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The US has millions of people incarcerated for crimes, not political dissidents.
by bufferoverflow 6y ago
The US has millions of people incarcerated for crimes, not political dissidents.
- saagarjha 6y agoA substantial majority have not been convicted of a crime and there is of course certain groups that tend to be incarcerated at higher rates.
- Qwertious 6y agoWe're not talking about jailing dissidents though, we're talking about jailing demographics that tend to vote for the opposition.
- bhickey 6y agoYou don't need to be a dissident to be politically disfavored. "Sarah Shannon and colleagues estimate that one-third of black men had a felony conviction in 2010—a significant increase over the past 30 years and far above the rate for white men." [0] As one Watergate conspirator revealed in an interview, this was the purpose of the war on drugs: "by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities." [1] [0] https://www.sentencingproject.org/news/5593/ https://www.sentencingproject.org/news/5593/ [1] https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
- ykevinator 6y agoThe sentence for those crimes is prison, the loss of voting is just an arbitrary bonus that is "the way we've always done things."