Please - and I ask this with calmness and a sincere urging: Stop trying to make incarceration seem like a long-running historical phenomenon. It is profit-dri

Please - and I ask this with calmness and a sincere urging: Stop trying to make incarceration seem like a long-running historical phenomenon. It is profit-driven propaganda, the promulgation of which began promptly in 1865. Incarceration, in the Western legal tradition, is very new in relative terms, and its growth has been overwhelmingly the result of the experience of the USA transforming slavery into something marginally more politically acceptable. You probably already know this, given your knowledge of the history, but some plantations, such as Angola, never even bothered closing down; they just transformed into penitentiaries and continued business as usual. The 13th amendment to the constitution, against the better judgment of many objectors, is specifically worded to facilitate this transformation. Incarceration is not a legal tradition. It is a way to shoehorn slavery economics into one.