"The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap"

[xchrom]

http://truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/23443-the-divide-american-injustice-in-the-age-of-the-wealth-gap



Excerpt From THE DIVIDE: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

Over the course of the last twenty years or so, America has been falling deeper and deeper into a bizarre statistical mystery.
Take in the following three pieces of information, and see if you can make them fit together.

First, violent crime has been dropping precipitously for nearly two decades. At its peak in 1991, according to FBI data, there were 758 violent crimes per 100,000 people. By 2010 that number had plunged to 425 crimes per 100,000, a drop of more than 44 percent.

The decrease covered all varieties of serious crime, from murder to assault to rape to armed robbery. The graphs depicting the decline show a long, steady downswing, one that doesn’t jump from year to year but consistently slumps from year to year.

[QC]

1. I'm reading this book now, and it really is excellent.

Well worth a read, despite Taibbi's recent demotion to poopiehead status.

[Dragonfli]

4. I wonder how long before Moyers status is downgraded from his recent "cooties" status

to full blown poopieheadedness.

I give it a week.

[QC]

6. Even Howard Zinn got the full treatment here

for venturing some mild, polite criticism of You Know Who, so Moyers doesn't stand a chance.

[hfojvt]

2. Matt seems to skip a step

"Our prison population, in fact, is now the biggest in the history of human civilization. There are more people in the United States either on parole or in jail today (around 6 million total) than there ever were at any time in Stalin’s gulags. For what it’s worth, there are also more black men in jail right now than there were in slavery at its peak.

See if this syllogism works, then.


Poverty goes up;

Crime goes down;

Prison population doubles.

It doesn’t fit, unless some sort of alternative explanation comes into play. Maybe all those new nonviolent prisoners fit into some new national policy imperative. Maybe they all broke some new set of unwritten societal rules. But what?"

http://truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/23443-the-divide-american-injustice-in-the-age-of-the-wealth-gap

When did he show that most of the people in prison are "nonviolent offenders".

Having a paper copy of SAUS for 2001, I find arrest statistics from 1999.

10.6 million people were arrrested, 1.7 million of them for "serious" crimes. 8.9 million for "nonserious" crimes. Among the "nonserious" crimes - 982,000 people arrested for drunk driving.

880,000 of the serious crimes were defined as "larceny/theft". Take those away and that leaves .82 million, and at that rate it only takes seven years before you have 6 million people arrested for "serious" crimes.

I am NOT a fan of the prison industrial complex, but it does stand to reason.

More criminals in prison

less crime.

[ladjf]

3. Don't forget the influx of drug related incidents and

the advent of private prisons.

[starroute]

5. If that's so, it means the implications are even worse

It would mean that our government made a conscious decision about 35 years ago to stop trying to reduce poverty and instead began to deal with poverty-related problems -- from crime to riots to drug addiction -- by putting ever-growing numbers of people in prison.

In fact, there are any number of indications that this is so -- and that it's been reinforced by a new kind of ghettoization that is so sweeping we don't even recognize it as such. The disenfranchisement of ex-prisoners, the demotion of certain cities and regions to what Chris Hedges calls "sacrifice zones," the creation of gated communities and other methods of starkly separating the rich from the poor (which in turn makes gerrymandering easier), the creation of a two-tier education system with poor children being sold out to substandard for-profit schools.

I suspect that Taibbi probably does talk about these things in his book, and that the divide is not just about a double standard when it comes to justice but about the literal, physical separation of this nation into two sets of enclaves, with the those that imprison the poor being tightly policed to make sure their inmates don't escape and trouble the tranquility of the rich.

[hfojvt]

7. is crime completely a "poverty related problem"?

Or is that just blaming crime on the poor?

I would like to see some data on that, instead of just accepting the conventional wisdom that crime is "poverty related".

[starroute]

8. The poor are arrested and sentenced disproportionately

And crime itself is often a rational response by people who have no legal means of earning more than poverty-level wages.


https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/%28X%281%29S%28cqojthultxcyst45b3zieo2z%29%29/displayArticle.aspx?articleid=6070&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

White prisoners tend to share one thing with their black and Hispanic compatriots: poverty. Most prisoners report incomes of less than $8,000 a year in the year prior to coming to prison. . . .

Some activists mistakenly claim, "prisons don't work." Before we can answer that question, we must first determine what are prisons for? First and foremost, they are tools of social control, a means by which political and economic elites can maintain and enhance their position of dominance over the lower and working classes. The $147 billion a year criminal justice system of police, prosecutors, courts and prisons is to domestic U.S. policy what the military and NATO is to U.S. foreign policy: a means of maintaining the political and economic status quo and crushing any challenges to the current state of affairs.


http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2010/10/toxic_persons.html

In devastating detail in Daedalus, the sociologists Bruce Western of Harvard and Becky Pettit of the University of Washington have shown how poverty creates prisoners and how prisons in turn fuel poverty, not just for individuals but for entire demographic groups. Crunching the numbers, they concluded that once a person has been incarcerated, the experience limits their earning power and their ability to climb out of poverty even decades after their release. It's a vicious feedback loop that is affecting an ever-greater percentage of the adult population and shredding part of the fabric of 21st-century American society.

In 1980, one in 10 black high-school dropouts were incarcerated. By 2008, that number was 37 percent. Western and Pettit calculated that if current incarceration trends hold, fully 68 percent of African-American male high school dropouts born from 1975 to 1979 (at the start of the upward trend in incarceration rates) will spend time living in prison at some point in their lives.