Came across an article (a review of a book review, really) that upended my understanding of why there are so many prisoners in this country.

The whole article is worth reading (it’s halfway down the middle, skipping irrelevant-trump bullsh/t) but in it, ACLU’s legal director David Cole dismisses the now-commonly-accepted notion that the prison “was deliberately created by an explicitly racist war on drugs that swept up nonviolent drug offenders, primarily black, from the 1980s on” and goes into detail on how the data simply don’t back it up.

“The emotionally unsatisfying answer: unsupervised and unaccountable prosecutors seeking tougher sentences all over the country, and given many more options, under the law, to do so. ”

I couldn’t read the review itself (it’s behind a paywall), and I know I simply won’t have the time for the book, but I did come across the article by the book’s author, a law professor, where he is criticizing Obama for focussing on pardoning non-violent offenders only, and not acknowledging the inconvenient fact that the majority of inmates are, indeed, violent (reflecting an even more inconvenient fact that the American society is inherently violent?) – and that to reduce the prison population, we should give violent offenders shorter sentences or perhaps just let them go.

http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-is-perpetuating-a-huge-myth-about-americas-prisons-2015-7

I don’t know how I feel about any of this, but here’s someone who obviously spent a lot more time researching it than most ppl. I know that now I’m taking the relative safety of NYC for granted, and don’t know how I would feel about trading that for a more morally and socially-just society.  I don’t know if any city or country experimented with this either and what happened as a result.

Anyway, putting it here because it’s something that I am currently struggling to see the both sides of.