The Prison Imperative

Have a look at this graph:

Prison Policy Website depiction of jail populations from the Prison Policy website.

What does the above graph say to you? If you can’t see the graph, you can navigate to https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/CA.html to review it there. What is shows is that certain ethnic groups are under-represented in the prison system in California (which is hardly a Republican stronghold—that’s not what this is about). You know which groups are over-represented in the prison system in California? That’s right: blacks are more than 4 times more likely to get sent to prison based on these data. Latino? You also are slightly more likely. So looking at this, and being naive and foolish, one could say “gee, those black people must be committing a lot of crimes.”

But that’s the naive view, and if you’ve listened to Right and Freedom before, you know better. You’ve heard of overpolicing in minority neighborhoods, you’ve come to understand the school-to-prison pipeline, and you’ve also understood the breakdown of prison sentences. At least 15% and as high as 25% of the entire prison population is there for drug possession charges.

However, graphs like these are used to demonstrate other things too. Like the “fact” that certain ethnic groups commit more crimes than others. All you can really tell from a graph like this is that more black people are in prison than other ethnicities. And when you have a provably warped judicial system, and an ineqitable criminal “justice” system, then it’s pretty clear why that disparity is there—and it’s not because black people commit more crime than white people.

This is one of the topics we get into in this podcast episode. That…and why DJT should be locked up and the key should be smelted down to make a pair of tiny handcuffs.