71–80 of 374 posts
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I believe it’s reasonable to assume that far more than 5% of people behind bars are actually innocent. I was raised by two career long LEOs and if even a small fraction of other LEOs were as bad as my folks, it would be safe to assume that there are a lot of innocent people behind bars.
I'd be surprised if it was more than 1%. But getting actual data is impossible of course.
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Most of the time, supporters of these laws aren't brainwashed or stupid. They just prefer the status quo that these laws uphold, which tends to overlay nearly perfectly with class lines.
>Supporters say the collections are a legitimate way for states to recoup millions of taxpayer dollars spent on prisons and jails. Wait there are supporters of this? You're telling me if I asked 100 people on the street, there'd be someone that said "oh yeah this is a pretty fair and reasonable law to charge the inmates 5-star hotel prices"??
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the time, supporters of these laws aren't brainwashed or stupid. They just prefer the status quo that these laws uphold, which tends to overlay nearly perfectly with class lines.
>Supporters say the collections are a legitimate way for states to recoup millions of taxpayer dollars spent on prisons and jails. Wait there are supporters of this? You're telling me if I asked 100 people on the street, there'd be someone that said "oh yeah this is a pretty fair and reasonable law to charge the inmates 5-star hotel prices"??
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Nothing weird going on here... It's the free market doing it's thing. Apparently staying in prison is in high demand, driving up prices. /s
How are actions by a government... "the free market"?
What drives me absolutely insane about stories like this is that so many of the people suffering under these policies are guilty of little more than market participation. The government strains, at extraordinary expense, to pretend they can stop drugs from being made, bought and sold, but they can't. They simply can't. Countless laws, countless billions of dollars and countless ruined lives later, drugs are no less p…
Most of the time, supporters of these laws aren't brainwashed or stupid. They just prefer the status quo that these laws uphold, which tends to overlay nearly perfectly with class lines.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the time, supporters of these laws aren't brainwashed or stupid. They just prefer the status quo that these laws uphold, which tends to overlay nearly perfectly with class lines.
>Supporters say the collections are a legitimate way for states to recoup millions of taxpayer dollars spent on prisons and jails. Wait there are supporters of this? You're telling me if I asked 100 people on the street, there'd be someone that said "oh yeah this is a pretty fair and reasonable law to charge the inmates 5-star hotel prices"??
Prison conditions in the US are infamous for the degrading of the human experience to a point of no return.
Open rape culture, radicalization, utterly despicable behavior that even barbarians would shiver at openly covered in popular culture as fact.
As someone who grew up outside the US, it is truly astonishing how fucked up the system is.
In the UK it costs the taxpayer about $60K per year per prisoner to keep them locked up, according to official figures. However if you take the overall annual budget for the prison service and divide by the number of prisoners I think the figure is closer to $100K. I’ve often wondered what the cost might be to house that population somewhere else, somewhere less expensive, like Turkey or Greece.
This is the sort of thinking that had the UK export criminals to Australia, no?
Every day I find new reason to believe the American penal system unconscionable. Not only is slavery permitted, the US is the subject of the ire of the United Nations over it (the ILO, specifically). For-profit prisons with state minimum occupancy clauses. Charging prisoners for their time there. And one of the highest incarceration levels and worst recidivism rates in the world. What exactly is the point of any of t…
Generally I wonder if people comprehend that prisons should be (for the majority of inmates) intended to reform people; that is, to make them better and show them a better path. I'm not clear how people think throwing a bunch of criminals together in a featureless pen to lift weights, fight and fraternize is going to achieve anything. If anything, these people warrant more social investment than the average person, with the intent of educating them and building honest skills in them, so that they have new opportunities that they didn't have previously, when they made their mistakes the first time around.
I guess this sentiment is seen as sappy, unrealistic and saccharine, and of course socialist. Of course it has to be paired with having decent socialized healthcare and education, but I think we have seen in practice how the contemporary American school of thought for prisons does not work, and we have seen in other countries what is possible, and how reformist and sympathetic attitudes to incarceration, combined with strong social support generally can produce better outcomes in regards to crime.
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This is the sort of thinking that had the UK export criminals to Australia, no?
Not quite, Australia wasnt an independent country at the time. It only gained independence in 1901. The last prisoner was shipped to the penal colony around 1870. So there was no Australian state to sign any agreement with. UK was until very recently in the EU with Greece. Might even get the prisoners superior conditions, some of UKs jails are Victorian in construction and very overcrowded.
It had been occupied for 65000 years by people that might have argued otherwise though!
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First of all, conceding that 5% of people in jail could be wrongfully imprisoned should be MORE than enough reason to want to tear the entire system down. Second, many of these "crimes" had no victim, so maybe it's not the people living their lives who are at fault, but rather an overzealous government who imprisons otherwise free people for doing no harm other than some abstract "moral" rule-breaking.