Farm bill will deny food assistance to 100,000 formerly incarcerated individuals

Can they still buy guns?

I really wish our prison system would make the switch from “punish while in prison, and to a lesser degree forever after” to “rehabilitation”. I don’t have a ton of sympathy for violent offenders, but if we’re not even going to try to reintegrate them back into society and give them a second chance, releasing them at all is a bad idea.

This is the fascist response to the welfare state, BTW. Maintain benefits for certain people, but define that group so as to exclude all but the in-group.

Expect similar for healthcare etc.

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Surprised? It seems to me that the effect that you describe is actually the motivation for the bill.

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No, not surprised. As you say, it’s definitely a feature, not flaw. Anybody who’s surprised by Republican hostility toward everyone other than straight, Christian, cisgender, white males hasn’t been paying attention.

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I wouldn’t expect the fact that this is a fucking abomination to slow Republicans’ roll.

I do find it amazing, though, that the one-percenters who dictate GOP fiscal policy think this is a smart deal for them. You do realize you’re talking about unincarcerated violent criminals, right? And that the contents of your home are worth many years of food stamps? Why not just wear a T-shirt that says “please cook and eat me”?

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And really…taking people with a proven history of violence and denying them food…I mean there’s no way THAT is going to end badly.

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That’s what Southern states have already done with blacks; they create police records for horrible behavior like running in the halls (in grade school), then throw the maximum charges at them for things that an officer would let whites off with a warning. Usually there’s someone waiting when they are released from prison to arrest them and plant contraband on them.

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Sam Winston asks “Can they still buy guns?”
They can still buy guns if they have the right contacts. And the guns will have the serial numbers filed off.

:musical_note: So we shake our arse and dance
As if racism just upped and vanished
But has it? No it’s right on course
You’re beaten so bad, you’re trained to ignore
Let me not just make sweeping statements
Gimme a second, I’ll explain it
For small amounts of drug possession there’s more black people in jail in America
than there is for rape and armed robbery and murder all put together
You can say they’re just locking up thugs,
Imagine if they locked up every middle class kid that had ever held drugs,
Oh that’s right, that’d be your kids!

Bigger than that what is going on with this,
Prison in America’s a private business
They get paid 50k per year per inmate by the State, just wait…
Also legally are allowed to use their prison inmates as slaves
Cheap slave labour, big corporations
They come out of jail, can’t get a job
So when we celebrate going to jail,
We are LITERALLY CELEBRATING ENSLAVEMENT
Add to that, that the hood that you’re livin’
Engineered social condition that breeds crime by design
Where do you think you get your nine?

You can say that they’re just Black,
But I like to deal with facts
In the 1920s you would’ve found in America
Black towns,
Prospering centres of economics and education to make you proud
But some people couldn’t bear
that the former slaves would not just lie down
So the KKK and other hate groups burnt
those towns to the ground
Killin hundreds,
If it ain’t understood,
You think you were always livin’ in the hood? :musical_note:

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I was wondering, and its a kneejerk reaction of mine, why the State doesnt offer assisted suicide to inmates at this point (well apart from the profit motiv) - US prisons and the time after with all the public shaming and such looks more and more like tor … enhanced incarceration and in the long run it would be “cheaper” for the state.

That being said: Suicide is preventable, if you are in bad place call your local mental health line and go to a psychiatrists/Therapists. Selfhelp groups exists to help with depression and problems that lead to that.

Coming up next soon: GOP bill that will make shooting poor people for sport legal.

Yes, but…

Keep in mind that private prisons are not the core of the problem. They’re a relatively minor factor.

All American prisons are for profit. They all provide slave labour to corporations.

There are also factors to consider regarding the economic exploitation involved in taking poor & disproportionately Black urban prisoners and using their incarceration to justify employment for white suburban/rural districts. Plus stolen representation (disenfranchised urban prisoners counting in the census for the suburban/rural districts of their prisons rather than their homes), etc.

The public prisons are just as bad as the private ones.

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Good title.
Dang.
I was about to go with “Less Miserables” (to make the point about Cult45’s policies in action) but the grammarian in me kept saying “fewer! it’s fewer! not ‘less’!” so I think yours is today’s depressing depressing winner.

And if only someone could write some speculative fiction books, perhaps a trilogy, about a population living in a place resembling something like U.S., wherein a series of… oh… highly publicized survival stunts


(alarming bonus: now a series in quite a few countries… I consider all these to be mere pilot series for what could possibly come next from the marketing genius TV programmers)

disguised as games or something… would be performed to the death by unwilling “volunteers” for the amusement of the ruling class as a means to feed the starving in his or her home province.

(sigh)

I went looking for the quote, but it doesn’t seem to have a consistent source(most are UK-based, including Red Dwarf), “We are (2-9) (hot) meals away from anarchy.”

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That’s actually pretty clever, too. My bad about harshing your mellow, my humor is often dark.

Oh?

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I think @jmcgarry was referring to the quote they tried to approximate. I.e., “A society is only three meals away from anarchy.”
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquote:Reference_desk/Archive/2#A_society_is_only_three_meals_away_from_anarchy

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Sorry I wasn’t clear. Not the quote from the song, but instead the quote that is my response. Apologies for the confusion.

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Yes, thanks. I wasn’t as clear as I had hoped to be.

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Ah, I see.

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