Arizona communities would 'collapse' without cheap prison labor, Corrections director

[Belsnickel]

(07-19-2022, 11:24 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Like most things the roots of this go way back.  Consider that the people who founded this nation were considered religious extremists in their home countries.  They had very strict views on crimes and their punishments.  This has never gone away and likely won't any time soon.  Because of this a prisoner in the US will generally serve a much longer sentence than their European counterpart.  A very important question regarding the criminal justice system is why the black population accounts for such a large percentage of overall crime.  I know people wince when they hear that, but the numbers are there and they are frighteningly consistent.  Use the UCR for literally any year, here is 2019 (Also, note that for "white" the initial number includes Hispanics, who are often listed not as a race but as an ethnicity);

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/table-43


This, of course, leads us to the discussion of why this is the case. Systemic racism is certainly part of the issue, as is poverty and lack of opportunity.  But it cannot explain all of it, because if those were the driving factors then you would see similar disproportions for Hispanics, who are only slightly over represented, and Native Americans, who are also over represented, but nothing close to the same degree.  And Asians are very much under represented.  There are so many factors that even attempting to discuss all of them would be exhausting under this format.  But, if this problem could be solved, or even mitigated significantly, it would result in a very large drop in overall crime rate.  As inner city gangs account for the vast majority of "mass shootings" this would also make an enormous dent in that issue as well.

BTW, you're one of the people here I'd even have this discussion with.  Many would use this as an opportunity to hurl predictable accusations of racism, which, while predictable, gets old real fast.

I think one of the things we need to consider in this conversation is that immediately following the end to the majority of slavery in the 19th century, laws were put in place with the aim of charging the newly freed and voting black populous with crimes to enslave them again and get them off the voting rolls. This is the story of the post-Reconstruction South. There are, undoubtedly, many other factors involved as any issue that is this large in scope is highly complex and nuanced. However, we have to recognize that the criminal justice system has been weaponized from the very start to target our black communities to use their labor and keep them from exercising political power in this country.