cue the construction of private contract prisons
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My first thoughts were “wouldn’t the cops just shoot him for refusing?”
I hate this world they have made for us.
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This is all about drug laws being used to deny voting rights to the black and Latino communities, who vote almost purely anti-Republican. Felons of color almost never get their right to vote returned to them, even in states where it is supposed to be mandatory.
So, this is about millions and millions of votes being suppressed forever. By Republicans. Again.
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While that is one of the results, I don’t honestly think that was the plan. I think it was a desperate grab to try to reduce the crime rate that started going up in the 80s and continued up until the 90s. Though it doesn’t look like those laws actually did anything to lower the crime rate.
Crime rates that were influenced heavily by the pumped up ‘War on Drugs’ started by Nixon in the 70’s. Soooo there’s that. And to be sure, no one’s ever accused the gov’t of feeding the supply lines…
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Well, to be fair Dump did promise to build new infrastructure.
It makes the ladies hot and bothered.
Boomer criminals got old, jailed, or dead (or all three).
Here’s a thought or three: there are 74.9 million in the Boomer cohort. They are now outnumbered by Millennials (75.4 million), and that’s projected to top out at 81 million in 2036 (the age cohort includes immigrants). Which means that based on demographics alone - the raw percentage of a population at an age most likely to do the criminal thing - we’re set for an uptick in crime of all sorts. Gun violence has already ticked up after a steady two-decade+ decline (the fresh data is still coming in - the trend might be developing, though not quite the sudden “epidemic” the media and certain segments of the ruling class have been trying to push).
But the perception of crime rates - fueled by an “If it bleeds it leads” philosophy of news production across all formats and from all viewpoints - hasn’t kept pace with the reality. E.g., “57% of registered voters said crime had gotten worse since 2008, even though BJS and FBI data show that violent and property crime rates declined by double-digit percentages during that span.”
People already think crime is much worse than it is. So any actual uptick is going to result in widespread support of a disproportionate response.
And that’s because too many people don’t know how to think critically about the media they stuff into their heads all day, don’t examine their beliefs and how they’ve arrived at their conclusions, and in general are overwhelmed by a daily deluge of news-style imagery and curated information, the cumulative effect of which is to keep them feeling afraid, deprived, and weak, no matter how sheltered, prosperous, or healthy they actually are.
Whether that’s a wide-ranging deliberate plan or just humans being shitty in groups because they evolved from asshole primates is an open question, imo.
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Eh - which crimes? Murder and assault and the like? I would agree the War on Drugs made it worse. Just like prohibition saw the rise of the “gangster” and the mob. Just like when prohibition was repealed, the reason to shoot at cops and other people to run booze disappeared. Street gangs get their power from money. They get their money largely from the drug trade. Make drugs and prostitution legal, you take away the main reason to partake in a game or crime in general.
Yep. We are living in some of the safest times in human history. And I have my exwife paranoid that my kid will get snatched, as there is supposedly a child abduction ring in KC.
The time to do that was the day before the Presidential election. Check out the stock chart for the Corrections Corporation of America (now called “CoreCivic”), one of the saddest artifacts of this whole Trump debacle - stock plunges as Obama administration makes moves to stop using private prisons after the expose in Mother Jones; blows up on the day after the election and has been climbing since.
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Strongly suspect Jefferson spells it “marihuana”
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The marihuana.
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I wish the United States would introduce long mandatory prison sentence for the crime of being Jeff Sessions.
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It’s a far more complex problem than linking drugs to specific types of crime. If you haven’t, I’d suggest reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, which for my money is hands down the best systemic analysis of the war on drugs.
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This son of a bitch has got to go.
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king cannut, whipping those waves.
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There is no way this isn’t a racist agenda, racial and class targeting is the only thing these types laws have ever achieved. This administration has been very boldly racist on multiple occasions. 
That alone should be enough to get the lot of them fired immediately. How is it not?
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For Sessions, the imprisonment is just a happy side-effect.
His actual goal is disenfranchisement of demographic groups that will never vote Republican.
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This is nothing else but an endless fight to maintain slavery. People have their freedom taken away from them and are forced to perform labour for next to nothing for no other reason than that they have been walking around with the wrong skin color. How can this be described as anything other than slavery? The Civil War never ended. Most of these places are even still flying their stupid flag.
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On a positive note, there are a lot of states where it’s going to be damned near impossible to get 12 people to convict you of something that 7 of them don’t think should be a crime in the first place.
That is what killed alcohol prohibition, IIRC.
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