Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I have mixed feelings about this situation. On the one hand, if the sentences were for drug possession, yes, I think its really shitty to incarcerate people for that. But if their felony was due to burglary or something more serious/violent, I do think they deserve the punishment. I also agree that once the sentence has been served, people should not be punished any further, except where the occupation requires a…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/04/... The US has about 4.4 percent of the global population and about 22 percent of the global prison population. So either we are seriously fucking up as a country and incapable of producing decent human beings, or our entire justice system is broken. Something needs to be done differently at the systemic level that doesn't involved holding every individual f…
Note that that's not an exclusive or; both can be true, and it's even plausible that there's a positive feedback loop between the two—that is, we have worse people because of our massive imprisonment, and can't get political support to end mass imprisonment because people correctly fear the near-term results given the way in which those in in prison are socialized (and even often preferring more imprisonment from perfectly legitimate fears of the way many people not in prison are socialized due to our mass imprisonment system.)
Which isn't to say we shouldn't bite the bullet and end the system, but just that we'll have lots of near term problems when we do and lots of political difficulty in actually doing it.