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sibig99
•
62d
What's your opinion of the prison system after your firsthand experience with it
excothrowaway
•
60d
Absolute fucking horror show. I went in a Republican and came out a socialist.
In future American history books, mass incarceration will be discussed in the same tones as Jim Crow, the Red Scares, eugenics, Native American genocide and Japanese-American Internment. Mass incarceration has done unfathomable damage to countless lives.
Once somebody gets a felony on their record, it's as if our society has done everything possible to make it extremely difficult to rebuild their life and stay out of prison. No jobs, no social services, political disenfranchisement, etc. The brutal prison conditions also result in inmates developing coping mechanisms and survival strategies that are counterproductive to survival in the free world, such as having to react with violence to any perceived slight. Combined with extremely aggressive and militarized police, and there's no wonder the US has the highest incarceration rates on the planet.
The use of inmate slave labor is far more extensive than most people realize. In Louisiana prison inmates are used as personal servants by the governors, for Christ's sake - incarcerated butlers, shoe polishers, waiters, stylists, you name it. Watching guards on horseback making crowds of black people pick cotton in the sun at gunpoint at a prison built on an old slave plantation was quite the wakeup call.
Read Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow for a great rundown of the insidious ways mass incarceration fucks people over, disproportionately African Americans. Currently tired as hell after work, apologies if parts of this post are kind of all over the place and incoherent.
sibig99
•
62d
What's your opinion of the prison system after your firsthand experience with it
excothrowaway
•
60d
Absolute fucking horror show. I went in a Republican and came out a socialist.
In future American history books, mass incarceration will be discussed in the same tones as Jim Crow, the Red Scares, eugenics, Native American genocide and Japanese-American Internment. Mass incarceration has done unfathomable damage to countless lives.
Once somebody gets a felony on their record, it's as if our society has done everything possible to make it extremely difficult to rebuild their life and stay out of prison. No jobs, no social services, political disenfranchisement, etc. The brutal prison conditions also result in inmates developing coping mechanisms and survival strategies that are counterproductive to survival in the free world, such as having to react with violence to any perceived slight. Combined with extremely aggressive and militarized police, and there's no wonder the US has the highest incarceration rates on the planet.
The use of inmate slave labor is far more extensive than most people realize. In Louisiana prison inmates are used as personal servants by the governors, for Christ's sake - incarcerated butlers, shoe polishers, waiters, stylists, you name it. Watching guards on horseback making crowds of black people pick cotton in the sun at gunpoint at a prison built on an old slave plantation was quite the wakeup call.
Read Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow for a great rundown of the insidious ways mass incarceration fucks people over, disproportionately African Americans. Currently tired as hell after work, apologies if parts of this post are kind of all over the place and incoherent.
