[lbo-talk] Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

Jordan Hayes jmhayes at j-o-r-d-a-n.com
Sun Sep 9 17:35:09 PDT 2007


J. Tyler writes:


> If the economic system can only support so many jobs ...

Stop right there ...

-----


> 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 ...

It absorbed far more additions to the general population over the last 30 years than are in prison today ...


>> 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?

Well, it's the beginning of a different story.


> aren't these people committing "real" crimes because the
> economy has not given them anything to do--or *worth* doing?

I'm sure part of that is true; and there's lots of other reasons why there's more crime in the US than in other places. And that's all interesting, after a fashion. But the Subject: of this thread makes the implication that there's something _about the prison system_ itself in the US that's causing this, and I think that's a zig-when-they-should-have-zagged.

[ ... ]


> why the deprivation of social capital?

My sense is that it's just a business decision: it seemed cheaper/easier/less risky to do it this way. That may turn out to be reconsidered at some point, but much like the decisions that were made about Iraq, it might take a long time for them to come around.

But I also think that a lot of this kind of thing can get decided at a high level but implemented differently at the street level. What a group of Senators are getting paid to do and what the guy who owns the auto parts store down the block (or even the governor of a small, say, sothern state) does can be very different.


> even if the US were to provide the resources to make these
> people economically valuable, would there be jobs for them?

I doubt there would be jobs; others have spoken about this before. But decent social welfare might just be a pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later proposition (if you just want to look at the $ ... which I believe has been done). One big root cause of "additional" crime in the US (as opposed to, say, France) -- the vast inequality that makes it attractive to risk trying to switch sides from the have-nots to the haves -- would still be there, for instance. So it's not clear that "simply" having France-style support for the poor would automatically make crime in the US drop significantly.


>> the legal system is relatively less corrupt than some of those
>> other places.
>
> You haven't spent much time in the South, have you?

I said _relatively_ :-)

And I'm glad to see Chris back me up on that.

/jordan



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list