[lbo-talk] Pods: Surpassing the Gulag in Scalability

Luke Weiger lweiger at umich.edu
Tue Jun 21 11:02:37 PDT 2005


Justin wrote:


> I apologize if I was rude. But let's bury this line of
> discussion. US imperialism sucks. Stalinist
> totalitarism sucked. The Gulag was a terrible crime.
> So is Gitmo, but they're not very close. End of story,
> jks

Yep. But the high US incarceration rate deserves discussion. My own view isn't particularly interesting: the vast majority of prisoners are criminals, they belong in prisons (though the prisons ought to be a lot more humane), but we would probably have far fewer criminals (and hence far fewer crimes and inmates) if we had a more robust welfare state. Which is yet another reason the US should experiment with the following the lead of its European peers.

(If you take a look at Posner's excellent blog, it appears that he may accept that the traditional bleeding heart approach of alleviating poverty to prevent crime would work--but he thinks alleviating poverty is too costly. Seems to me that our present approach is plenty costly.)

-- Luke



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