I think it’s important to frame any discussion of criminal justice reform in the US in the fact that our modern legal system is built on laws and loopholes, beginning with the 13th amendment, that exist solely to criminalize and reenslave huge portions of the population.
I highly recommend the documentary “13th” on Netflix for more info.
Most people in the US don't. Which, combined with its history of racism, goes a long way towards explaining the school-to-prison pipeline.
US is one of the least racist - up to and including freeing slaves.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15...
How many countries had millions of slaves (15% of the population) to free?
Also interesting that you say "up to and including freeing slaves", which excluded the racially founded prison industrial complex that was created to replac e slavery after the 13th Amendment.
Not saying US is the worst, am saying not to ignore USA's ugly history and present, especially USA claims to be the world leader in freedom and human rights.
[0] Even the North didn't support abolishing slavery until after the Civil war started, at which point the argument was largely 'we just fought and won a war over this, lets at least get something out of it".
also, that link is regarding a survey asking people if they think they are racist, it’s hardly objective
I think the US doesn't see most of its citizens as human beings, let alone its inmates. That is indeed the root of this and many problems.
That's something we've got to fix. But just because that happens, it doesn't mean we don't have to be hard on "not elite" criminals.
>If punishment was applied uniformly, maybe you'd have more people respecting the law?
I don't believe so. You think crack dealers, murderers or rapists do their thing because Mr. Richguy didn't go to prison for stealing a few millions? I don't see how those two things are related at all.
Maybe the case of some anarchist terrorists who wanted to sow discord through crime, but that's a tiny minority.
If you wrote an algorithm, then some tests, and your tests showed it failed 76% of the time, do you really think you'd look at that and think: "great, it's working, so let's do more of that?" If so, I doubt you'd be long for the world of paid employment. Yet that's exactly what you're advocating here. Assuming, that is, your goal is to reduce crime.
Let's re-frame the conversation. If 76% of high school students failed to graduate, would you point at that and say the kids are scum, failures, it's their fault they couldn't hack it? Clearly the system works. Here's a pick-axe and a hard hat, good luck with your future in the coal mines. Or would you say hmm, clearly there's room for improvement in the way we teach people or the things we teach? Let's figure out how to fix this.
Now if you just want an institutionalized way to abuse people, it definitely fits the bill.
[1] https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/recidivism-am...
The reality is that other systems in the world have much, much lower recidivism rates (20% in Norway, where they actually treat people humanely [1] the trope goes). The incarceration rates in the US are off the charts [2] and the recidivism rates are too. So either the people born in the US are overwhelmingly more likely to "just be scum who belong in prison for some reason" or there's more at play here, institutionally speaking. And furthermore, what happened in 1980 [3] that made huge portions of the population (3X more) suddenly "become scum"?
You absolutely can change peoples behavior. People don't want to be bad people. Some don't know how, and the evidence shows if you show them a better way, they grow and respond. Giving people room to live up to your expectations works, whether in your day job in management or in prisoner rehabilitation. The data bears that out. Yeah, definitely not everyone, but it's fair to say that we can do better.
On a joking note, I do wish you luck in your testing career ;)
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/why-norways-prison-system-is...
[2] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/10/incarceration
[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._incarceration_r...
There's a lot of people who literally believe this, and most of their reasoning boils down to "Norway is all white". Have you ever heard "America is different, X can't work here because America is so diverse"?
Regarding incarceration rates specifically, the next 3 leading jailers behind the US (Russia, the Ukraine and Poland) are unbelievably homogeneous. I believe Poland is almost 97% white [1]. They're my people, so I think I can safely say, they consider a mild tan to represent diversity. There are homogenous countries that lock people up, and there are homogenous countries that don't. There are also diverse countries that lock people up, and diverse countries that don't.
I was trying to be very careful in not comparing Norway's incarceration rate (which is, itself, 1/10th of the US) but rather their substantially lower recidivism rate which I think one can more easily treat as an apples-to-apples comparison, meaning that there is room to improve on the process.
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2005-10-16-051015...
Does being hard mean scamming them? Because that's what we're talking about here, not about applying longer sentences or other harsh punishments.
In short, the US prison population is sufficiently skewed away from justice that holding incarceration against someone is disingenuous.
Law only works when the transgressors are few. When the law is at odds with society, society adopts to being at odds with the law. If one truly believes in the rule of law, then it behooves them to reject nonsensical applications of it that undermine its credibility.
Some of them have disrespect for some laws, which can be entirely reasonable and not make them lesser at all.
Some of them were desperate.
Very few fall into the bucket you described.
If you're a green card holder and leave the card at home, and run into a law enforcement officer, that's a $100 fine or 1 month in jail. Luckily I've got my photocopy here, ah wait, that's insufficient. Good point -- scum of the earth, I'll see myself to jail.
You can go to jail for possessing a lobster less than 3.25" long even if you found it washed up on shore, you absolute monster [3]. Have you, yourself, ever held a short lobster? Remember! Not knowing isn't an excuse either!
Nobody even knows how many federal laws there are [4]. We've tried to count them and failed a number of times. Stalin's head of secret police once said "Show me the man, and I'll show you the crime" -- well, if the set of crimes in the US is un-countable, I bet you that works equally well here.
I've never met you, but I guarantee, you've accrued enough potential legal liability to spend the rest of your miserable life in prison, and yet you're out wandering around, calling others scum (in a different thread) and showing off that you've never been to prison. So what's difference? Luck I guess.
[1] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2014/01/21/84-year-old-jaywalker...
[2] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/do-i-really-need-car...
[3] https://www.mass.gov/files/documents/2016/08/no/dmf-lobster-...
[4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304319804576389...
And being treated like a sub-human in a prison you got thrown into, for what you consider to be an unjust decision is bound to make you resent the law and increase your chances of ending up there again. How is he not seeing that?
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
You're still a criminal, but depending on how you picked the laws you're probably not subhuman.
> Not an excuse.
It's not a legal defense (usually), but it's a defense against being antithetical to society itself.
What is the context for this response?
>Not an excuse.
Not an excuse for what? Treating criminals like human beings?
There's another explanation:
Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
I'm not a religious person, but sometimes I truly wish hell exists so that these prison profiteers, who have sold their soul to the devil, at least get what they deserve in the afterlife.
Or did they just sign because . . .
While I agree, I think this is more corporations do not give af about their customers. How many music services have done this? I don't have a count, but I've heard of a few.
I guess that the bigger is the inmate population the easier is to make more money.
> But in 2018, the FDOC switched to a new company called JPay, which didn’t honor the earlier purchases. The agency required inmates to trade in their music players for new multimedia tablets, or to pay $25 and have the players shipped to someone outside prison.
That is a perfect business. You have literally captivated customers.
I think that USA do not see inmates as human beings. That is the only way to explain what happens there. But, they are human and abusing them is as much as a crime as abusing anyone else.