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Why Are There So Many Prisoners in the US?

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Clarissa

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Because it’s a model nation-state that cares about the well-being of its population. Many places in the world never became mature nation-states, so they don’t bother to punish crimes. Many others did achieve it but then started dismantling their nation-state institutions and letting criminals out with minimum sentences or refusing to incarcerate altogether.

If all countries took its obligations to its citizens as seriously as the US, we’d see comparable and higher incarceration rates everywhere.

The resistance you feel towards the positive description of the US I’m giving in this post was implanted into you with the specific purpose of dismantling these nation-state protections that the US possesses.

18 responses to “Why Are There So Many Prisoners in the US?”

  1. mosckerr Avatar
    mosckerr

    White slavery goes hand in glove with racial prisons where most people jailed – Black. Prison labor = gulag labor made famous by Stalin and Mao.

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  2. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    There’s also this misguided liberal (but I repeat myself) argument that tougher punishment doesn’t deter crime so let’s do away with harsher sentences. To me that’s an argument to do exactly the opposite. If no amount of punishment can deter some people from committing crimes, then those people definitely need to be jailed forever. They’re not fit to participate in society!

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Yes, the argument is that jail doesn’t rehabilitate, so it has no purpose. As if punishment and deterrence were somehow less important.

      No, you can’t change people. But you can lock them up so they don’t commit more crime at least for a while.

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      1. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        My sister was attacked on the job, and permanently injured (she walks with a cane now), by a man who should have been locked up, having already violently assaulted at least two other people. One of them was his own mother, who refused to press charges, and the other got suckered into the “oh, he’s mentally ill, he needs *treatment*” BS. What actually happens, is they put him in temporary MH lockup, medicate him, and once he’s doing better they let him go, he goes off his meds, and he attacks someone else. Yes, violent people should be locked up. Particularly if they are not mentally sound.

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  3. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Are you serious or are you playing Devil’s advocate?

    I’d say higher rates of incarceration reflect higher crime rates. But then it becomes very difficult to claim that the US version of the nation-state is working particularly well. And one will have to ask why the crime rate is high… (And the answer may not be “racism”, it may well be “illegal immigration”, but then one will have to ask in whose interests it is occurring…)

    v07

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      The incarceration rates are driven by African Americans.

      African Americans commit between 9 to 11 times more violent crime than whites; Hispanics commit between 2 to 3 times more than whites; and the Asian arrest rate for violent crime is so low as to be statistically insignificant. So yes, definitely not racism.

      Within this reality, the fact that arrests and incarceration are high is a good sign. The overwhelming majority of the incarcerated are in jail for a violent crime. It’s a good thing that violent criminals do get incarcerated.

      I highly recommend Charles Murray’s book Facing Reality for these and other enlightening numbers.

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      1. Avatar
        Anonymous

        Sure, but I still remember another discussion we had on this very blog about how recent black immigrants are doing much better than US-born blacks. So there actually is something about growing black in the US.

        Which brings us to the issue of the nation-state. Maybe I understood Andersen too literally, but “nation state” is among other thins about solidarity with fellow countrymen outside of one’s immediate community. On that metric the US never was a strong nation-state. There is tremendous level of solidarity and help and charity within the communities, but once people think of people in other communities, who are too different, the libertarianism kicks in and other peoples problems become “their own fault”…

        v07

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      2. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        Now do stats about violent crime in people raised in two-parent homes vs. one-parent homes.

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        1. Avatar
          Anonymous

          Sure, I do not dispute any statistics. I have a problem with people believing that any cause and effect relationship should have only one step.

          Blacks show higher crime – there is something inherently wrong with blacks (it is their own fault).

          Blacks have higher family breakdown rate - there is something inherently wrong with blacks (it is their own fault).

          What about an alternative hypothesis -that there is something wrong with something else and the above are the effects, not the cause? Does not have to be a one-step-but-leftwing hypothesis (because racism), but the above one-step hypotheses are very… unsatisfying intellectually.

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        2. Demotrash Avatar
          Demotrash

          I doubt that Clarissa of all people would deny the importance of children having their mother and father. Indeed, I imagine high rates of single parenthood could be part of what’s driving high crime rates among black Americans.

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      3. Demotrash Avatar
        Demotrash

        Interestingly, every racial group, even Asians, has a higher crime rate than the same groups do in other countries. I think this is because Americans are a fiery, hot blooded people. This is difficult to change, and if this could be changed, it would probably have other downstream effects that aren’t so good. So I’m inclined to accept this aspect of American culture and accept that we need our prisons.

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  4. methylethyl Avatar
    methylethyl

    Yes, absolutely. I do think we should do more to sort out the problem of disparate punishments for certain crimes. Things like DUI (even a DUI where you end up killing someone) end up being two-tiered justice with different punishments depending on how much money you’ve got. IMO more celebs and lawyers should go to jail for that, just like everyone else, instead of being able to weasel out by paying fines. It’s not enough of a deterrent. On the other hand, there are a lot of dumb things that poor people go to jail for because they can’t pay the fines, and the wealthy simply ignore because the fines are no deterrent– stuff like dog licensing failure, driving with suspended licenses, petty vandalism… IMO nobody should go to jail for those. It’s a waste of resources. We should bring back stocks and public caning for that level of offense and be prompt with the serving of the sentence– again, no getting out with a fine. 

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  5. Demotrash Avatar
    Demotrash

    Finland has a serial killer who they keep releasing from prison. I’m glad we’re not like Finland. You’ll find similar stories across the “enlightened” Western world. They don’t know how to deal with serious crime. Reminiscent of the film “Demolition Man,” in which the wimpy police of the future are forced to defrost a cryogenically frozen 20th century masculine American policeMAN because a real criminal is roaming the streets and they don’t know how to deal with him.

    Btw, don’t bother trying to read the wikipedia page about this serial killer. Recently he’s decided to identify as a woman, so now it’s unreadable. I find it offensive to women, and honestly to law abiding trans people as well, to humor this monster’s preferred pronouns. If you rape and murder women, you shouldn’t get to identify as one and have other people go along with it.

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  6. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    Unpopular opinion: America has an underincarceration problem.

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  7. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    “Sure, but I still remember another discussion we had on this very blog about how recent black immigrants are doing much better than US-born blacks. So there actually is something about growing black in the US.Blacks have higher family breakdown rate - there is something inherently wrong with blacks (it is their own fault).”

    Well, this is a recent phenomenon, starting from the 60s. And it’s got to do with government policies (like making them permanent wards of the state in exchange for a permanent voting block). Black families did not exhibit dysfunction like this in the 50s when – and we all can agree on this fact – racism was far more prevalent than it is now. Black families were intact, their out of wedlock birth rates were comparable to that of whites, black neighborhoods were functional. I was watching an interview of Condi Rice where she was talking about her life growing up, her church-going grandparents, her (mostly black) suburban neighborhood, and it just seemed so …normal. As american as apple pie!

    So, people who literally came out of slavery were able to lead regular, dignified, productive lives, but their descendants, with 100x the opportunities, can’t keep their shit together. Sorry, it’s not racism.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      This is absolutely true, and unfortunately, we don’t ever hear this discussed in the mainstream. The ruling mythology is that black fathers abandon their children because slavery separated families and as a result strong family feelings never developed. But in the immediate post-slavery and all up to the civil rights movement, black families had higher rates of stable marriage and lower illegitimacy than whites! That’s decades of data. And black wealth accumulation was actually progressing vastly better than today. And then it all changed pretty dramatically. The black share of the population stopped growing after Roe and has stagnated since then. Illegitimacy soared. And illegitimacy means crime, poverty, no generational wealth, low academic achievement, psychological problems.

      Talking about families from Africa, these are overwhelmingly intact families who are very engaged with the children and very into academic achievement.

      There’s never going to be any improvement with 70% illegitimacy.

      And to the point about Condoleeza Rice, when my university was selecting our new Chancellor, we had an African American candidate, a churchgoer with a beautiful family, former military, who had excellent ideas about actually helping black students. He was rejected in favor of a clueless race hustler, and we have the results that we have.

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  8. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    I’m listening to this longform podcast series (Martyr Made, highly recommended) about the history of black-jewish relations in America, the rise and the fall. Two hours in, he’s still giving background. Some brutal stuff. The sociologists whose “research” was responsible for welfare programs like Head Start explicitly say that the true revolutionary subject has to be the unproductive lumpen proletariat, so we need to encourage blacks to enroll in welfare programs, to deliberately overwhelm government services, creating tensions between the underclasses and the state and the middle class (who’s paying for all this), so the state gets destroyed and only then true revolution can come about.

    They had NGOs whose sole job was to train black and Puerto Rican single mothers to create a scene at the welfare offices, the more aggressive the better. There was this funny anecdote where these guys are trying to figure out who the “community leaders” are who can act as mediators between them and the state. People like MLK laughed out of the room by the black community, other pastors, respected entertainment figures like Dick Gregory, all rejected. So they decided the real community leaders were the gang members.

    https://martyrmade.substack.com/p/martyrmade-23-whose-america-ep-2

    (it’s free on Spotify)

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  9. PaulS Avatar
    PaulS

    In SA, there’s the problem of criminal activity by trade unions, which is why there’s a lot of admiration on the right for Reagan and Thatcher standing up to them.

    https://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/race-violence-goes-underground-in-sa

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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