the United States prison system is a tragedy on par or exceeding the horror of the Soviet gulags. In my opinion the only legitimate reason for incarcerating people is to prevent crime. The USA currently has 7 times the OECD average number of prisoners and crime rates similar to the OECD average. 6⁄7 of the Us penial system population is a little over 2 million people. If we are unnescesarily incarcerating anywhere close to 2 million people right now then the USA is a morally hellish country.
note: Less than half of the inamtes in the USa are there for drug related charges. It is very close to 50% federally but less at the state level. Immediately pardoning all criminals primarily gets us to 3.5 times the OECd average.
I’m not the OP, but I’ll throw a quote into this thread:
There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
The problem with having to many felonies is not that prisons get filled with people being punished for silly things, it’s that the people who do get punished for silly things tend to correlate with the people actively opposing the current administration.
So if we reduced sentences what effect do you think that would have on crime rates? Remember three strikes was passed in response to crime rates being too high.
the United States prison system is a tragedy on par or exceeding the horror of the Soviet gulags. In my opinion the only legitimate reason for incarcerating people is to prevent crime. The USA currently has 7 times the OECD average number of prisoners and crime rates similar to the OECD average. 6⁄7 of the Us penial system population is a little over 2 million people. If we are unnescesarily incarcerating anywhere close to 2 million people right now then the USA is a morally hellish country.
note: Less than half of the inamtes in the USa are there for drug related charges. It is very close to 50% federally but less at the state level. Immediately pardoning all criminals primarily gets us to 3.5 times the OECd average.
This seems close to the (liberal) mainstream. Why do you think it is contrarian on LW?
I do not think most people consider this a problem on the par of the Soviet Gulag. Though possibly I am wrong.
The problem with the Soviet Gulag wasn’t so much its size, but rather the whole system it was part of and things which got you sent to it.
Is your claim that they’re in prison for crimes they didn’t commit, or that we should let more crimes go unpunished?
I’m not the OP, but I’ll throw a quote into this thread:
So which crimes would you take off the books and what percent of prisoners would that remove?
We can start with the drug war, things like civil forfeiture, and go on from there. You might be interested in this book.
The problems with the US criminal justice system go much deeper than just the abundance of laws, of course.
Civil forfeiture doesn’t fill prisons.
The problem with having to many felonies is not that prisons get filled with people being punished for silly things, it’s that the people who do get punished for silly things tend to correlate with the people actively opposing the current administration.
There are a LOT of problems with having too many felonies, but that’s a large discussion not quite in the LW bailiwick...
Agreed, but the discussion was about there supposedly being too many people in prison.
False dichotomy, It’s about sentence length, eg three strikes.
So if we reduced sentences what effect do you think that would have on crime rates? Remember three strikes was passed in response to crime rates being too high.
Drastically increasing sentences didn’t drastically reduce crime, so...
Comparable countries have lower crime rates and lower prison populations, so they must be doing something right.
You don’t have to keep moving the big lever up and down: you can get Smart on Crime.
Well, the crime did fall. Whether it was due to increased sentences or something else is still being debated.
They also have fewer people from populations with high predisposition to violence (and yes, I mean blacks).
The last was disappointingly predictable.