[lbo-talk] it's inevitable

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri Apr 28 11:38:14 PDT 2006


Dennis Claxton wrote:


>Wojtek wrote:
>
>
>>I also do not think that locking these guys up is necessarily a bad thing.
>
>
>Then we seriously disagree.

I'm all for locking up bad guys, like murderers, rapists, and armed robbers. But when the growth in the inmate pop exceeds the growth in the general pop by more than 10/1, something's really wrong. The US doesn't have a particularly high rate of property crime. We do have a high rate of gun violence, but that's not why most people are in jail. We criminalize drugs in a way no other society does, and we give longer sentences with less possibility of parole. Surely a professional sociologist should know these things.

Doug



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