301–310 of 374 posts
Counterpoint question to most of the comments I’m seeing here: Who then is supposed to pay for a criminal’s stay in prison? Law-abiding tax-payers? Laws that SEND people to prison (like drug possession laws) can be fairly painted as ridiculous, but when it comes to paying for the actual prison infrastructure… it seems a lot less ethically clear.
In Norway you earn money in prison, and we still have lower percentage of people in prison.
Is it a fair comparison though? Norway is relatively small and homogenous compared to the US. And doesn't have a puritanical and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps culture. EDIT: I don't mean to defend the US here. It's a terrible system. Rather just point out the societies are so different I don't think what works in Norway can transfer directly to the US.
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ASB in New Zealand offer it. They have a list you can search for various things and companies, your comment prompted me to check. Fines, taxes and some big companies appear there.
I was told in the 1980s that personal finances in Australia were such.. that many independent adults did not own their own autos, but that ownership and insurance were arranged through their employer, typically a large company or government agency.
It hasn't been a loophole for years (fringe benefits tax took care of that), but many older people still do it anyway.
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Portugal is an excellent role model, there are numerous studies on their approach to drugs[0]. While I am not an expert on the subject the model is morally appealing to me, and I believe public order is maintained. Begin researching on your own if you're interested in this subject. I feel for anyone who loves a drug user. Separately I just learned fentanyl test strips are not legal in all 50 states. Given that fentan…
> I don't know how heavily this law is enforced, but it's a great example of cutting your nose to spite your face. To me it's a litmus test that reinforces the notion the USA's stance on drugs was never about harm reduction. Was it ever framed as harm reduction?
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It depends on answers to questions like “are these groups actually committing a disproportionate amount of the crime?” And I wouldn’t rush to the notion that you need to be justified in using hyperbolic/metaphorical language before you can criticize the problem.
Why would black or indigenous people as a group commit more crimes?
Why would kids growing up in a remote community with no work, surrounded by drug and alcohol abuse, in a culture that tolerates child sex abuse, whose brains are cooked from day one by FASD and inhalants _not_ commit more crime.
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Plenty of countries, especially in Asia, but also the UAE and possibly others, have successfully stopped nearly all drug use and trade with heavy-handed policies. You may not like what it took to get done, but it did work. I'm not advocating for the heavy-handed approach, but it's intellectually dishonest to say that it can't work. Also, the other countries have done it with a much smaller imprisonment per capita.
It is intellectually dishonest to say drug prohibition can work in the United States. It has been tried and has failed comprehensively and over multiple generations. You are making a very different argument - that if the US was an entirely different type of society with a different government, culture and history, then this approach might work.
"Plenty of countries have solved the drug problem by eliminating their populations; it would be dishonest to say that it cannot be done".
My preference is with a society that supports the freedom of the individual. One side-effect of that kind of society is that the unlucky and irresponsible are ill-protected. All told, I prefer that situation to an authoritarian, totalitarian, or fascist society.
It's a calculus with numerous concessions on all sides. I suspect we're highly programmed to support the perspective that corresponds to our geographic origins, even though mine's the best.
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It depends on answers to questions like “are these groups actually committing a disproportionate amount of the crime?” And I wouldn’t rush to the notion that you need to be justified in using hyperbolic/metaphorical language before you can criticize the problem.
Why would black or indigenous people as a group commit more crimes?
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Presumably murder, rape, and manslaughter carry longer sentence terms. If a rapist spends five times as long in prison compared to a drug offense, then there will be five times as many rapists behind bars if the quantity of the two crime's convictions are comparable.
I still don’t see any numbers here, so I will assume the OP comment was bull.
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Seems like something people should know about. It's incredibly dystopian.
Also wild to think about the fact that many states take away voting rights for prisoners (e.g. Florida which voted to stop this practice but Santis managed to undo that) Another extremely dystopian reality we live with daily and rarely stop to question. When the 13th Amendment was proposed, one of the big compromises the South fought for was the "except as punishment for crime" clause. And, of course, immediately aft…
The south didn't really get a say in the text of the 13th since they weren't around. That clause was included so as not to screw with the established prison labor systems of the states that were in the union. The 13th was in the over at a time when union support for the war was low and it wasn't a boat anyone felt like rocking. It wasn't a contentions clause and was basically seen as a common sense exception at the time. If it wasn't then you'd think some of the more abolitionist states would have tried to abolish that too or you'd at least have some period correspondence about it you could refer to.
>And, of course, immediately after it was passed there was a big cultural shift in racist stereotypes of Black men from being effeminate and cowardly to being big scary criminals.
You're early by a century. The lazy and up to no good criminal black man is a stereotype that mostly came around in the 1960s after we incentivized urban minorities to quit working above the table (and quit getting married) with asinine welfare eligibility rules. As an aside, president Johnson actually has some very quotable quotes on this subject.
In the many decades between the civil war and great depression blacks increasingly moved north and moved to urban areas (mostly in the north and midwest but some in the south) to get jobs in the industrial economy and because the alternatives in the south sucked. Throughout this time period they were stereotyped as tireless workers with some cultural differences much the same way other cultural groups have been over the years.
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>What happens is the folks who end up in prison haven't accrued any more of less liability - instead they drew attention. >If you'd like to learn more I recommend Three Felonies a Day. [1] It's hard to take that book seriously when the book fails to state how the average person actually commits felonies a day. According to the top critical review[1], it doesn't seem like most of the people in prisons are because of t…
I'm sorry but I'm not going to take the word of one randomly-selected Amazon reviewer at face value just because they're a verified purchaser.