Tom Cotton says America has "a major under-incarceration problem"

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

This is just a trollish way of describing the national increase in violent crime. The end of the last crime wave was at least in part a matter of incarcerating and policing our way out of it. Most Americans would agree with the idea that an increase in murders and assaults should be met with an increase in imprisonment.

That era of tough-on-crime politics and the creation of racial fear is one of the biggest mistakes in this country's history. It is different with murder and assaults but locking up a lot of people does not actually solve anything. It breaks families apart which causes more people to repeat the cycle. It put more pressure on the police that will just further create more distrust. It explodes the prison budget which directs funds from other things we should be spending money on.

What Cotton is calling for is the same racist scare tactic that has been used for decades that just puts us in an infinite loop in which nobody benefits except for private prisons and the gun lobby.

Neither data nor common sense supports the idea that "locking up a lot of people does not actually solve anything."

There's plenty of research demonstrating that policing and incarceration played a meaningful role in ending the crime wave, even though those policies aren't the only explanatory variable.

The common sense pieces barely merits saying outright: Locking up many of the people most prone to committing crimes prevents them from committing more crimes while they are imprisoned.

What's true is that (1) incarceration doesn't solve everything, and (2) the costs of mass incarceration are so high that other solutions are worth pursuing if they are feasible. The trouble is that they often aren't feasible, and, even when they are, they rarely work overnight and therefore provide little comfort to those who continue to feel unsafe in their own neighborhoods.

Many of these policies had widespread support among Democrats of all races at the height of the crime wave, and if violent crime continues to make its way into the lives of more voters, that could happen again. There's this reductive idea that our singular incarceration rate is only about race and the drug war, but every dataset that we have demonstrates that the United States is a uniquely violent place among rich countries. You would expect this country to have a higher rate of imprisonment based solely on its violence, even in the absence of racist policing or punitive drug laws.

Your last paragraph here is a good point, Averroes, but I disagree with your assertion that alternatives to incarcerating our way out of the problem aren't "feasible". The phrase that comes to mind is Chesterton's "not tried and found wanting, but found difficult and left untried".

This is without even getting into issues like the unusually brutal and dehumanizing culture within US prisons or for that matter the unusually harsh social control of ex-cons once they're out, which hopefully even people who in principle aren't uncomfortable with high incarceration rates can agree are #problematic aspects of our policy and cultural stance towards these issues. "A More Humane Mikado" was not meant to be aspirational!

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Yeah we have such a problem and Black males and Latinos are 66 percent and you see what happened to George Floyd, cops aren't just arresting, they are killing minorities.

Cops want to beat Latino and Black men they know the system is broken and prison doesn't cure the felons, so to get back at society they beat them


It's not we don't have an under incarceration problem, it's the Rehabilitation that stinks

[SAAuthCapitalist]

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/murder-rate-jumps-back-1990s-levels-fbi-data

Why is everyone talking about Cotton’s comments but not that fact?

[SAAuthCapitalist]

We need more petty criminals, carjackers, and BLM/ANTIFA rioters in jail.

[SAAuthCapitalist]

Agreed.
The fact that most Republicans aren’t in jail right now is a problem.

You mean Democrats and BLM thugs?

[Lechasseur]

Most crimes never lead to arrests. But a lot of those criminals might eventually be arrested for other things. And somehow we end up with a remarkably huge number of people incarcerated, comparatively.

maybe US has a combination that together isn't true of other countries:
1. social dysfunction which leads to crime   &
2. strong, relatively reliable state capacity (ex. police are able to intervene and not be scared or bought off by gangs)   &
3. state generally relies on responding to crime or particular situations rather than attempts to preemptively restrain entire population as in totalitarianism

Yeah this is absolutely true, and I've thought that to myself as well

I think another point that needs to be added is the recidivism rate in America's huge because America simply REFUSES to rehabilitate or give anyone a second chance.

If you refuse to let criminals get a job or housing, ofc they're going to turn to crime again.

If you refuse to allow people to reintegrate into society, you may as well just lock up anyone witha record for life (for the record, I do not support that, I actually do not believe in life sentences either (bar exceptional circumstances), it's just to prove my point on America's refusal to rehabilitate people).

But America just seems to be a very vengeful country