Posted on 06/29/2015 8:40:26 AM PDT by Academiadotorg
Professors who rail against the imprisonment of blacks rarely show as much interest in black victims of crime. “In 1980, there were 500,000 Americans in prison or jail,” Jason Stanley writes in The Chronicle Review. “By 2013, there were more than 2.3 million.” “The explosion in incarceration has fallen disproportionately on the descendants of slaves. White Americans are 77 percent of the U.S. population, and black Americans 13 percent. Yet more blacks are incarcerated than whites.”
Stanley is a philosophy professor at Yale. His conclusions resemble those of 20 scholars who recently completed a study under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences.
Actually, the U. S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, in then-Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department, found in 2013 that “In 2011 (the most recent data available), the majority (53 percent) of sentenced state prisoners were serving time for a violent offense, including robbery (14 percent), murder or nonnegligent manslaughter (12 percent), rape or sexual assault (12 percent) and aggravated or simple assault (10 percent). About 18 percent were serving time for property offenses, 17 percent for drug crimes and 11 percent for public order offenses, such as weapon violations, drunk driving, commercialized vice and court offenses.”
“White prisoners comprised 35 percent of the 2011 state prison population, while black prisoners were 38 percent and Hispanics were 21 percent.”
Meanwhile, the FBI Uniform Crime Reports of 2012 showed that blacks made up about 44 percent of all murder victims, about 91 percent of whom were killed by other blacks.
Why don’t you put them up in your house, Prof old boy.
Harsher sentences which we would hear affects blacks the most, would, at the same time, actually save untold black victims.
Fill empty prisons with professors.
Here’s a thought. Keep dangerous criminals behind bars and put those who aren’t dangerous onto community service or something.
Remember the phase before total collapse into anarchy is "settling scores".....and it won't be pretty.
Maybe we could institute a program to allow professors to serve out the time for a convict of their choice.
30% of our prisoners are illegal immigrants, so our incarceration rate is inflated by people who should be in jail in Mexico and Central America
We cut the number of mental health beds to a fraction of the total of the 1950s though the population has grown. Many of those in jail should be in psychiatric institutions instead of jail, but there is no where else to house them.
When the mentally ill and illegal aliens inflate your numbers, the numbers look far worse than they really are.
Close to 30% are non-citizens. That does not mean they are all illegal immigrants. A number of them are in legally but are in prison for other offenses like murder, robbery, etc.
Hey, we're impressed with your acronyms. It's too bad that very few people have a clue what you are trying to communicate.
When the descendants of slaves murder each other at a rate that is several times higher than the rate at which those who descended from their owners, then maybe leftist have to stretch further and further to explain in in terms of their “oppression narrative”.
Now, if it is the fact that over 70% of black boys don’t have a father figure in the home, the remedy is obvious. But just try to suggest that black women need to be married mothers and black men need to be married fathers, and just watch our professor friend here flop around in apoplexy at the very idea.
Why Have Penitentiaries Anyway?
Most people realize that the court and penal systems in North America are seriously broken and must be fixed, yet contemplating doing away with penitentiaries sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Barely 200 years ago, an experiment began which has cost us untold billions of dollars. Just last year, this experiment resulted in 1.4 million adults incarcerated in federal and state penitentiaries (a figure which has quadrupled since 1980) at a cost of nearly $40,000 each.
As Alan Elsner pointed out in a recent Washington Post article, 2.2 million people are engaged in catching criminals and putting and keeping them behind bars, and “corrections” has become one of the largest sectors of the U.S. economy, employing more people than the combined workforces of General Motors, Ford and Wal-Mart, the three biggest corporate employers in the country. In many “prison town” counties, the number one employer is the Department of Corrections. This is a staggering expense of over $50 billion, an amount that increases by additional billions for each year of the last 25 years of explosive prison growth. As the prison population ages, the taxpayer is paying for medical procedures he can’t afford for himself, and the victims of these criminals realize no compensation at all.
Few realize that the first penitentiary in the world was founded in Philadelphia in 1792. Jails had always existed for the purpose of holding the accused until trial, after which the guilty would pay a fine, make restitution to the victim, be banished, be executed, etc. However, the concept of warehousing criminals to cause them to repent was entirely new.
Imagine a criminal justice system where penitentiaries didn’t even exist, but where a person paid for his crimes rather than having society pay to keep him incarcerated.
One such nation existed. If you stole someone’s property, say a sheep, and were caught with the animal in your possession, you repaid the victim with two sheep, but you didn’t go to a penitentiary. The victim also got a financial settlement, satisfying the desire for victim restitution in our time.
If you sold the stolen sheep, thereby being more involved in the crime, you paid the victim four sheep.
If you committed a capital crime, (murder, rape, kidnapping, etc.) you paid with your life, but you didn’t go to a penitentiary. Such facilities didn’t exist in this nation. They were not needed.
Such a system would completely do away with our newest growth industry, penitentiaries, and restore the victim of crime financially.
I’m not going to tell you where I got the idea for this system, but it’s from a reliable source. Of course, it will never happen here because a powerful lobby has grown up around the prison system that will fight hard to protect the status quo. Correction officers have formed powerful labor unions, and their financial contributions to our politicians will easily outweigh the will of the people. I know, I know, I’m such a young man to be so cynical.
what a wonderfully proactive step that would be
It seems almost invariably that violent criminals are usually free from some previous sentencing that should have kept them locked up, or they are “awaiting trial” on some other charge.
Just to give them a fair chance in society.
I guess those would be exceptions to the rule?
I am all for executing murderers, rapists, pedophiles, horse thieves, financial swindlers, and the like.
That would leave us without most of the staff in our government offices. What ever would we do ?
Just wait until the Supreme Court applies the standard of “disparate impact” to prisons. Any prison which has a higher percentage of black prisoners than the black share of the general population will be guilty of civil rights violations and be required to release “prisoners of color” until the ratios match. What to do with the empty cells? Put conservatives guilty of “thought crimes” there.
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