You must log in or register to comment.
Spoiler: they don’t actually want crime to go down
They want to punish the people they don’t like, not reduce crime.
They don’t even really care about punishment, I’d say the real driver for the prison system is just the need for labor and the loophole of enslavement. Most of the plantations that were major holders of slaves are now prisons after all.
I hate the prison industrial complex as much as the next guy, but, you gotta sauce on plantations to prisons?
Lmao, my bad on not getting back to you, but the other feller’s link is pretty much a good summary. Adding a few though because that article doesn’t list which ones have undergone the evolution, lol.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/05/01/prison-plantations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_farm
https://daily.jstor.org/slavery-and-the-modern-day-prison-plantation/
https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-prison-plantations/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/5-ways-prisoners-were-used-for-profit-throughout-u-s-history
Our government loves to use what it has in terms of resources for as close to free as it can manage. From a purely Machiavellian and pragmatic perspective, it’s sensible, even if it’s utterly reprehensible.
Okay, yeah, I knew about that. State pen where I grew up was a farm. The majority of plantations didn’t become prisons, it doesn’t take that many people to farm anymore. Modern farming is often a high skill job driving heavy equipment.
A few plantations became prisons, but the majority didn’t. Slavery is totally okay, by the constitution, for prisoners. Too bad they didn’t put in anything about rehabilitation.
When I said “major holders” I meant some of the Largest plantations were converted, rather than a majority of All plantations, sorry for not being clearer. I would agree that they genuinely don’t need as much labor due to ag-science development. However, I was also trying to convey what this map https://pudding.cool/2017/01/shape-of-slavery/ shows in words. The main theme of “which plantations” got converted mostly has to do with soil quality due to the Mississippi River delta over eons than it does with race or useful and efficient placement of reform facilities. Sorry for not thinking to go find the map yesterday, lol. (Also upon review this isn’t even the map I thought it was, though pertinent and I may add more, lol.)
Prisoners are legally allowed to be enslaved. Which is not great, even though I understand the motive. It’s been pretty well proven that punitive incarceration is bad for the individual and society. Remove punishment from the equation and slavery is not justifiable.
Most plantations continued to be farmland, some plantation houses still exist but wood maintenance in the south is a lot. Some of the old plantations overlap with prison farms. Most of the farm system has been shutdown as it isn’t economical.
Anyhow, yeah. The US has a huge incarcerated population, mostly black/Hispanic minorities, they are used for profit by enslavement.
They want people to associate African Americans with drugs, Latin Americans and Hispanics with rapes, transpeople with pedophilia, and Leftists with disorderly conduct in order to have excuses to arrest these people.
It’s why they take an “Aww shucks” attitude everytime a Right Winger shoots up a Kindergarten, they don’t want that connection being made
As an outside observer it seems like American police culture is fundamentally rotten and it’s not a funding issue.
What’s cool is they are exporting it. The cops where you are look up to the American style. When the American cops retire, they will be hired to train your cops with seminars and books. Its a fun little community. So you’re an outsider, but not for long. Just a few more years of passively waiting and you will be an insider soon.
If I recall the vast majority of crime is property crime and if you remove property concerns that crime drops.
Pay attention to what we do whenever you see policy announcements as that gives a clear picture of what we want.
If you think you’re altruistic ass (not necessarily yours specifically) is different, you’re still a part of the machine that wants this. If you’re legit disgusted by it work from within to change it.
“Be the change you want to see in the world” is contrived as shit but it’s true.
I’m literally being as belligerent as I can already!
Don’t be belligerent you attract more bears with honey.
Can we be real? Police do not reduce crime.
Police punish criminals, or rather, they punish those that they think are criminals, since everyone is innocent until proven guilty (also the reason you shouldn’t argue, fight with, nor run from cops… They can charge you with crimes like evading arrest, even if the arrest is unlawful, resisting arrest, or assault on a “peace officer”… Justice does not come from police action, it comes from the actions of the court)…
Police usually show up, and/or take action after crimes have been committed, not before.
If you want effective crime prevention, there are plenty of good studies that prove what works, and putting more police on the streets, and giving them better and better arsenals is not on that list.
From social programs to “handouts” for healthcare and basics like food and shelter, among so many more proven tactics, can significantly reduce crime rates.
Giving the police money under the guise of reducing crime or being tough on crime is just political spin. What they’re trying to do is funnel public dollars to their friends who make the equipment that the police use. Vests, weapons, radios, vehicles, you name it. More police means that police departments need more equipment to supply everyone.
These fuckers in government are serving themselves and their fat cat friends, not the public interest. The worst part is, that many believe their shit and think that it’s for the public good to give the police more money.
That’s the real problem here, ignorance. But again, that’s what the fat cats want. The majority to be just stupid enough to believe whatever they’re told and do no further investigation… To have faith in liars, thieves and cheats.
What they’re trying to do is funnel public dollars to their friends who make the equipment that the police use.
Don’t forget funnelling a steady stream of prisoners into their corporate prison system…
Also criminalizing any political opponents…
Same idea, different context.
They’re still funneling public money to their friends, just the friends that run the for-profit prisons.
They’re happy to criminalize anyone and everyone they can. That’s the entire point of the police “service”.
“To protect and serve” is incomplete. It’s more like “to protect and serve corporate interests and profits”
In a normal state of things the police doesn’t decide who is a criminal, the justice system does and that should be separated from the government. Sadly there are more and more corrupt countries these days. But yeah giving them more money for anything else than to get more/better personel doesn’t help.
In a normal state, yes.
I don’t think anyone confuses what’s happening in the USA in recent years to anything that should be considered “normal”.
The fact is, the Justice system relies on the investigative work of the police and other law enforcement agencies, in order to collect the evidence and reconstruct events, then accuse the likely perpetrator.
… Except the law enforcement agencies are filled with people, and people suck. So 9 out of 10 times, people will “follow their gut” and look for evidence that supports what they think happened, and ignore any that doesn’t. So only evidence that supports their conclusion is presented to the Justice system, everything else is discarded… Even if some of those discards prove that the accused is not guilty.
The problem is that the Justice system is reading from the LEO’s story book, so when law enforcement writes fiction, the Justice system has no real way to prove that it’s not fact… Not without the accused throwing literally thousands of dollars into the effort of defending themselves.
Therefore, Justice gets served for those with the means to defend themselves, for everyone else, you’ll take whatever the LEO’s think you deserve.
That’s all great. But imagine being in the desert and knowing where an oasis is but just not telling any one about it. We all know this information on the left. We repeat it like crows cawing to each other. But we don’t pass it a long. So unless we get better at sharing our views in a modern online world, all this information is not worth jack fucking shit. And sharing this information is not just reciting it verbatim in a comment in a forum among everyone that already knows this. Unless that’s what we’re really after. Pats on the back from people who agree with us.
I’m not going to argue with you that discussions on left-leaning sites and forums is basically preaching to the choir, but at the same time, I would expect every person participating in the discussion to carry their viewpoint into discussions with those that are not in this echo chamber.
Your views seem overly pessimistic about what the participants here do when they’re not here.
The circle jerk is definitely real, and I acknowledge it. At the same time though, to go along with your comment, we need to develop ways to actually bridge the gap. A lot, and in my experience most, of right leaning ignorant types are so hard set in their bullshit they won’t listen. Deep set propaganda channels on the right are so engrained they refuse to take any information outside of it. Granted I understand my area is a bit worse as I’m deep in a red state, but it’s disheartening as fuck. Not trying to be absolutist, I get there’s always a way, just fuck if I know what it is.
In my experience, it all comes down to presentation. Most die-hard Trump supporters aren’t as locked into their beliefs as people assume. But when we approach them waving the typical “leftist” flag, their defenses immediately go up.
I’ve had plenty of honest conversations where, if you avoid the usual framing, many of them actually agree with progressive policies. But you can’t come at them swinging it shuts everything down.
They’re not dumb, racist caricatures they’re people, just like anyone else. One of the right’s biggest strengths is building a shield that prevents our ideas from even reaching them. We need to ask: Why is so much effort spent on keeping our perspectives from mixing?
There is a lot of money and effort among the right wing party to antagonize the left to become more aggressive and hateful of the right. And we fall for it constantly. We’re trained to meet them with hostility, and that aggression plays right into the system’s hands. It doesn’t have to be that way. We should be discussing to understand their point of view and finding solutions for how the information we know can be used to open them up more to ours.
Best I can do is militarized police
To address this problem, we need to fundamentally revisit the idea of the social contract. Even the definition of crime today feels outdated almost archaic. If you look into your country’s penal code, you’ll likely find absurd and antiquated laws that have no place in a modern society.
The deeper issue is this: most legal systems are still grounded in Victorian moralism, Puritan ideals that glorify work and wealth, and a liberal ethical framework that collapses under its own contradictions. Trying to solve complex structural violence with these tools just makes things worse.
The problem isn’t just systemic it’s internal. As long as we defend our comfort zones like fragile sandcastles, thinking “as long as I’m safe and untouched” (aka “I’ve got mine, so screw the rest”), then we will continue to see public resources diverted—not toward justice or equality—but recycled back at us as institutional violence.
F.e. the current Dutch penal code was accept in 1881. Thats 144 years ago.
Part of the issue is that we are mostly stuck in an economic structure that cannot continue forever unless everybody partakes. Getting more wages every year, getting more revenue and profit every year, just doesn’t work for eternity. In theory, if everybody got their 2%$ wage increases and interest was just 2% a year (excluding promotions or corrections for pas years etc) it would be fine.
The circular economy theory is one of those theories that attempts to fix that AND also work on helping the repair, reuse, recycle movement.
It’s almost like their highest priority isn’t lowering crime.
Chaos, artificial scarcity, and violence feeds the system and justifies its existence.
Otherwise, why would we still have a mass incarceration system? Why is it still punitive in nature with terrible and inhumane conditions normalized?
A cycle is created that makes people unemployable and industries and those in power reap the benefits at every stage of these people’s lives - any police contact is effectively a scarlet letter. Specifically, many corporations benefit from the slave labor sourced from prisons and the private prison industry is its own can of worms.
With AI tooling screening job applicants with proprietary criteria, public data brokers, mass surveillance disguised as “adtech”, people search websites, social media (where people have a tendency to overshare personal details), systematic reporting of arrest records/etc. in newspapers (generally with no updates to reflect the person’s current situation); you can literally be unemployable in the US with no conviction or crimes that have been expunged or sealed.
If you have a felony or misdemeanor on your record - good fucking luck getting a job in today’s market - background checks are normalized and are extremely accessible to employers. It’s no wonder why people turn to crime to exist, discrimination is effectively legalized - there is insufficient regulation and protections for job applicants.
The only way to prevent crime is to rehabilitate those who commit crime and to provide services to enrich people’s lives before they would otherwise commit crime. We also need to respect people’s privacy upon rehabilitation - we shouldn’t be permanently labeling (or dehumanizing) those deemed to be fit to return to society (e.g. people that aren’t violent or who aren’t a threat). We have to give them a path to participate in society.
I’m not disagreeing with this necessarily, but I don’t like seeing a post by an account I have no idea about stating something as scientific fact, and then having that post taken as fact point blank. Once again, not trying to say what she is saying is incorrect, I just get concerned when I see bandwagoning on some random person’s take.
That said, if you find the studies on this, please please please do us all a favor and comment those!
Here’s a decent meta-analysis you can start with.
Sixteen reviews met the inclusion criteria. The reviews were comprised of nine peer-reviewed articles and reports from systematic review databases, five technical reports, and two working papers. Table 1 shows the reviews organized by objectives and geography
Well done and thank you.
Awesome, love this.
I wish this was the post or at least linked.
I’m disappointed that your link was not a rickcroll.
There is a mountain of evidence and everything she says is common knowledge at this point to anyone who has spent even a few minutes looking it up. You can just use you favorite search engine to see for yourself.
You really just come off sounding aloof and uninformed. What evidence!? When you are swimming in a sea surrounded by it.
Sorry I was too busy yelling at other people on other threads.
But also my concern was about the reaction to the post, not necessarily the post itself, though the two are connected
Fair enough, I can see your concern.
doesn’t protect private property though because that money might give poor people strength and power and we can’t have the rubes having that now, can we? :(
They’re not giving the police money. They’re giving the people who supply the police more money. Which are their people
More crime also means more slave labour and more equipment sales
As always the real problem is laziness. Why create new systems when we can ad hoc the current system? Sure it was never meant to do that thing but our short term goals are way more important than any long term goal you can think of.
Crime goes down when police do less crime. Less police = less crime.
Given police crime When police funding is decreased by 50 percent Then police crime decreases by 50 percent
The reason no one in a suit cares is because most of the voting monkeys don’t care because they lack the capacity to understand.
This is what’s so wack about society to me. We’ve got a side promising to give police more money and a side promising to give poor people some money and people will literally choose the former because they don’t believe the latter.
But giving poor people money is a crime, it encourages people to become/stay poor
/S
What if we all became cops? We get universal income? Lol
Sounds like the Hue & cry system.
