In a world where people are incarcerated on a scale unprecedented in all of human history, and where prosecutorial success is measured by number of scalps taken, the assumption that this is plain malice designed to let the state rob a few more individuals of their freedom makes much more sense than it all being just a big pile of incompetence and misunderstandings.
> the assumption that this is plain malice designed to let the state rob a few more individuals of their freedom makes much more sense.
Of course it makes much more sense that there was a massive conspiracy across the medical, legal, prison industry, and press to put more people in prison. Rather than some doctors and legal professionals assuming SIDs was a simple explanation for a not very well understood medical phenomenon probably with many causes.
>Of course it makes much more sense that there was a massive conspiracy across the medical, legal, prison industry, and press to put more people in prison.
Not like it hasn't happened before. And you're overestimating the required massiveness of the conspiracy IMO.
In a world where people are incarcerated on a scale unprecedented in all of human history,
This is only true, because prior to these times, people were killed instead. Or beaten to within an inch of their lives. Local "justice", lynching, mob action, used to be far, far more common.
And of course, many people used to be worked to death. Or sold into slavery. Or die from horrid conditions in jail. Or forced into the foreign legion.
While I agree that something may be wrong in the US, there are many regions in the world where the above still happens.
> This is only true, because prior to these times, people were killed instead. Or beaten to within an inch of their lives. Local "justice", lynching, mob action, used to be far, far more common.
Hm, sounds like an assertion that ought to be checked by a historian, possibly ACoUP's blog? (Yes, the one who writes about Rome, he is sometimes featured in HN). He specializes in demolishing misconceptions people/Hollywood have about history.
For example, many historians have been writing, recently, about how medieval society was far less brutish and cruel than portrayed in pop culture. There were laws, rights the monarch gave their subjects, culture, etc. Lots of what we "know" about the middle ages from Hollywood is simply wrong.
Their source could be your source, which you seem to be very seriously misreading.
> As the global population grew 21 per cent, between 2000 and 2019, the number of prisoners worldwide jumped by more than 25 per cent, according to the UNODC data.
So, worldwide trend is upward.
> While Northern America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe have experienced a long-term decrease in imprisonment rates of up to 27 per cent, other regions and countries, such as Latin America, Australia and New Zealand, have seen up to 68 per cent growth over the last two decades, the study revealed.
So apparently your definition of “western countries” includes sub-Saharan Africa but excludes most of Europe and all of Australia and New Zealand?
Overall your own source supports their point and contradicts your own.
> So apparently your definition of “western countries” includes sub-Saharan Africa but excludes most of Europe and all of Australia and New Zealand?
To be honest the text you are quoting doesn't talk about Western Europe at all, and I think if you exclude Western Europe, then "Northern America + Eastern Europe" is most of what remains of "western countries". Australia and New Zealand, while part of western countries, are so small that they are basically insignificant for statistics.
The data in the source[0], though, says the number of prisoners in Europe as a whole (as well as Northern America) has decreased (Figures 10, 12, and 13) confirming what GP said. Eastern Europe is quoted specifically because the decrease has been much more important (basically, the numbers are becoming similar to Western Europe).
There's no question that the trend in the West has been a decrease in incarceration rate, with Australia and New Zealand clear outliers.
If you exclude Western Europe and simply ignore Australia and New Zealand you’ve abandoned any reasonable conception of “the West” altogether.
Regardless, cherry-picking even such an incredibly gerrymandered “West” ignores the entire point of the source: the human population in prison has risen faster than the human population itself… pointing to minor improvements in the world’s largest prison state and what remains of the ex-Soviet gulag system states while ignoring considerably larger regressions in, for example, a nation colonized specifically to be a prison does nothing to contradict that fact.
The data (linked in my comment) shows that incarceration rates have decreased in all of Europe as well as all of Northern America and increased in Australia and New Zealand.
If you consider "the West" to be (as is commonly admitted) Europe, Northern America, Australia and New Zealand (with maybe Japan included) then incarceration rates have decreased in the West. Even if they have increased in minor countries (AU + NZ).
You're getting stuck on a sentence of the summary that talks about a subset of the data, but I'm not sure why. I also have no idea what you mean about a "nation colonized to be a prison", but honestly this looks to me as if you're just trying to push some idea without vocalizing it, which is a bit off-putting. If you're talking about the US, then yes it does have a much higher incarceration rate than anywhere else in the West, but it's a clear exception within the West and it is still decreasing.
The scale of incarceration is still unprecedented. A reduction by 27 percent doesn't change that. Imprisonment was an extremely rare phenomenon for much of history (as was police, for that matter). Today's incarceration rates would have to be reduced by 99+% in order to reach pre-modern levels, where large cities often had only a handful of cells in total, and rural areas had none at all.
It's not so clear cut. At least admit that a lot of thought has been given to this, none the least by Foucalt's famous essay on this topic, Discipline and Punish.
Foucalt has his critics, but it's not immediately obvious that the massive incarceration problem in some Western nations is better than public execution at the whim of monarchs. And some forms of torture, Foucalt argued, have changed from the theatrical and public to the more subdued torture of everyday lives of prison inmates.
That's a multi faceted problem. Murder rates also were halves since the 80s in the US, it's not necessarily the same type of criminality
In other countries the clearance rates are as high as ever. The US is an exception in many aspects in the West, closer to third world countries depending on what metric you look at
> overall, findings showed that the clearance rate in Finland and Switzerland in the years of analysis was very high, in some years of the analysis even reaching 100 percent. Internationally, these rates are extraordinary high, even in comparison with other European countries such as Italy (67 percent and, later, 78 percent) , Estonia (80 percent), England & Wales (85 percent) and France (80 percent)
To be fair, for much of history there weren't enough resources for everyone, much less for keeping people fed for free in a prison for decades. For serious crimes you just got executed as soon as possible.
>designed to let the state rob a few more individuals of their freedom
"The state" doesn't benefit in any way from locking people up. In fact, it costs them money (both directly and in lost taxes from the lost salaries and wages of those incarcerated).
An argument could be made that prosecutors benefit from higher incarceration rates through the incentives you described. And an argument could definitely be made that private corporations paying well-below-market rates for prison labour benefit.
You think states don't benefit from spending more money? They're just like other organizations who try to expand their budgets year over year.
Except they can force people to pay them more, all they need is plausible justification (like combating crime, or terrorists, or drugs, or viruses, or whatever the current societal scare happens to be about).
Also, keep in mind, it costs the taxpayers money, not the people running the criminal justice system. They're motivated by climbing the ladder and scorekeeping.
I hate to break it to you, but the prison system has been the premiere, essential job-creation program for these United States ever since Appomattox 1865.
The word "lest" is meant to come after something else. It means "for fear that" or "or else" or something similar. So it's not clear what you're trying to say. I don't know what "very systems" built by "the most evil" you mean either. Is it supposed to be obvious what you're referring to?
I clicked the link and remain confused. The poem does have in common the term "lest we forget", but apparently nothing else. It's also used in a grammatically correct way in the poem, but not in your post, since it's not following anything.
Power is not a meagre result. For those people who live by it, it is the ultimate goal, and they will use any means to obtain and expand it, no matter the cost to others.
I think that's being way too charitable.
In a world where people are incarcerated on a scale unprecedented in all of human history, and where prosecutorial success is measured by number of scalps taken, the assumption that this is plain malice designed to let the state rob a few more individuals of their freedom makes much more sense than it all being just a big pile of incompetence and misunderstandings.