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One of the sad realities of American politics is that jailing people, and jailing people under inhumaine circumstances remains very popular. For any given behav
by ashtonkem 6y ago
One of the sad realities of American politics is that jailing people, and jailing people under inhumaine circumstances remains very popular. For any given behavior that is socially undesirable it’s easy to find a large enough constituency that says “lock them up and throw away the key”, even if as a society we all agree that our criminal justice system is ineffective and out of control.
- InitialLastName 6y agoPart of the issue is that nobody ever got elected to local law-enforcement/judicial positions (sheriffs, state atty generals, judges) by saying "I'm definitely going to arrest fewer people in your town".
- ashtonkem 6y agoThis returns to my original point; people win elections promising to lock more people up because locking people up is very popular.
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago> under inhumane circumstances remains very popular. I recently read an article about the popularity of '/r/justiceserved' type forums (the original tagline of this subreddit was "Now with 40% more police brutality" but was changed as it became more popular). I can't for the life of me find the article, but it was a fairly ambivalent account of how this kind of forum taps into a deeply innate arousal from visceral punishment. Something that the author decides, sadly, appears to be in all of us. > lock them up and throw away the key The "empathy gap" rears its ugly head.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy_gap
- derivagral 6y agoI'm not familiar with the rest of Altemeyer's work but I found this book fascinating to read; it tries to go into where some of that might come from. https://theauthoritarians.org/options-for-getting-the-book/ https://theauthoritarians.org/options-for-getting-the-book/