Okay, I see I was tagged.
The prison industrial complex is extraordinarily complicated.
A single study statistic or metric does not say much.
The system as a whole has to be analyzed and it has been many times in many different ways.
Spot analysis of known problematic areas is limited usefulness because of their own complications: you can no more use Chicago, Illinois as an example of anything as you could New York City or Florida or Pennsylvania : they are big and complicated with their own histories that are distinctive and their own political connections and backstabbings and family squabbles that go back for Generations
But : too Simple Solutions tend to lead to bigger problems.
In the 1990s, the Broken Window Theory was very popular.
The idea was if you very strict with the smallest of crimes it will prevent the bigger crimes
Long story short it was a miserable failure repeatedly
On the other hand you have some over eager politicized revolving door policies that lack the necessary outer social programs required for that type of a thing to be successful.
I can dig up successes that have stayed and I could easily dig up failures that have stayed
Now I will share my area of concern in this:
Prison is a second Society in the US
There are a lot of people looking to make a lot of money off of this second Society and do.
There is a school to prison Pipeline and a prison industrial complex and there’s No question about these anymore : it wasn’t that long ago that it was controversial to even suggest such a scheme was active, much like the idea of pharmaceutical companies overcharging people or the American healthcare system being fundamentally flawed : such ideas were anathema.
Now it’s a little more open we talked about and we have a lot of experience with the dangers of privatizing Prisons that we didn’t have 30 years ago.
You will always find sad stories of people who are victims of “the other party’s” policies.
Excess is on both sides need to be curtailed but :
It’s important to ask what ways (outside of the explicitly stated) are the individuals benefiting that are promoting one perspective or another?
Of this I’m not speaking about you and I am talking about people in positions of power that are funding or pushing various perspectives
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