[ashtonkem]

One of the sad realities of American politics is that jailing people, and jailing people under inhumaine circumstances remains very popular. For any given behavior that is socially undesirable it’s easy to find a large enough constituency that says “lock them up and throw away the key”, even if as a society we all agree that our criminal justice system is ineffective and out of control.

[SoSoRoCoCo]

> under inhumane circumstances remains very popular.

I recently read an article about the popularity of '/r/justiceserved' type forums (the original tagline of this subreddit was "Now with 40% more police brutality" but was changed as it became more popular). I can't for the life of me find the article, but it was a fairly ambivalent account of how this kind of forum taps into a deeply innate arousal from visceral punishment. Something that the author decides, sadly, appears to be in all of us.

> lock them up and throw away the key

The "empathy gap" rears its ugly head.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy_gap

[InitialLastName]

Part of the issue is that nobody ever got elected to local law-enforcement/judicial positions (sheriffs, state atty generals, judges) by saying "I'm definitely going to arrest fewer people in your town".

[ashtonkem]

This returns to my original point; people win elections promising to lock more people up because locking people up is very popular.

[derivagral]

I'm not familiar with the rest of Altemeyer's work but I found this book fascinating to read; it tries to go into where some of that might come from.

https://theauthoritarians.org/options-for-getting-the-book/