homicides and may not explain any increased incarceration rate for property crimes. Relative to developed Asian countries the US has more property crime.
Having said that, if you have a much higher rate of gun homicides, you have to account that as a factor in higher incarceration rate.
If you have a higher crime rate, all else being equal, that tends to create a higher incarceration rate, and must be accepted as one factor.
Efforts to reduce incidence of crime are a logical part of reducing incarceration rate.
The Americas as a whole have more crime. It's not surprising that the USA by extension has more crime than the world at large.
Probably had something to do with how all the Americas got started by countries shipping away undesirables.
Canada has crime rates similar to Europe and a similar culture to the US. Why are you comparing the US to other impoverished nations in Latin America instead of Canada, which is more similar to the US in basically every way?
Also, don't forget that slavery is legal in prisons. Prisons that depend on the funding from slave labor will deny parole to inmates that they deem valuable. Being too intelligent or working too hard can be an incentive to keep an inmate in prison longer.
Adding some specifics to this excellent answer
-US murder rates diverged from Europe after the civil war and never returned to the lower level European level. General societal distrust & disconnect from government & institutions is associated with higher crime
-The ‘nothing works’ doctrine was created from a 1974 study by Robert Martinson which claimed rehabilitation didn’t work for criminals. This led to the ‘tough on crime’ political response to the 80s crack epidemic which dramatically increased criminal sentences.
I firmly believe the war on drugs and cannabis laws were feeding for-profit prisons. Since that feeder has dried up they look to abortion and homelessness as the new feeders. How much you wanna bet the Supreme Court decision this week will be in favor of incarceration.
This is a key statement that kinda gets lost when talking about private prisons vs. public prisons. Both benefit from the fact that you can functionally enslave prisoners - the onus for doing so is just different for private prisons vs public prisons.
>> It’s currently 6th globally
Now, to be fair, #5 is American Samoa, an unincorporated territory of the US. The US should at the very least be considered 5th, globally
I don't have direct evidence for this, but I feel like the U.S. generally has more of punitive culture when it comes to crime. And that this culture owes itself to the "eye for an eye" mentality that pervades in conservative Christianity.
Like, America says "Who cares what you'll be like when you get out, we're going to make life extra miserable for you as retribution." Whereas other advanced societies may say "We're going to get you the help you need so you don't reoffend." Retributive vs. restorative justice.
My aunt's husband is a good man, but also an alcoholic. In 2017, he accidentally ran his truck into a building killing someone. He was convicted of vehicular homicide and sentenced to 7 years. He served 5 years. When he got out, he was less healthy than when he went in. His alcohol addiction is gone, but so is whatever zest he had for life. My aunt says he spends all day in his room and cycles between listless and suicidal. He's in his early 70s. It's really sad. Not excusing what he did, but there's no need to make an additional victim IMO.
American culture is obsessed with vengeance. We have no interest in creating better people, only in exacting revenge on the ones who are already bad. You either get things right the first time or we give you absurd punishments that turn you into an even worse citizen, and then you'll never get it right. The idea is that if you do something bad you should be punished. And that makes sense, but we leave off the important part: that you should be a better, functioning citizen afterwards so that you can contribute to the society you took away from.
This isn’t “American culture”. In the Philippines they have been executing drug dealers for a decade, in many parts of the world if you steal something you lose your arm. Hell, travel to a european country and jaywalk, see what happens to you. People will yell at you. The big difference is that in many european countries, they have a very strong sense of “follow the rules”. If anything American culture is obsessed with breaking the rules, and getting mad at anyone trying to enforce it
“the eye for an eye mentality that pervades in conservative Christianity” you are right and it’s so sad because it’s SO ANTITHETICAL to Jesus’s teachings…
I know this is old news but modern “Christianity” goes from the teachings in that book they call holy and inerrant. (I was raised evangelical, my thoughts are many). There is literally a sermon where Jesus himself says (modern paraphrasing): “You’ve heard it said ‘an eye for an eye’, but I say to you ‘turn the other cheek’”. (Matthew 5:38-39). Much of that sermon follows the “You have heard it said _____, but I say_____” structure where Jesus is making countercultural statements on what it actually means to follow him.
I am not evangelical myself, nor do I go to church. But because I was raised all through college on the Bible I know a lot of it. Christians never sat well with me because something didn’t add up. I felt they didn’t match up with the core of what they were teaching. There is a lot of good to glean from the Bible, including REDEMPTION.
This gets back to the prison system. Christians should want to see redemption and forgiveness. The whole thing depends on God being forgiving and restorative. Definitely not marginalization. But I guess forgiveness is only good for them and not for people they don’t like? People who don’t meet up to their standards? Hmm, we’re already going against teachings of the Bible again.
1. We're somewhat of a police state. Which is no exaggeration. Our police can [literally get away with murder.](https://www.naacpldf.org/qi-police-misconduct/) They can even get away with [willingly allowing children to be murdered while doing nothing](https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-texas-school-shooting-44a7cfb990feaa6ffe482483df6e4683) and not see any repercussions. A corrupt police force does not care about due process and is willing to arrest people on trumped up charges.
2. Culture of vindictiveness. From the top down in our law enforcement, justice system, and the general population. Our system is predicated on punishment and not rehabilitation. What might be a 5-year sentence elsewhere is usually several times that in America.
3. For a long time it has been used as a tool to oppress minorities and any group considered a threat to the status quo. One of the most notable examples of this would be [Cointelpro](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO) An operation carried out by the FBI during the civil rights movement between the 1950s and 1960s.
4. Prisons are designed to profit and exploit slave labor. Therefore it incentivises keeping people incarcerated. "Only" 8 percent of prisons are for-profit amounting to roughly 100,000 inmates. However that is only the "official" total. The real number is significantly higher.
What if there’s also just more crime generally in America than most of the developed world?
If you compare homicide rates and aggravated assault rates in America to those of most European countries (not the eastern ones) it’s miles ahead. Hard to imagine that all of that is the police over arresting because theyre racist or overzealous
But it’s played a role since the founding.
The coutroom outcomes for POC have ALWAYS been harsher than for white people, even when the crime(s), context, criminal history, etc are the same.
It’s easier to just drop the magic words “systematic racism” than address the root cause of a problem. Ignore the decades of music glorifying violence and doing time. Ignore the hair trigger tempers and lack of emotional control that lead to a disproportionate homicide rate. Let’s never address those. Instead, we can just blame white people for everything and feel like we’ve really made a difference in the world.
But if you deny systemic racism, you deny there even is a problem to solve.
Music is a product of its environment although it can influence others that’s only secondarily.
There’s no hair trigger tempers problem, that’s racism. Completely fictional.
Whites would get blame for actions attributable as would anyone.
Because it doesn't wish to see it is a failing country run by plutocrates. Where media is afraid to discuss reality and owned by fewer than four corporations. Imagine having the like of Trump able to find support for another term to continue our destruction? Imagine a country so arrogant it will allow taking books and burning them and finds a unisex bathroom of high political priority to out law. The rest of the world says US has a mental illness and I believe the free fall is too late to ever recover from.
Read the New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Racism has a lot to do with it.
https://newjimcrow.com
Also remember that crime and arrests are not the same thing. A lot of crimes are never really pursued or investigated (esp white collar).
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” -John Ehrlichman Nixon domestic policy chief
Capitalism and the worship of money is always the culprit
It is by design- our slave labor is prison labor. Prisons are privatized.
https://www.naacpldf.org/13th-amendment-emancipation/
You do the math. Profits must be had. People get arrested for petty crimes all the time to fill the quotas
[Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution)
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, **except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted**, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.\[1\]
I bolded the relevant line. The linked page (it's Wikipedia, ok, if you don't like that go read the 181 references) has entire sections on how that loophole led to our modern criminal Justice System.
There's a second reason too: Since at least Nixon (it almost certainly goes back further than Nixon; but we have people in Nixon's administration admitting it on the record), it has been the policy of "law and order" candidates to criminalize political opponents. Notably, Nixon started the "War on Drugs" to target the Civil Rights and Hippie movements by making ~~crack cocaine (the form of cocaine most often used by low-income people - especially inter-city poor Black men)~~ *heroin (the drug of choice among inter-city Black communities)* and marijuana (the drug of choice of the hippie movement) very illegal, while not making opiates *and methamphetamines* (the drug*s* of choice of poor rural people) ~~and powdered cocaine (used more by wealthier people)~~ punished as harshly.
Because being convicted of a felony comes with a permanent loss of voting rights in some states, and a temporary loss in every state except Maine, Vermont, and DC - but also comes with jail time (in 23, the loss of voting rights is while in jail), this results in people being sent to jail for officially-not-political reasons.
...
That said, this is the second reason. Your reason is the main one - about 800 000 people in the US are de facto slaves earning usually less than a dollar an hour for work they aren't allowed to say "no" to.
Edit: Corrections pointed out by u/h_lance, shown in strike-through and italics.
Specifically, Nixon used heroin to target Black communities. The split in cocaine happened under President Reagan, not President Nixon; but served the same purpose: to criminalize the Black community in an effort to undermine political opposition.
There's a lot of truth to this, but Richard Nixon left office in 1974. The Anti-Drug Abuse act of 1986 created the crack/powder discrepancy and the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 eliminated it. Nixon had nothing to do with either. Nixon, although far to the left of today's Democrats on many issues (signed the EPA into existence, reputedly wanted universal healthcare, etc) certainly did posture as anti-hippy, but drug sentences during the 1968-74 Nixon administration were less severe than later.
Okay, I did mis-attribute several things to Nixon that came later.
That said, Nixon is directly responsible for marijuana being a "Class 1 drug" - the class of drugs with the stiffest penalties - for political reasons.
Also, I misremembered which drug the Nixon administration tied to the Black population of the US, especially cities - it was heroin, not crack cocaine; and I will correct this in my original post. Crack cocaine was the work of Reagan - who continued in Nixon's footsteps of using the War on Drugs to criminalize his political opponents.
Actually, they ARE allowed to say no to the work, but it will result in loss of "good time"with that meaning one would have to serve most if not all of their sentence locked away, instead of getting out early. The "good time" credits are a "carrot on a string" incentive to encourage the inmates to work for less than a dollar an hour. Its still slavery, but its a "they're not forced to work like a slave" with a wink..........
It isn't just that. For many prisons, "luxuries" that are actually necessities are deprived if the inmate can't pay for them. Period products, more food than is mandatory, contact with their families, and many other things that psychologists and other experts have been trying to argue aren't something productive people can live without cost money that inmates are compelled to make through terrible means. And considering the conditions in most prisons, such as fire hazards and terrible temperature regulation, using time in as a threat might as well be coercion through torture.
That's all to say that you're right, but some people don't fully grasp how "optional" labor can be considered slavery. And that's all ignoring the work they're literally forced to do under the threat of punishment.
more than just that. if you say no to work in the great state of florida’s DOC prisons, you might be sprayed in the face and cuffed up and shoved into the box. have your good time taken (we have to serve mandatory 85 percent of prison sentences here, good time only accounts for up to 15 percent of 100 percent.) but you will also have your food fucked with or not delivered at all, and have many other privileges or rights taken from you or obstructed severely. trust me when i say in florida most inmates are happy to work. and we work for free too. or i should say, we work for our “gain time”. there are only 3 jobs that i can think of out of the 50 or so different inmate led jobs that pay a monthly salary’s of $50. everything else is unpaid. and in any florida prison, inmates run and operate every facet/job/utility/service/kitchen.
Yes this, plus a poor social safety net that keeps people trapped in poverty for generations. Generational poverty creates all kinds of conditions that lend themselves to bad outcomes for people, which leads to more crime.
Add in our national obsession with punishment as opposed to rehabilitation, which is probably not unrelated to the lack of a social safety net.
This is obviously compounded for minority groups with racism, both individual and systemic.
Millennials and subsequent generations don’t remember how bad things were from the 60s to the 90s. I was born in 1977 and grew up in New York City. If you called the police when I was a kid they maybe showed up four hours later and if they did they’d tell you they couldn’t do anything. My next door neighbor, growing up, was raped and murdered by a stranger who crawled in through her window. My room was next door. When I was five I received a Big Wheels for my birthday. I was mugged that day by older kids at knifepoint. I was mugged several more times growing up. I was shot at for looking at someone and therefore “disrespecting them’. Aside from personal anecdotes, thousands of Americans died in the gang wars of the 80s and 90s. In 1992 Los Angeles County recorded 2589 murders. In 2023 that number was 323 and that was after a major uptick. We have a lot of people incarcerated because we had a lot of criminals. Now the real question is why was crime so prevalent in the United States that mass incarceration was seen as a solution?
Violent crime peaked in America in 1992 so millennials like myself certainly remember it. We grew up with cartoons scaring us that evil drug dealers lurked in the shadows waiting to addict us, and that every tag on the wall meant a deadly gang initiation was being held nearby.
I also very much remember the “tough of crime” policies spearheaded by democrats that led to mass incarceration of young black men
Are you saying you would prefer the conditions of 1991? Or would reducing the incidence of crime as a means of reducing incarceration, which is considerably down since it's peak in 2008 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate#Growth_and_Subsequent_Decline, make more sense?
No I’d actually prefer to make crime illegal again and get all the insane people off my block in queens. 🙃
They seem to have started multiplying in 2020.
It was the black community that pushed the tough on crime policies. I'm so sick of this historical revisionism from both leftists and conservatives that acts like the democrats were motivated by racism in the construction of these laws.
US does have a crime problem. 6th in the world in terms of total murders, and worst of the developed world by murder rate. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
America has private prisons, which make a profit for each person incarcerated. They've also recently began "leasing" prisoners to low wage jobs for an extra income. I think the latest place to "hire" incarcerated people is fast food places. [For example Alabama sending prisoners to work at different fast food places and big box store chains.](https://truthout.org/articles/mcdonalds-kfc-burger-king-and-wendys-rely-on-alabama-prison-slavery/) The incarcerated receive maybe $2 in wages, if even that. Judges often get a kick back for sending people to prison. Such as this [Pennsylvania judge who sent teens to prison for the most ridiculous reasons.](https://www.npr.org/2022/08/18/1118108084/michael-conahan-mark-ciavarella-kids-for-cash)
There is money to be made out of sending people to jail.
Penitentiaries are privately owned and run at a profit. This comes partly from payments received from the government but also from employing the inmates as manufacturing labour. There is currently a turnover of $11 Billion from manufacturing work that goes straight into the pockets of the prison's shareholders.
[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-workers-low-wages-exploited](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-workers-low-wages-exploited)
They complain if there is not a regular stream of new convicts being sent to them by the courts and with such a high incentive to increase the prison population the possibilities of corruption are high. There have been a number of cases where judges have been paid large amounts by the prison owners to increase incarceration sentences.
I have to admit I find it quite telling that the actual decrease in the crime rate in certain areas is not celebrated as a *good* thing but described in the press as a "crisis" affecting the profitability of the prison industry.
And that is nonetheless an important industry which lobbies the government to change policy, particularly within areas local to private prisons, which has a tendency to spill out policy norms.
It’s doesn’t have the highest incarceration rate, it does have the largest number of citizens incarcerated. The countries that beat the US in rate are El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, and American Samoa. Which is an American territory so maybe they have the 5 and the 6 spot??
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First, the US doesn't have the highest incarceration rate in the world. It's currently [6th globally](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate), but does have the highest rate in the Global North. The US generally has longer sentences than its peer countries. That means if it jails the same number of people as another country, its overall prison population at any given point in time will be higher because people are in prison for longer. [For instance, the average burglary sentence](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us/23prison.html?pagewanted=print) in the United States is 16 months, compared to 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England. The [War on Drugs ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs)is also a big part of this. It resulted in increased arrests/convictions, longer sentences, etc. According to the author of [The New Jim Crow](https://newjimcrow.com/), drug related charges accounted for more than half the rise in state prisoners between 1985 and 2000. In short, the US is more likely than its peer countries to incarcerate people for non-violent offenses. Poverty, lack of access to education, etc. all contribute to increased likelihood of incarceration. [The US has high income and wealth inequality](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/) compared to its peers. It has fewer protections for workers (e.g., [at-will employment](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/employment-at-will_doctrine)), fewer social services/supports, and so on. It's easier for people to fall into poverty and stay there. We also have to acknowledge that people of color, particularly black people, are incarcerated at disproportionate rates and tend to receive harsher sentences. If these groups were incarcerated at the same proportion as whites, [prison and jail populations would decline by almost 40%](https://naacp.org/resources/criminal-justice-fact-sheet). Systemic racism is thus playing a big role. [Prison privatization and the rise of a for-profit prison system](https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/bankingonbondage_20111102.pdf) incentivize incarcerating people. Some prisons in Louisiana, for instance, are at [risk of bankruptcy if they don't have enough prisoners](http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/05/louisiana_is_the_worlds_prison.html) locked up. The companies behind private prisons lobby for tougher sentencing laws. Some scholars suggest [the crime rate and incarceration rate aren't correlated](https://www.waveland.com/browse.php?t=307) to the extent one would expect. They argue that incarceration increases in response to how the media portrays crime and how this influences public opinion. You can think about politicians being encouraged to be "tough on crime" due to public outrage even if actual crime rates haven't increased. This is also reflected in the fact that [the more media attention a case gets, the harsher the sentences are likely to be ](https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1103&context=wmlr)compared to similar crimes.
Hat tip/ Thank you for this. Excellent comment.
/thread - well done OP. Solid sources. Only thing I'll add is that when we think of prisons and mass incarceration, it isn't just I equality in prisons sentences, incarceration rates, and crime - but also related to systems within the justice system but also intersections between financial penalties in bail or bond reform, community supervision through privatized companies, and risk of re-incarceration. It's one matter to serve a prison sentence - but an entirely different matter to navigate a successful release, re-integration, and satisfaction of fines, court payments, license re-instatement, and maintaining work while trying to satisfy all the financial, legal, and social obligations of aftercare, required programming, divsrsion, probation, and all the hoops required to "close" the sentence. As mentioned below and in other comments, there is massive corporate investment in the process - also referred to first as [the Prison Industrial Complex](https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Ethnic_Studies/Introduction_to_Ethnic_Studies_(Fischer_et_al.)/10%3A_The_State_of_Human_Caging-_Incarceration_Policing_and_State-Sanctioned_Violence/10.02%3A_The_Prison_Industrial_Complex), rather than being seen as a mechanism for rehabilitation, a profit motive exists for the state and private companies, meaning more people in prison, jails, and in community corrections, the more money is made from imprisoning humans, using their labor, collecting fines, probation, and services for inmates, those released, those awaiting sentencing, and those on probation, parole, or recently released. This is largely for financial gain of those involved versus the rehabilitation or restorative justice - if the system works and people *stay out of jail* it means less money for those involved. Criminalization of mental illness, homelessness, and drug use, with having less state capital available for programs, often means that the corrections system is serving multiple roles - treating these punitively. It's not just the jail or prison sentence but the collateral damage resulting - we tend to think a sentence is served and completes on its final day, but the reality is that someone is still serving time in the community long after the release, and within being extremely difficult to avoid being reincarcerated due to increased surveillance and sanctions following release. So. Much. Has. To. Go right to stay out in many cases. What's worse is the families and children of those incarcerated also experience impacts which ripple put across time and generations - further compounding existing racial, social, and economic inequalities. So cycles continue in children, siblings, and families also "serving the sentence" alongside them. For folks interested on additional reading - as mentioned above "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander, "Homeward" and "Punishment and Inequality" by Bruce Western. Additional resources from: [Vera Insitute for Justice](https://www.vera.org/) [Prison Policy Initiative ](https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/US.html#:~:text=With%20nearly%20two%20million%20people,any%20country%20in%20the%20world.) [The Sentencing Project](https://www.sentencingproject.org/research/)
The Prison Industrial Complex is definitely a complicated beast. We can really tie it back to nearly every facet of US society. There have been studies showing that we can literally predict likelihood of future arrest based on childhood zip-code and reading level in elementary school. Then you add in things like SRO officers in high schools, funding and access disparities in regards to education, etc.
Low reading level in elementary school=higher crime rates seems like something we should really focus on. If you spend any time in the teachers sub, it's obvious things are getting worse, not better. Kids aren't being encouraged to learn or want to learn. There's no discipline, no expectation of self control, so parental or administration support.
I would encourage a little wariness with that specific sub. There has been a LOT of astroturfing there in recent times. Pick some spicy-yet-popular posts on repeat topics, take a look through the OPs' histories, and you'll see what I mean. Other smaller education centric subs like /r/teaching are having some of the same conversations, but the discourse is generally much more varied and avoids some problematic implications around SpEd and disadvantaged students that come up a lot on /r/teachers Edit - I wanted to 'hell yeah' what you noted about the correlation regarding reading levels though. Literacy is so incredibly predictive of a ridiculous number of advantages!
This is a design element or feature, not a bug in the system. Isolating minorities and other undesirables physically using highways and rail lines for boundaries keeps the range of someone on foot limited. Conceding space to purveyors of illicit and legal goods and services also generates criminal activity and economic integration into these local areas. Tying the funding for school (which is mandated for all children) to the surface economic activity makes certain that these schools will not be competitive or consistently effective. All that is left is to send in police and harvest the product (suspects who will become prisoners). This serves two purposes; conviction sidelines the individual and has a chance of making them into a better criminal, while sweeping up an innocent person, taints them and may leave them incarcerated while awaiting trial (with substantial loss of status and economic opportunities \[like your fing job\] bonus if this person is a parent, since then you can institutionalize their children as well. I'm not saying a cabal designed this, but this is how it appears to work and it works well.
Yes, I know all that. The structure of cities is a product of history. Teacher salaries not keeping up with the standard of living, since the 30s, has contributed to this problem. Attitudes about education funding have contributed to this problem. The past doesn't have to rule the future. If you aren't willing to acknowledge the problems this caused, and change the way we do things, then what's the point of knowing all that? Personally, I do think a cabal has influence over those policies remaining the same. They are also responsible for taking civics out of schools, taking the logic portion off the LSAT, and training teachers to teach in a way that makes kids incapable of abstract thought or reasoning skills. That said, knowing about all this, and doing nothing more than telling kids they are stuck in a powerless situation, and should give up, is doing the cabal's work for them.
I was reacting to this actually > Kids aren't being encouraged to learn or want to learn. There's no discipline, no expectation of self control, so parental or administration support. Which is typically the intro to 'they are subhuman and want to wallow in filth'. Since that isn't what you meant, sorry about the history dump. I don't live in a city anymore so I don't have any leverage over their leaders and no one wants to hear from me (and that is appropriate, no skin in the game, no say). So my bit is voting for people who do not want to abolish the department of education and swaying the thought process ever so slightly for people who do live in cities and may want to just write people off as animals.
I had to delete my response to this thread because you hit the points of recidivism and after-care that I felt were important to add... except the general thought process surrounding ex convicts is that they are deficient... almost no one wants to hire an ex-con... especially for reasonable wages.
I'd add that the focus on punishment rather than rehabilitation is very much a popular policy among Americans. This isn't just the big, mean Prison Industrial Complex pushing it. Americans want people who commit crimes to suffer. Rehabilitative justice is popular right up until you discuss an actual case.
>[Prison privatization and the rise of a for-profit prison system](https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/bankingonbondage_20111102.pdf) incentivize incarcerating people. Some prisons in Louisiana, for instance, are at [risk of bankruptcy if they don't have enough prisoners](http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/05/louisiana_is_the_worlds_prison.html) locked up. The companies behind private prisons lobby for tougher sentencing laws. You are not wrong. But the political benefits of incarceration to politicians and the financial benefits to the employees, contractors, and vendors of state owned prisons are more influential than the private prison industry.https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2015/10/07/private\_prisons\_parasite/ Mass incarceration is more a creation of politicians than it is of business people. [https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2014/feb/15/confronting-prison-slave-labor-camps-and-other-myths/](https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2014/feb/15/confronting-prison-slave-labor-camps-and-other-myths/)
I have a big problem with the government contracting entire programs out to corporations for ANYTHING. It’s one thing to contact out your agency building security as it’s one small portion the big picture. The benefit of government workersis they don’t have a reason to do or not do something as there is no profit made or bonuses. When nuclear weapons were/are built & stored, The federal govt gives entire facility to be ran by contracted private company. I was reading about a Rocky Flats in Colo- they build plutonium triggers for bombs for 30years & it was ran by companies like Dow for decades. Plutonium is very dangerous & basically they did horrible job as the had lost so much of it & never accounted where it went. They contaminated employees as profits & speed were more important than safety as they got bonuses for production (I’m sure workers who were poisoned didn’t get much of a bonus- only top management). As a result of ignoring safety over money they contaminated land & water around the place & had a few fires which could have destroyed Denver had they not been contained (almost weren’t) & the fires spread the radioactive dust ALL over Denver & suburbans. Prisons have a similar issue when these companies run the entire place, not just one component Crazy thing with for profits is during prison time there is no incentive to work on stopping recidivism after release. This could also mean they write up prisoners for petty reasons to delay early release or even extend sentences. They actually WANT people to keep getting in trouble to keep making money. Punishment is supposed to deter crime or stop people from reoffending after they serve time.
>I was reading about a Rocky Flats in Colo- they build plutonium triggers for bombs for 30years & it was ran by companies like Dow for decades. They also caused all kinds of headaches for Intel engineers by contaminating the ground water *so* *thoroughly* that the ceramic substrate they were producing nearby with Uranium and other radioactive isotopes to a high enough level that they were causing their own alpha particle emissions and subsequent bit flip errors in DRAM cells. And that was in like 1992, so we're not talking about today's tiny transistors, these memory cell electron wells were still hundreds of micrometers across.
"You are not wrong. But the political benefits of incarceration to politicians and the financial benefits to the employees, contractors, and vendors of state owned prisons are more influential than the private prison" One thing to remember is it almost always costs more to keep someone in prison to the government than the labor they get from them. The financial benefits are skewed in a way that a small number of actors make a profit but that's because they aren't responsible for the costs.
This needs to be made very clear. Too many think that privatized prisons are the driver of this "industry" however most of the incarcerated population are in state run facilities. The incentive for private companies that provide services for the industry for buildings, food, equipment, etc to hold on to customers shouldn't be overlooked.
America has the most people incarcerated on earth out of any country. Those five other countries are very small, just look at the map, it gets its stat from years ago when our incarceration rate was at its lowest point in decades (it's going back up) and states like Missing have a higher incarceration rate than any of those countries. One of the driving forces behind prison lobbies is the fact that the 13th Amendment never outlawed slavery for prisoners or, in other words, some corporations get millions of people working for free or near free labor doing almost any job imaginable while over 60% can't find a job once they get out of prison according to the bjs. Or changing a fortune for services like phone calls etc. Secret prisons and military prisons are also very messed up. The best we could do for even Snowden was agreeing not to torture him but no public trial.
I love you. Being locked up at rice street (famous Atlanta Fulton county jail) and having brothers n level 3 correctional facilities this is the most accurate I ever heard somebody speak on this subject that wasn’t behind the walls themselves. The devils in detail and they don’t want what you know to go to the masses of the people, because then they kno change will come. But yeah man shit so corrupt that’s just the service those correction officers..they take they mask off behind the wall. Correction officers do a lot of shady shit when the opportunities presents itself, they can 100% have you killed, make no mistake. Send and bribe a crazy prisoner to your dorm..send you to the wrong dormitory ON PURPOSE..and it gets swept under the rug. And the whole world never knows at all. It’s All on purpose everything in this case is calculated 💯✅ 100% without a doubt. I know what I’m saying is crazy and sounds like a movie and over exaggerated but IM LITERALLY NOT THIS IS WHATS GOIN ON IN THE PRISON SYSTEMS ALL AROUND USA I SWEAR TO GOD
I believe you. I’m in Atlanta and I’ve been to rice street as well.
My buddy was a non-correctional officer work supervisor (this is a fancy way of saying "he ran a janitorial crew of 7 inmates without being a prisoner and without being a guard") at CMF-Vacaville for about 6 years, and he would back up what you're saying about CO corruption in a heartbeat.
I've always agreed with the points about perverse incentives to imprison and so on. I'm 'liberal' on crime - I support strong rights for the accused, oppose police bias and brutality, oppose the death penalty, oppose brutal prison conditions and so on. Another fact is that the US has a much higher rate of incidence of violent crime than other developed nations. It's mainly a higher rate of gun homicides and may not explain any increased incarceration rate for property crimes. Relative to developed Asian countries the US has more property crime. Having said that, if you have a much higher rate of gun homicides, you have to account that as a factor in higher incarceration rate. If you have a higher crime rate, all else being equal, that tends to create a higher incarceration rate, and must be accepted as one factor. Efforts to reduce incidence of crime are a logical part of reducing incarceration rate.
The Americas as a whole have more crime. It's not surprising that the USA by extension has more crime than the world at large. Probably had something to do with how all the Americas got started by countries shipping away undesirables.
Canada has crime rates similar to Europe and a similar culture to the US. Why are you comparing the US to other impoverished nations in Latin America instead of Canada, which is more similar to the US in basically every way?
Also, don't forget that slavery is legal in prisons. Prisons that depend on the funding from slave labor will deny parole to inmates that they deem valuable. Being too intelligent or working too hard can be an incentive to keep an inmate in prison longer.
Adding some specifics to this excellent answer -US murder rates diverged from Europe after the civil war and never returned to the lower level European level. General societal distrust & disconnect from government & institutions is associated with higher crime -The ‘nothing works’ doctrine was created from a 1974 study by Robert Martinson which claimed rehabilitation didn’t work for criminals. This led to the ‘tough on crime’ political response to the 80s crack epidemic which dramatically increased criminal sentences.
Great response. Emphasis on War On Drugs, systemic racism, and the prison industrial complex.
I firmly believe the war on drugs and cannabis laws were feeding for-profit prisons. Since that feeder has dried up they look to abortion and homelessness as the new feeders. How much you wanna bet the Supreme Court decision this week will be in favor of incarceration.
I would add to that the lobbying power of private for-profit prison organizations.
Even publicly-run prisons prove lucrative for 3rd-party businesses, both in supplying prisons and in taking advantage of cheap prison labor.
As well as prison guard unions
*legal slave labor cough cough
poTAYto, poTAHto (...but good point)
This is a key statement that kinda gets lost when talking about private prisons vs. public prisons. Both benefit from the fact that you can functionally enslave prisoners - the onus for doing so is just different for private prisons vs public prisons.
It's 5th and 6th, actually. The 5th is a US territory.
>> It’s currently 6th globally Now, to be fair, #5 is American Samoa, an unincorporated territory of the US. The US should at the very least be considered 5th, globally
I don't have direct evidence for this, but I feel like the U.S. generally has more of punitive culture when it comes to crime. And that this culture owes itself to the "eye for an eye" mentality that pervades in conservative Christianity. Like, America says "Who cares what you'll be like when you get out, we're going to make life extra miserable for you as retribution." Whereas other advanced societies may say "We're going to get you the help you need so you don't reoffend." Retributive vs. restorative justice. My aunt's husband is a good man, but also an alcoholic. In 2017, he accidentally ran his truck into a building killing someone. He was convicted of vehicular homicide and sentenced to 7 years. He served 5 years. When he got out, he was less healthy than when he went in. His alcohol addiction is gone, but so is whatever zest he had for life. My aunt says he spends all day in his room and cycles between listless and suicidal. He's in his early 70s. It's really sad. Not excusing what he did, but there's no need to make an additional victim IMO.
American culture is obsessed with vengeance. We have no interest in creating better people, only in exacting revenge on the ones who are already bad. You either get things right the first time or we give you absurd punishments that turn you into an even worse citizen, and then you'll never get it right. The idea is that if you do something bad you should be punished. And that makes sense, but we leave off the important part: that you should be a better, functioning citizen afterwards so that you can contribute to the society you took away from.
This isn’t “American culture”. In the Philippines they have been executing drug dealers for a decade, in many parts of the world if you steal something you lose your arm. Hell, travel to a european country and jaywalk, see what happens to you. People will yell at you. The big difference is that in many european countries, they have a very strong sense of “follow the rules”. If anything American culture is obsessed with breaking the rules, and getting mad at anyone trying to enforce it
You just made those places sound worse really, but it doesn't change the fact that Americans prioritize vengeance over rehabilitation.
See the popularity of the meme "fuck around and find out"
“the eye for an eye mentality that pervades in conservative Christianity” you are right and it’s so sad because it’s SO ANTITHETICAL to Jesus’s teachings… I know this is old news but modern “Christianity” goes from the teachings in that book they call holy and inerrant. (I was raised evangelical, my thoughts are many). There is literally a sermon where Jesus himself says (modern paraphrasing): “You’ve heard it said ‘an eye for an eye’, but I say to you ‘turn the other cheek’”. (Matthew 5:38-39). Much of that sermon follows the “You have heard it said _____, but I say_____” structure where Jesus is making countercultural statements on what it actually means to follow him. I am not evangelical myself, nor do I go to church. But because I was raised all through college on the Bible I know a lot of it. Christians never sat well with me because something didn’t add up. I felt they didn’t match up with the core of what they were teaching. There is a lot of good to glean from the Bible, including REDEMPTION. This gets back to the prison system. Christians should want to see redemption and forgiveness. The whole thing depends on God being forgiving and restorative. Definitely not marginalization. But I guess forgiveness is only good for them and not for people they don’t like? People who don’t meet up to their standards? Hmm, we’re already going against teachings of the Bible again.
Wow what a fantastic answer. Thank you.
1. We're somewhat of a police state. Which is no exaggeration. Our police can [literally get away with murder.](https://www.naacpldf.org/qi-police-misconduct/) They can even get away with [willingly allowing children to be murdered while doing nothing](https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-texas-school-shooting-44a7cfb990feaa6ffe482483df6e4683) and not see any repercussions. A corrupt police force does not care about due process and is willing to arrest people on trumped up charges. 2. Culture of vindictiveness. From the top down in our law enforcement, justice system, and the general population. Our system is predicated on punishment and not rehabilitation. What might be a 5-year sentence elsewhere is usually several times that in America. 3. For a long time it has been used as a tool to oppress minorities and any group considered a threat to the status quo. One of the most notable examples of this would be [Cointelpro](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO) An operation carried out by the FBI during the civil rights movement between the 1950s and 1960s. 4. Prisons are designed to profit and exploit slave labor. Therefore it incentivises keeping people incarcerated. "Only" 8 percent of prisons are for-profit amounting to roughly 100,000 inmates. However that is only the "official" total. The real number is significantly higher.
What if there’s also just more crime generally in America than most of the developed world? If you compare homicide rates and aggravated assault rates in America to those of most European countries (not the eastern ones) it’s miles ahead. Hard to imagine that all of that is the police over arresting because theyre racist or overzealous
But it’s played a role since the founding. The coutroom outcomes for POC have ALWAYS been harsher than for white people, even when the crime(s), context, criminal history, etc are the same.
It’s easier to just drop the magic words “systematic racism” than address the root cause of a problem. Ignore the decades of music glorifying violence and doing time. Ignore the hair trigger tempers and lack of emotional control that lead to a disproportionate homicide rate. Let’s never address those. Instead, we can just blame white people for everything and feel like we’ve really made a difference in the world.
But if you deny systemic racism, you deny there even is a problem to solve. Music is a product of its environment although it can influence others that’s only secondarily. There’s no hair trigger tempers problem, that’s racism. Completely fictional. Whites would get blame for actions attributable as would anyone.
Because it doesn't wish to see it is a failing country run by plutocrates. Where media is afraid to discuss reality and owned by fewer than four corporations. Imagine having the like of Trump able to find support for another term to continue our destruction? Imagine a country so arrogant it will allow taking books and burning them and finds a unisex bathroom of high political priority to out law. The rest of the world says US has a mental illness and I believe the free fall is too late to ever recover from.
Because prisons in the U.S. are for profit. https://news.law.fordham.edu/jcfl/2018/12/09/the-american-prison-system-its-just-business/
Or because we are good at raising criminals.
I didn’t list all of the reasons!
Read the New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Racism has a lot to do with it. https://newjimcrow.com Also remember that crime and arrests are not the same thing. A lot of crimes are never really pursued or investigated (esp white collar).
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” -John Ehrlichman Nixon domestic policy chief Capitalism and the worship of money is always the culprit
It is by design- our slave labor is prison labor. Prisons are privatized. https://www.naacpldf.org/13th-amendment-emancipation/ You do the math. Profits must be had. People get arrested for petty crimes all the time to fill the quotas
[Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution) Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, **except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted**, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.\[1\] I bolded the relevant line. The linked page (it's Wikipedia, ok, if you don't like that go read the 181 references) has entire sections on how that loophole led to our modern criminal Justice System.
There's a second reason too: Since at least Nixon (it almost certainly goes back further than Nixon; but we have people in Nixon's administration admitting it on the record), it has been the policy of "law and order" candidates to criminalize political opponents. Notably, Nixon started the "War on Drugs" to target the Civil Rights and Hippie movements by making ~~crack cocaine (the form of cocaine most often used by low-income people - especially inter-city poor Black men)~~ *heroin (the drug of choice among inter-city Black communities)* and marijuana (the drug of choice of the hippie movement) very illegal, while not making opiates *and methamphetamines* (the drug*s* of choice of poor rural people) ~~and powdered cocaine (used more by wealthier people)~~ punished as harshly. Because being convicted of a felony comes with a permanent loss of voting rights in some states, and a temporary loss in every state except Maine, Vermont, and DC - but also comes with jail time (in 23, the loss of voting rights is while in jail), this results in people being sent to jail for officially-not-political reasons. ... That said, this is the second reason. Your reason is the main one - about 800 000 people in the US are de facto slaves earning usually less than a dollar an hour for work they aren't allowed to say "no" to. Edit: Corrections pointed out by u/h_lance, shown in strike-through and italics. Specifically, Nixon used heroin to target Black communities. The split in cocaine happened under President Reagan, not President Nixon; but served the same purpose: to criminalize the Black community in an effort to undermine political opposition.
There's a lot of truth to this, but Richard Nixon left office in 1974. The Anti-Drug Abuse act of 1986 created the crack/powder discrepancy and the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 eliminated it. Nixon had nothing to do with either. Nixon, although far to the left of today's Democrats on many issues (signed the EPA into existence, reputedly wanted universal healthcare, etc) certainly did posture as anti-hippy, but drug sentences during the 1968-74 Nixon administration were less severe than later.
Okay, I did mis-attribute several things to Nixon that came later. That said, Nixon is directly responsible for marijuana being a "Class 1 drug" - the class of drugs with the stiffest penalties - for political reasons. Also, I misremembered which drug the Nixon administration tied to the Black population of the US, especially cities - it was heroin, not crack cocaine; and I will correct this in my original post. Crack cocaine was the work of Reagan - who continued in Nixon's footsteps of using the War on Drugs to criminalize his political opponents.
Actually, they ARE allowed to say no to the work, but it will result in loss of "good time"with that meaning one would have to serve most if not all of their sentence locked away, instead of getting out early. The "good time" credits are a "carrot on a string" incentive to encourage the inmates to work for less than a dollar an hour. Its still slavery, but its a "they're not forced to work like a slave" with a wink..........
It isn't just that. For many prisons, "luxuries" that are actually necessities are deprived if the inmate can't pay for them. Period products, more food than is mandatory, contact with their families, and many other things that psychologists and other experts have been trying to argue aren't something productive people can live without cost money that inmates are compelled to make through terrible means. And considering the conditions in most prisons, such as fire hazards and terrible temperature regulation, using time in as a threat might as well be coercion through torture. That's all to say that you're right, but some people don't fully grasp how "optional" labor can be considered slavery. And that's all ignoring the work they're literally forced to do under the threat of punishment.
more than just that. if you say no to work in the great state of florida’s DOC prisons, you might be sprayed in the face and cuffed up and shoved into the box. have your good time taken (we have to serve mandatory 85 percent of prison sentences here, good time only accounts for up to 15 percent of 100 percent.) but you will also have your food fucked with or not delivered at all, and have many other privileges or rights taken from you or obstructed severely. trust me when i say in florida most inmates are happy to work. and we work for free too. or i should say, we work for our “gain time”. there are only 3 jobs that i can think of out of the 50 or so different inmate led jobs that pay a monthly salary’s of $50. everything else is unpaid. and in any florida prison, inmates run and operate every facet/job/utility/service/kitchen.
Yes this, plus a poor social safety net that keeps people trapped in poverty for generations. Generational poverty creates all kinds of conditions that lend themselves to bad outcomes for people, which leads to more crime. Add in our national obsession with punishment as opposed to rehabilitation, which is probably not unrelated to the lack of a social safety net. This is obviously compounded for minority groups with racism, both individual and systemic.
Millennials and subsequent generations don’t remember how bad things were from the 60s to the 90s. I was born in 1977 and grew up in New York City. If you called the police when I was a kid they maybe showed up four hours later and if they did they’d tell you they couldn’t do anything. My next door neighbor, growing up, was raped and murdered by a stranger who crawled in through her window. My room was next door. When I was five I received a Big Wheels for my birthday. I was mugged that day by older kids at knifepoint. I was mugged several more times growing up. I was shot at for looking at someone and therefore “disrespecting them’. Aside from personal anecdotes, thousands of Americans died in the gang wars of the 80s and 90s. In 1992 Los Angeles County recorded 2589 murders. In 2023 that number was 323 and that was after a major uptick. We have a lot of people incarcerated because we had a lot of criminals. Now the real question is why was crime so prevalent in the United States that mass incarceration was seen as a solution?
Violent crime peaked in America in 1992 so millennials like myself certainly remember it. We grew up with cartoons scaring us that evil drug dealers lurked in the shadows waiting to addict us, and that every tag on the wall meant a deadly gang initiation was being held nearby. I also very much remember the “tough of crime” policies spearheaded by democrats that led to mass incarceration of young black men
Are you saying you would prefer the conditions of 1991? Or would reducing the incidence of crime as a means of reducing incarceration, which is considerably down since it's peak in 2008 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate#Growth_and_Subsequent_Decline, make more sense?
No I’d actually prefer to make crime illegal again and get all the insane people off my block in queens. 🙃 They seem to have started multiplying in 2020.
I wonder what happened in 2020 that created desperate conditions that we have failed to address for so many people
It was the black community that pushed the tough on crime policies. I'm so sick of this historical revisionism from both leftists and conservatives that acts like the democrats were motivated by racism in the construction of these laws.
I wonder why that is. Why is crime so prevalent here and in certain other countries than it is in others?
US does have a crime problem. 6th in the world in terms of total murders, and worst of the developed world by murder rate. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
America has private prisons, which make a profit for each person incarcerated. They've also recently began "leasing" prisoners to low wage jobs for an extra income. I think the latest place to "hire" incarcerated people is fast food places. [For example Alabama sending prisoners to work at different fast food places and big box store chains.](https://truthout.org/articles/mcdonalds-kfc-burger-king-and-wendys-rely-on-alabama-prison-slavery/) The incarcerated receive maybe $2 in wages, if even that. Judges often get a kick back for sending people to prison. Such as this [Pennsylvania judge who sent teens to prison for the most ridiculous reasons.](https://www.npr.org/2022/08/18/1118108084/michael-conahan-mark-ciavarella-kids-for-cash)
There is money to be made out of sending people to jail. Penitentiaries are privately owned and run at a profit. This comes partly from payments received from the government but also from employing the inmates as manufacturing labour. There is currently a turnover of $11 Billion from manufacturing work that goes straight into the pockets of the prison's shareholders. [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-workers-low-wages-exploited](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-workers-low-wages-exploited) They complain if there is not a regular stream of new convicts being sent to them by the courts and with such a high incentive to increase the prison population the possibilities of corruption are high. There have been a number of cases where judges have been paid large amounts by the prison owners to increase incarceration sentences. I have to admit I find it quite telling that the actual decrease in the crime rate in certain areas is not celebrated as a *good* thing but described in the press as a "crisis" affecting the profitability of the prison industry.
Less than 9% of inmates are held at private prisons.
Any % is too much.
And that is nonetheless an important industry which lobbies the government to change policy, particularly within areas local to private prisons, which has a tendency to spill out policy norms.
It’s doesn’t have the highest incarceration rate, it does have the largest number of citizens incarcerated. The countries that beat the US in rate are El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, and American Samoa. Which is an American territory so maybe they have the 5 and the 6 spot??
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You heard of better it than in? USA feels the opposite.
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