Re:Think Debtors Prisons Are a Thing of the Past? Not in Mis...
by dragonwriter on Sunday January 12, 2020 @02:54AM
(#22025098)
> I see several comments complaining about the US incarceration rate without mentioning the US crime rate.
The former is a major cause of the latter.
> You can’t credibly assert that the US incarceration rate is too high without knowing how it compares to the crime rate.
The incarceration rate is too high, in part, because it drives the crime rate.
It's also too high because it's historically largely a product of criminal justice policies adopted as a direct replacement for chattel slavery as a tool of racial suppression and which have continued to this day with that effect, having spread beyond the region which had chattel slavery to replace to the whole nation.
The former is a major cause of the latter.
> You can’t credibly assert that the US incarceration rate is too high without knowing how it compares to the crime rate.
The incarceration rate is too high, in part, because it drives the crime rate.
It's also too high because it's historically largely a product of criminal justice policies adopted as a direct replacement for chattel slavery as a tool of racial suppression and which have continued to this day with that effect, having spread beyond the region which had chattel slavery to replace to the whole nation.
This is particularly true of penal slavery.