I’ve cut some of your text, stuff that was more fact-based, that one would not object to the data. But responded in red.
So this post is going to be a long one, buckle up. But first, a couple of disclaimers:
[*]The focus of my paper was on the crippling effect mass incarceration has on black Americans, so that is the focus of this post as well. But mass incarceration affects all Americans and the points I will try to explain apply to all Americans as well.
I’d be interested to read your paper if you were willing to share. Lmk.
Mass incarceration and how we got to the point we are at basically boils down to two ideas regarding the purposes of criminal justice: retribution or rehabilitation. If you feel that the criminal justice system should bring about retributive justice (i.e., an eye for an eye), you likely don't feel that there is anything wrong with the criminal justice system as is other than the backlogs in the court prevent more people from going to prison. The goal of the system is to restore justice to the victim who was wronged and that usually has strict statutory punishments that are meted out according to charges brought against a defendant. On the other hand, rehabilitative justice seeks to (obviously) rehabilitate the offender through proactive measures (e.g., drug treatment programs, anger management, mental health facilities, etc.) aimed toward returning the offender to society a better person that is not likely to commit further crimes. I am firmly in the latter camp and that should be known before I get into the nitty gritty of the rest of this post.
Can you expand on this paragraph? I don’t find it sufficiently addressed the “how we got to the point we are at?” question. The dichotomy of retributive/rehabilitative doesn’t seem to speak to the broader social and political conditions that gave rise to the PIC.
The two biggest issues that I found in my research regarding mass incarceration recently were disproportionate targeting of minorities by U.S. police departments and the criminalization of poverty. Now, these two issues are interrelated and can compound quite quickly.
But to start, I will focus on what I believe is the primary reason that mass incarceration is such a problem and that is the disproportionate targeting.
I think what abolitionists try to get at is a core argument that it is 2019 and literally none of the reforms we have tried in our criminal justice system have worked in rooting out racial disparities. How many decades now have we done the “police bias training” as a reform? How has it worked? Abolitionists would say policing and incarceration are inherent to capitalism and are inherently white supremacist institutions and that you can’t “reform” the racism out of individual officers without addressing the institutionalized racism.
I’ll share some resources later when I respond to other posts, but the first state police force was in Pennsylvania and was modeled after our colonialist occupation of the Philippines. But it just violently put down labor strikes and didn’t solve any crime.
Early police forces were usually just used to suppress labor activism, and they were crooked as fuck. By any historical analysis they were derived both from the legacy of slave catchers and to explicitly serve the interests of the capitalist class.
So if you wouldn’t mind digging deeper and answering why you think these racial disparities exist today. What reforms do you believe will work in removing racial disparities?
Is “disproportionate targeting” driving the cause of mass incarceration? Or is “disproportionate targeting” one of the many ways the PIC operates?
In the interest of not completely boring you all with additional issues such as the disparate treatment of minorities in plea bargaining and the overcharging of court fees to even indigent defendants, I'll stop here. But the bottom line is this: until cash bail is totally eliminated from the criminal justice system, there will continue to be a mass incarceration crisis in this country.
I’d be interested if you could share an answer to one of my original questions. What does ending mass incarceration mean? What levels of incarceration would be sufficient to you?
If you have any additional questions related to this post or if you all would like to hear more about other issues I researched, please let me know. More than happy to share.