| Besides homicides, I take all crime rates with a heaping grain of salt, although it's probably fair to consider them to generally be a significant undercount. It does not seem entirely intuitive to me that mass incarceration would drive down crime rates in the long run. Prisons are themselves maladaptive institutions that are harmful to most inmates and indeed are certainly hardening people who could otherwise have been steered in a more productive direction. There is also the fact that taking people out of their families and communities has terrible downstream effects that get passed on to the next generation, causing the cycle to continue. Also, you say we don't arrest people for no reason, but there are a lot of people in prison who did not commit the crimes they were convicted of. Probably not a majority but I'll bet it's a non negligible minority. How would you feel about a society that locked you up in brutal conditions for something you didn't even do? What about people locked up for drug possession with the same people locked up for violent crimes? Does that make any sense? Personally I think we are at an inflection point. What we have been doing in the US is not working. The illusion that we can maintain increasing levels of inequality by just locking up more and more people is fading fast. This problem can't be solved long term with more incarceration. I am not convinced that the people you've characterized as the "criminal class" are inherently so. It's also dehumanizing to describe them in this way. Many, if not most, are reacting to difficult situations bordering on the impossible. That's not to be pollyanna and pretend that there aren't some very dangerous people locked up. This is a very difficult problem. We obviously aren't going to just empty our prisons tomorrow. But we should all be thinking about what kind of society we want to live in and how we might make progress towards that vision. In many ways, even wealthy America is already beginning to feel like a luxury penal colony. The existence of the brutal penal colonies distracts us from that fact. I want safer cities and communities than what we presently have, but I don't believe that our current incarceration system is effectively getting us there, even if it looks somewhat effective compared to Argentina. Even then though, I ask at what cost? Do "criminals" not matter at all? I think they do, even if they have committed crimes. If you actually believe that there is a large class of people who are inherently worse than others, you should really think through what the implications might be. |