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Best I can do is militarized police
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.
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.
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.
Because suite giving people money without suits doesn’t help the suits friends who also happen to wear suits.
Well there’s your problem, suits only care about keeping money.
The system is fucked; people who are pro services are soft on crime, people hard on crime are soft on services.
You get a society where everything is provided and the fuckups are treated with kid gloves leaving everyone else asking if its really worth the tax hit, where the other option wants a fucked up ghetto of starving sick poor who get sent to work a life of prison labor if they steal food.
That’s because our societal structure doesn’t reflect reality. Here’s the reality: the government is a tribe, a gang, an institution. Give Burger King guns and badges, say they dictate human behavior now, and you get the same results. You all are so caught up in this mythical “big picture”, but the reality is right in front of you and under your feet. And that reality is anarchism. Nobody is coming to save you faster than someone can stab you and bounce, and if you check on your elderly neighbor who had groceries delivered a little too long ago, you’ll save a life faster than any social programs. Embrace the reality that we’re being picked on by these bullies we call institutions and business, check on your neighbor, pick up some litter, and punch a mofo in the mouth when you’re disrespected. We’ve developed tools for social cohesion over billions of years far more refined than your rudimentary moral and systemic frameworks. Use them, dummy. Not you, specifically, all of humanity.
The downside to this approach, when you get right down to it, even if it works and improves standards of living all round. The real crux of the problem that the scientists always ignore is this: you’d have to allow some of your money to go to other people. That’s a deal breaker for most folks with money.
It’s worse than that. Some folks actually reject the idea that those poorer than them should have nice things, or even OK things. This is why there are voucher programs, why so much social housing (when it was built) are ugly, plain boxes showcasing the worst of brutalism.
I feel like most rich people would reject 1000$ if that meant a poor person got 500$.
During covid, they took $100ks while people got $500,
everybody knows how deverstating low crime and high purchasing power are for business
I think people are our own worse enemies at times. There are some countries that are less individualistic than the ones I’ve lived in, but there’s a “crabs in the bucket” mentality.
I was lectured by a coworker about how the poor have it better than us and how we provide for them but they have it better than us. Note that despite having this knowledge, my coworker still decides to earn a paycheck. People hate it when others get stuff for free. There is definitely a form of entitlement that some people can get. I know people that work in government (Canada) and they say those that get free benefits just act so mean about it and if things go wrong or are delayed.
Western capitalist neoliberal dogma, which has largely been adopted globally, has us working against each other rather than towards a common good. That dogma dictates that we should see poverty as laziness and entitlement and wealth as aspirational and fulfilling.
It’s easy to blame capitalism for this and I don’t disagree it’s pretty broken right now but I’ve been all over the world and people are largely like this. In India I heard a lot of “rich people deserve it because they have good karma” in China I heard a lot of “rich people just work harder or come from a great family” against all visible evidence.
Thats because the Western capitalist worldview has spread globally.
Many of these countries had more socialist systems after establishing their respective post colonial governments but embraced more protectionist strategies or had sanctions placed on them by the wealthiest (Western) nations for not playing ball with the neoliberal capitalist agenda.
Basically, the West stole from them for centuries through settler colonialism, left with the riches and then said ‘you better do things our way or we will refuse to do trade with you and you will continue to starve’
The world has had no choice to embrace it, for better or for worse.
Western capitalist mores are actively brainwashing us into thinking wealth is virtue. Might is right. It is not.
I think once you see how much damage colonization did it’s easy to blame everything on that one evil. But that’s oversimplifying to an extreme extent.
For example, I really doubt the idea of class based karma (or karma based class perhaps) was a colonial introduction to India. I’m not disagreeing with you that modern capitalism is bad or saying that colonialism wasn’t damaging, those are both true, but it’s pretty damn patronizing to says “they couldn’t have had bad socioeconomic practices without us” Hell they had a literal caste system of worker exploitation long before we showed up.
It was not a colonial based introduction but it was institutionalized by colonists.
I’m glad that we agree modern capitalism is problematic and the history of colonialism (and the modern Western world) is predicated on evil, exploitative, inhumane and non-egalitarian principles.
I didn’t say that they couldn’t have bad socioeconomic practices without [the West]. I simply stated that a forced assimilation to a capitalist worldview has occurred globally (the alternative being destitution) and which has reinforced the idea that wealth is virtue.
If we’re going to have an honest reflection on caste, we first need to acknowledge that the West treated all colored peoples as low caste for hundreds of years (and it still does in many ways through neocolonialism). Inequality is inherent to modern Western capitalist dogma, just as it is in a rigid institutionalized (courtesy of colonial legacy) caste based system.
I won’t deny that I am lazy (wealthy enough to not need to work for a few months a year), however I and almost everyone I know would much rather get that down to never needing to work. Capitalism has proven its ability to allow this for some people, social services would be amazing if there was enough capital behind them to enable their own self sustainability without requiring external revenue (aka surviving off the interest - inflation) so they could have a chance of working even if the majority of people rely on their services.
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.
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.
California had a great mental health system in place. Ronald Reagan got elected and chose to close many of the in patient facilities. This lead to mass homelessness, which meant the police and prison budgets had to go up.
Then he did the same thing when he was President.
Their excuse was rampant abuse, so instead of fixing it, they just closed them.
Small government doin its thing, yay Murica. Also stricter gun laws thanks to good old fashioned racism and hospitals are more overworked than ever with patients dealing with substance abuse and other related mental health issues. We stopped putting sick people in treatment and the cops just started shooting them instead.
And their dogs…
Edit: spelling, I got to stop drunk commenting
What if locking people up indefinitely (as many were in institutions decades ago) and diagnosing them with subjective criteria isn’t ideal? I’m not dismissing anybody’s diagnosis or hand-waving real symptoms or illness - I’m merely suggesting that an authoritarian system where human rights are stripped with minimal outside observation (with sometimes flimsy criteria and fallible actors) is potentially damaging to mental health and is probably not conducive to healing. It can be a very imbalanced power dynamic, especially as it was in the institutions of the past as you pointed out.
We need an answer to retain the rights of those involuntarily held as best as possible. I think it’s important to make courts more accessible to patients (and their loved ones), providing those held involuntarily with access to second opinions or different facilities (in some cases), and having established (and independently enforced) criteria for release - with appeals available for patients to argue their case for release with legal representation and other expert witnesses (e.g. other psychiatrists, qualified individuals directly involved in their care past or present) and perhaps even family members and other people who were involved with the patient.
Involuntary commitment (for any extended period) should be reserved for the severely mentally ill, who are determined by independent review to be in need of treatment to stabilize - and only those who are a danger to themselves or others, those who committed crimes, and those who are actively violent should be held in higher-security (locked) facilities.
I feel the rest would benefit greatly from conditions akin to a Soteria House (without locked doors, forced medication, or coercion) - the Soteria House model could be expanded, adapted, or modified. Treatment could be loosely mandated by courts, with reviews conducted and alternative treatment plans established if the patient wishes to modify or discontinue treatment before they are thought to be stabilized by their psychiatrist(s) and care team. I feel that maintaining consent, valuing patient input in forming treatment plans, and avoiding coercion is key to address certain states of trauma - otherwise patients are potentially faced with more trauma.
For those who are not thought to be severely ill, but who are thought to be in temporary crisis (and who are not thought to be violent or a threat to themselves or others), stabilization could be attempted in a temporary hold to assess their state, and continued onward with care akin to Soteria Houses or intensive outpatient care and other forms of observation and forms of support (e.g. with their environment and other distressing situations they are facing).
And to respond directly to you, I definitely feel like society was incapable or very underequipped to fix the institutions back then. Society is still largely unable to address distress and its very real manifestations or consequences - such as homelessness and the prevention of individuals from becoming homeless against their will.
The reason they locked people up is that they didn’t have any other treatment. Most psychiatric meds are recent inventions.
Here’s a link to a longer piece on the whole situation.
And a great deal of the rights violations persist to this day, regardless of some of the treatments being viable presently to stabilize individuals.
Lifelong prescriptions are misappropriated and are too common (see Soteria Houses - they use psychiatric drugs in first-episode psychosis/schizophrenia with consent for stabilization and only for a few months to achieve remission in some individuals), people are kidnapped (sometimes in the middle of the night) and taken without due process by individuals who aren’t able to assess mental illness, medicalized rape or forced psychiatry is rampant (patient choice is disregarded), there is essentially zero outside oversight, court access is wholly insufficient, you generally can’t get second opinions, forced treatment orders still exist (so even when you’re released you have to get court-ordered intramuscular shots), and so forth.
Some medications like neuroleptics carry a pretty big risk (20%~) of causing a condition known as Tardive Dyskinesia, which can be permanent and extremely debilitating. Polypharmacy is rampant and unregulated (some people can be on a pretty extreme cocktail of drugs).
There’s still atrocities and those who fall through the cracks in the system, but there are success stories presently, which is contrasted by the horrors even in the 80’s (which was fairly tame compared to psychiatry in the decades that came before it).
Psychiatry is in need of reform, and it doesn’t seem like psychiatrists or the for-profit hospitals behind them are interested in enacting that serious reform.
California had a great mental health system in place.
I’m sorry, but no, we really fucking didn’t. Reagan was wrong (about everything) to close them, but they weren’t good before he did that by a looooong shot
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.
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.
What if we all became cops? We get universal income? Lol
Sounds like the Hue & cry system.
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
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? :(
