It
is challenging to claim that punishment can serve a positive social
function. Arresting law-breakers may be positive, incarcerating
convicts may be necessary yet punishment, or retribution rather than
correction, is of dubious social worth. In
Saudi Arabia they cut off the hands of theives not just to mark them,
but to make it more difficult for a thief to take something quickly
with a hand. The U.S.A. is not so extreme as that however the example
of punishment incapacitating the ability of a criminal to repeat a
crime is not often provided. Hence psychological or at best
time-control benefits are inferred.
I
will say that prison, like mass education, serves to prevent chaos in
modern mass society. It gives serial killers a place to go without
disturbing or dismembering people. It creates jobs for people that
might have been criminals, guarding criminals. It stops a lot of
people from driving cars and contributing to global warming with
greenhouse gassing.
Punishment
allows politicans the oppoortunity to arrest wild and crazy guys on
Wall Street that use super-computers for dark pool trading so
corporations can be free from tech-software predators that disrupt
the invention and manufacturing stability of U.S. corporations (just
kidding).
Punishment
in prisons can help control the wildness of criminals. Malcom X said
that every thief expects to be arrested, it's just how many burglaries
one can get away with before that destined day that matters. When
theives finally are arrested for theft, it may stop a lot of future
thefts by the same guy (or not).
Some
believe that punishment in prisons prevents blacks from being good
citizens with good jobs; and for Hispanics too. If they wern't
arrested and convicted they woudn't have criminal convictions and
then would not be discriminated against by employers. Hence
minorities are controlled by convicting them on weak, petty crimes or
misdemeanors so they are sent to prison to be disqualified from
working or voting.
Punishment
stops people from destroying congress for putting up bad budgets
every year and creating 20 trillion dollars of public debt. No one
wants to go to a supermax prison or death row for attacking DC .
I
am trying to think of more things that punishment does to control
society. The media controls society too, and people want to drive
around in their 'shiny metal boxes', and charge things, pay a
mortgage for decades so big banks can forclose on it etc, and
everyone deserves a chance to greenhouse gas and fast food too.
Punishment
such as a six game suspension like
Zeke Elliot got
will let him rest
for the Cowboys until mid-season when he will be fresh for the last
half.
It will also force Dak Prescott to play better without just handing
the ball off to a great fullback to get out of a jam. He will be a
better QB for the experience.
Implicit
bias may bring people to assume that mass incarceration is
intentionally racist across the U.S.A. Because the southern heritage
does have a history of lavery and then lease convict labor, it has
been conflated in modern viewpoints with the problems of crime,
poveryt and race. I had never though about convict lease labor or
even heard of it until recently . I
have worked in several states and like to compare national, regional
and various states' ideas and biases. Once working for a contractor
in Georgia I was fired, I think, for not laughing when we saw a black
kid do a flip and a co-worker said; 'just like a monkey' Later, a dump on
a truck would not drop (I was inexperienced). If I had not kept a
straight face, maybe it wouldn't have got 'stuck up '. In
Alaska an Aleut thought I was prejudiced because i thought he was
Hispanic (in error). People often read predjudices into the thought
of others that doesn't exist. Espcially if one is simply
existentially observant of phenomena and tries to interpret and
corroloate that with best-data historical criteria.
Implicit
bias retraining on police departments may be somewhat off-the-mark. A
better investment of time might be educating them is classical and
symbolic logic. Policement should have a dual-processing ability to
think logically simultaneously as they think objectively abbout the
facts historically and the live situation. Like gambling and poker
playing a policeman addressing a suspect or dangerous situation
should be able to contemplate instantly the odds and the values of
the cards he is holding as well as what the other players might have.
If the policeman is wrong about a suspect being dangeorus he just
might end up shot or alternatively charged with a crime. Accuracy
matters.
Frankly,
many white people just expect black people to act like white people
and not commit crimes. Blacks are expected to have a low crime rate
like whites did in the 1950s or 1960s perhaps, and find work. Whites
were never reluctant to send whites to prison for crimes, or even for
one marijuana seed in Texas famously, and so the solution to blacks
committing crimes is thought to be to send them to jail.
One
may wonder how cities may be like zoos with millions of poor,
underemployed minorities, or pig farms perhaps, with copious dope
use, promiscuous sex, atheism, crime, guns, illiteracy, poverty and
poor housing and not produce friction, conflicts and crimes with
incarceration? It is just a moment in history where many parts are
not working well together, and where impractical design of
infrastructure an economics and left a lot of people down. One
wonders if classical virtue, if Plato and his books, are read much by
Afro-Americans,
or if they are listening to 50 cents?
How can people with little exposure to Jesus Christ and Socrates be
expected to have ideas or aspirations or silly notions like poor and
honest doesn't mean 'chump' or 'prey'?
Ordinary
people and their ordinary politician from outside the south usually
don't have the education in sociology or history to understand the
mass social problems that influence large numbers of blacks to commit
crimes. Though that may be a serious political inefficeincy, it is
also off-the-mark for blacks and Hispanics to assume that it is the
result of racism. It is an intertidal mixing zone in one historical
paradigm, yet the causality for the north may differ than for the
south. Most people are not aware that people can serve jail time for
minor offenses or that such offenses can prpevent employmment with
records that never go away. Even getting mental health treatment
without any criminal record can be enough to prevent employment for
life. Mental health treatment is the equivelent of a criminal record
for many purposes. One should avoid mental health treatment equal
vigorously as not committing crimes and getting a prison record.
Prison
as
a method of social control is and odd concept.
Prison
as a method for punishing crime differs implicitly from prison as a
method of social control. Mass social control could be applied to
evicting the werhmacht from Polan and France durring WW II. Mass
social control has a pejorative and onerous connotation about it, as
of there should be an absence of legal authority to 'control' or
prevent people from breaking laws.
Most
of the nations cited for comparison to the United States that have
lower rates of incarceration were preponderantly mon-cultural rather
than multi-cultural nations. How much alike can people believe
Finland is to the U.S.A. demographically? In a society with
tremendous racial and cultural integration issues exacerbated by the
number of illegal aliens transiting the U.S.A. the comparisons to old
Europe are rather superfluous. Russia; the second highest rated
nation for incarcerations per capita, also has ethnic issues.
Prison
and punishment was obviously used as a way to comtrol post-civil war
southern black freedom.
Even
the word surveillance
was
used with deprecation. Apparently some believe that the poor, on
parole and or welfare could be the only people free from
surveillance. Unfortunately that is the modern world; London has its
cctv and everyone should always expect to be on camera when not in a
private space; and even then privacy is not certain at all. One may
not like it, yet who would give up their Iphone or android and return
to carrier pidgeons?
The
people of the United States have no obligation to pay for public
housing. Building public housing is at odds with the political
philosophy in which western civilization grows. Theoretically anyone
should be able to construct their own shelter and afford enough land
to site it.
Individual
ownership is the fundamental principle of housing and it is to that
direction public housing must return.
The
U.S. Government implicitly
is rather minimalist. It will expand the size and scope of a
bureaucracy once it is brought into existence, lie most human social
organizations that become established inertia drives them forward.
Some governments especially in Europe and Asia evolve from a top-down
tradition of authoritarianism in contradistinction to the American
bottom-up heritage of individual and de facto ideological
libertarianism. King
George III wanted top-down social control while American
revolutionaries wanted bottom-up
From
its beginning the United States' political philosophy was to let
people be free to go about their private interests and for government
to do the minimum that is necessary to conserve the freedom of the
people to go about their private interests. Unlike a private
entrprise led by a creative thinker such as Tesla and Elon Musk who
may take quite a while to develop some sort of idea into reality, the
U.S. Government should not in theory hire think tanks of geniuses to
sit around inventing things that would be good for society to
develop; government is not suposed to compete directly with free
enterprise.
Thus
people at heart probably expect urban blacks to help themselves and
solve their own problems concerning housing or crime. Government can
expand existing bureaucracies and incarcerate poeple en massse to
control crime, yet government should not be expected to innovate
creative ideas to obviate recidivism after incarceration,
comprehensive literacy amid prisoners, or housing and transport for
all.
Though President Richard Nixon advocated a guaranteed minimum income for all American families-that sort of idea got no traction. Government minimalism means that the practice will be to fix problems only when required to, and with the minimal change or creative thought required (though perhaps at great expense to taxpayers).
It
is true that advantaged people press their advantage sometimes
unconscionably in a free enterprise social environment. Americans
recognize that individuals may require relief from oppressive social
conditions. Government programs exist that allow Americans to be free
from degradation, exploitation and peonage that could be forced
through the advantaged levering the poor. People may run roughshod
over disadvantaged individuals and drive them out of their own
private property with pressure in order to concentrate wealth for a
set of people with similar economic goals.
If
one considers places such as Detroit that had a surfeit of housing
that became fire traps and areas of high crime after an economic
slump it is evident that the lack of employment rather than an
intentional displacement of poor people in public housing in order to
prosperous white people to move in is the basic problem for the urban
poor. As Detroit auto making collapsed it was like a soufflé that
collapsed and a pervasive slump that crossed racial and class lines
followed.
Wealth
is concentrating in the U.S.A. The poor and middle class are stuffed
with obsolete social and economic theories about jobs, earnings, and
poverty, crime and national security and have become incapable of
even voting in their own interests. Its hard to say where that all
will go. Certainly there is a minority movement to blame white people
generally, and the fewer than 25% of the population that are white
males in particular, for every wrong and disadvantage they
experience.
In
a way, concentrated poverty in urban areas is a paradox. Urban areas
are the most costly places for real estate because of their central
location in high-finance and business areas, and the sole way that
the poor or even middle class could afford to live in such desirable
locations instead of in some distant rural spot far from business and
jobs is to have a ghetto that stinks and has crime making it too
dangerous for the prosperous to be comfortable in. As the poverty is
relieved through various program and policies the poor are bumped out
or replaced by those better able to afford the upgraded housing.
There are many paradoxical relationships involving economics and
public housing.
“Sex
with multiple partners is so entrenched in Southern Africa that it is
a religion, a basic moral philosophy for most people here. It is
often simply called culture or, specifically, African culture.
Political leaders who marry an increasing number of wives and royalty
that flaunts an equal number of wives and concubines are highly
visible.”-A Mail-Guardian Reporter in 2009
https://mg.co.za/article/2009-02-11-pressure-to-be-promiscuous
“That
the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary—a lesser
people might simply have died out, as indeed others have … But it
may not be supposed that the Negro American community has not paid a
fearful price for the incredible mistreatment to which it has been
subjected over the past three centuries.” - Daniel Patrick Moynahan
– The Moynahan Report
Moynahan
predicted the disintegration of blacks families in the years ahead
and he was completely right; today 72% of blacks are born out of
wedlock compared to appx. 25% or fewer in 1961.
Slavery
taught blacks communism in that they were not permitted to own
private property.
Many
black families on private property after the civil war could produce
much of their own substance for living in closer approximation to the
ordinary rural lifestyle of whites when fewer people had concentrated
wealth. As they left the south to urban north for various reasons
including forced incarceration for lease-slavery or peonage to
southern capitalists family structures were challenged to remain
together.
It
should be observed that African kinship systems and promiscuity were
possibly imitated by the return to African roots movements of the
1960s when urban black behavior was restive, sometimes riotous and
expressive of discontent with the lack of ready avenues for economic
promotion and integration with the sedentary urban class of whites
outside the south.
It
is natural to wonder if the feminist movement hasn't acted to
reinforce the decline of marriage where males are the head of a
family traditionally. The recent Supreme Court decision to debase
marriage as a heterosexual relationship primarily to support raising
children and expand it to include homosexual relationships seems
another indicator act toward the destruction of the nuclear family
not only for blacks; for all.
In
Africa traditional kinship structures as well as nuclear families are
being degraded by the demands of urban globalism that would ideally,
within a capitalist paradigm, prefer civilians to be individuals with
a direct relationship to TV, the state and programming commensurate
for consumer-proles. Those transitions for American urban blacks are
possibly far more advanced. It is more likely that urban blacks would
evolve toward a Brave New World construction along with whites than
to 'regress' toward a stable nuclear-family prevalent social
structure with good middle class, ecologically sustainable jobs for
all that want to work.
African
rejection of Christian culture as a white religion occasionally may
have supported the taking up of the Muslim religion and change of
names that was common in black America of the 1960s with the most
famous example being that of Cassius Clay- Mohammad Ali and second;
Lew Alcindor-Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
The
urban black Muslim and African axis toward the Middle East and view
of Islam as an African religion brought black Americans into an
unfortunate juxtaposed concurrence with global terrorists from the
1960s to the present with Isis and Al Qaeda. Somalis from the upper
Mid-West were arrested for seeking to travel to fight for ISIS and
the Islamic State.
The
black movement toward Africa shared a leftist flow toward
anti-Colonialism that was in turn regarded as a white, European
phenomenon almost exclusively. Muhammad Ali famously refused to serve
in the Vietnam war claiming to be a conscientious objector. Malcom X
was given a draft deferment to the second world war because at the
induction center he said he wanted to enlist in the Army so he could
shoot white people.
The
black movement toward anti-white, anti-colonial global left-leaning
causes is in sharp distinction toward the pro-American,
anti-immigrant U.S. nationalism that is in the interests of the poor
and middle class who are U.S. citizens. Black anti-colonialists view
that as a racist white-nationalism movement and the left-leaning
mainstream media presents the narrative that way too.
Many
of the left seem to want to universalize their own national economic
causality globally as a remedy rather than to comprehend and
reinforce their own national polity and real economic factors such as
labor supply and demand.
Global
plutocrats would be too happy to keep Americans divided and continue
to flood the nation with new and cheap illegal foreign labor to
replace the blacks that aren’t available for such low wages any
more. It is worth recollecting that white Americans fought to
liberate blacks from slavery in the U.S.A. Keeping a sovereign
democracy and wealth from concentrating and uniting in a planetary
aristocracy requires nationalistic free-enterprising supporters of
democracy with adequate taxation on the rich to keep them from owning
politics.
