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by thrownaway2424 4308 days ago
That's about the stupidest thing I've heard in a while, so stupid I have to assume it's sarcasm. Of course the great state experiment is how we got here in the first place. Reagan, as governor, defunded mental health care and just said fuckit, throw all the addicts in prison. Then he took his ideas "to prod" by doubling down on Nixon's "war", with the helpful (to his party) side-effect of throwing millions of black people in prisons.
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calibraxis 4308 days ago
As personally attacking as this post is (though the anger is perfectly understandable), it's probably closest to my view, mentioning "the helpful (to his party) side-effect of throwing millions of black people in prisons."

Except I don't consider it a side-effect, nor do I think it's limited to Republicans. For example, prison was one way to control the newly freed slave population. (http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/199804--.htm) Being the world's biggest jailer isn't exactly an "oops" thing.

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kirsebaer 4308 days ago
John Ehrlichman, Counsel and Assistant to President Nixon:

"You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Interviewed in 1992 by journalist Dan Baum, author of Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, full quote in "Truth, Lies, and Audiotape" by Dan Baum (2012).

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bashinator 4308 days ago
I find it very telling that prisoners are specifically excepted from the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution.

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

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