sgtmac_46
Senior Master
- Joined
- Dec 19, 2004
- Messages
- 4,753
- Reaction score
- 189
I minored in criminal justice, for the record, though that's entirely irrelavent. Criminal justice degrees are overrated. This isn't a criminal justice issue, anyway, it's an economics issue.Touch Of Death said:You think I'm kidding; thats cute. Perhaps you should take a criminal justice course. Then come laughing about it becoming our largest GNP.
Sean
The whole 'GNP' argument is a flyer for a conspiracy theory on the 'prison industrial complex', the rip-off of the ole' military industrial complex.
By the way, those incarcerated 2 million people are the reason why crime has been dropping drastically in the US for the last 15 years, while some other industrial countries, such as Great Britain, who like to point to our incarceration rates, are seeing a rise in crime. What's more, 2 million people aren't really even incarcerated, at least for not more than a few months at a time. Most of those people are on probation or parole, though they are listed as incarcerated, as they are, for the most part, listed under state and federal Bureau of Prisons inmate lists.
Speaking of which, i've heard some silly arguments along these lines. Arguments like 'Despite drop in crime, inmate numbers increase'...duh. Why do you think crime is dropping, folks? If several social programs failed, and crime kept rising (as they did during the 1970's and 1980's, leading to all time high murder rates) and society decided to get fed up and start putting criminals in prison, and crime started FALLING, what do YOU think is happening?
What's happened is, that all the clever and nuanced social worker ideas have failed, so we're back to putting the blame for crime on criminals, where it belongs.
Moreover, i'd be interesting in seeing the data that shows that prisons are becoming our largest 'GNP'.
None of this has ANYTHING to do with the idea that the answer to racism is MORE racism.