> This whole discussion smells bad. The implication is that somehow the
> US is putting black men in prison instead of giving them jobs?
Can jobs be created out of thin air? If the economic system can only support so many jobs--or at least so many jobs *worth* taking--then what else is there to do with a disgruntled and hopeless class of people? I don't pretend to know anything about what the US model of capitalism can sustain, or if it could absorb the millions of people in prison (and the officers and prison administrators who watch over them), but certainly it's not just as simple as saying the US is choosing to imprison them *instead* of giving them jobs. There may not be much of a choice--from a ruling class perspective.
> The US has a lot of people in prison because the US has a lot of
> criminals, end of story.
Isn't that the beginning of the story? We know there are a lot of people committing crimes, and that that provides at least a pretext for incarceration. There's no dispute that crimes are occurring. But even setting the War on Drugs--the motivation for which screams to be questioned--aside, aren't these people committing "real" crimes because the economy has not given them anything to do--or *worth* doing? I imagine part of what makes this class economically superfluous is the deprivation of social capital (education, health care, housing, i.e., stability), but then that just pushes the question back further: why the deprivation of social capital? Why the deprivation of the necessary resources to create persons of value to the economy? Is it because there are better ways to spend the money and it is easier to just warehouse them when they grow up or is it because there just isn't room in the economy for them if it were to be done? In other words, even if the US were to provide the resources to make these people economically valuable, would there be jobs for them?
> Incidently I
> think the reason we're closer to (but still beat) places like Russia, is
> because for all the other kinds of corruption in the US, the legal
> system is relatively less corrupt than some of those other places.
You haven't spent much time in the South, have you?