Implicit Bias of Social Control-Good Enough for King George III?

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.

The Paradox of Public Housing/Black Family Challenges

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 implicit 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.

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.

On Schools to Prison for Blacks Since Bill Clinton

It might have been useful to point out that historically weapons were not a problem in public schools generally, until fairly recently. With mass school shootings that surged during the Bill Clinton administration parents and others became much more 'zero-tolerance' oriented to weapons in schools. School shootings, terrorism, gang-related activities, and mass use of dope made schools dangerous places to be. Then again they  became targets for various sorts of terrorists. Zero tolerance for a broad field of behavior was not unexpected, illogical or unjust.

I completely agree that bad socialization of children from an early age create extreme disadvantages for future students that may lead to crime. A solid family and community life is invaluable in creating a continuum of good instructors, good homes and good students. It is wrong though to think that permissiveness for guns, drugs and thuggery in schools would create better students, adults and send fewer people to jail.

Prisons could be abolished and public corruption rise. The guilty could go unpunished a a few more individuals die- yet that is not the sort of society most people want.

Plainly individuals should not be repressed or treated without equal justice anywhere in the nation. With 92% of U.S. population growth being non-white and white society aging and sedentary the majority of the incarcerated, wild youth are likely to  be non-white. It is not in anyone's interest to provide wrong explanations of causality for the number of minorities in jail. It is also in everyone's interests to create a well educated youth and adult population in the U.S.A. that is stable, non-doped up, free-thinking and socially responsible with a good work ethic inclined toward creative, inventive productivity. It is expensive to incarcerate people. One prisoner's $35,000 annual expense would buy good food via food stamps for a couple dozen people. Crime steals from the hungry too.

On Southern Reocnstruction Era 'Slave' Labor

The convict lease system was a way to provide cheap labor for those that formerly used slave labor after the civil war ended slavery. I was surprised to learn of its existence. It is not well covered in U.S. history. As many as 800,000 black citizens were forced to be convict-lease-workers as a consequence of unjust sentences for a variety of sometimes non-felony charges. With as high of a mortality rate as 50% in lease-labor positions the sentences were blatant violations of just punishment.

In the reconstruction south there was a reorganization required socially as well as reconstruction of southern infrastructure without slave labor. Since so much of the ante-bellum south had slave labor as an integral part of their economic system its sudden disappearance caused a great shock to the system.

Instead of going too far into an historical analysis of the adjustments required for the economy of the post-war south I will just point out the obvious (after watching the video), that local law enforcement used their power to arrest and convict to obtain a prison labor force of convicts that could be leased to capitalists and former slavers for the same work that slaves did.

The video pointed out that the industrialization of the post-war south was accomplished with what effectively was slave labor doing much of the heavy labor.  John T. Milner was cited as a particular industrialist-racist who exploited slave labor to help coal mining and railroad building etc.

Because convict labor of this sort existed until 1923 some assume that black convicts today in the third millennium represent a continuum of oppression for purposes of putting down black males. That is an exceedingly superficial view of history even though there are still racists (of any  race) in the south and elsewhere.

Blitz Chess (3M) Modern Defense With 1.E-4

                                                             I played black...

Leadership Ostrich Evolution; North Korea Unbound

North Korean communist forces under the direction of the Dictator Kim Jong Un have steadily progressed to develop nuclear weapons, miniaturize them and build ICBMs. North Korea may have as many as twenty nuclear weapons already and is near to completing its ICBM system to attack American targets. Democrats and the media prefer the ostrich policy of diplomacy to war. Let’s consider that.

The ostrich position would declare diplomacy a moderate success if the nuclear issue disappears from the news media for some time even while nuclear weapons and missile upgrades continue in North Korea.  http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/lawmakers-slam-trumps-promise-unleash-fire-fury-north/story?id=49099484

North Korea has every reason to believe the United States cannot launch a pre-emptive nuclear and conventional strike because it lacks the will. Like a gun as a deterrent to crime, it is only effective if the criminal believes the victim would use it. North Korea knows the United States has not the will to begin a war to end its nuclear build-up

Nearly every media article about the nuclear development problem in North Korea and the possibilities of war concludes with the information that war must be avoided and diplomacy pursued. Yet Dictator Kim Un has already won the dimplomacy contest; he can continue to develop nuclear weapons and missiles as he pleases.

So one might consider what a world in two or three years would be like if North Korea continues building nuclear weapons and launchers. It might have 200-300 nuclear weapons and several dozen ICBMs. It is quite possible that former communists look to North Korea as the wedge to rebuild a communist world. 

Some believe that if the U.S. sanctioned China and forbid it from having students attend U.S. colleges that could force it to get North Korea to disarm. That policy though diplomacy would itself fail to be enacted by Congress as well as being ineffective at making North Korea stop building nukes and ICBMs.  Globalists look to China as the golden consumer-producer land of the future.

Would U.S. policy change when North Korea has a couple hundred nukes and ICBMs? The ostrich policy would say not at all; it could be ignored because Dictator Kim is a reasonable man. Diplomacy would lead the U.S.A. To expose its throat to a North Korea that could launch whenever it liked or at leas vaporize Japan.

One must wonder what Japan would think of the North Korean nuclear development. Would it be moral to prevent Japan from developing its own counter-nuclear missile force and nukes, or would Americans be uncomfortable with that? How would a nuclear proliferation policy in Asia stabilize or destabilize U.S. influence? Would the U.S.A. seem like a paper twit with missiles and no balls to use them except in retaliation?

If war eventually does occur with North Korea after it has developed a few hundred nukes and missiles U.S. policy makers may wish they had acted to stop the nuclear development earlier, even as a few US. cities are smoldering ruins and world economic leadership has shifted entirely to China.

Trump Imprecates Shakespeare to N. Career Nuclear Threat?

Dictator Kim has a fast nuclear weapons and missile deployment pace that seems head toward a launh even though democrats say its all President Trumps fault because he is irritating the dictator with rough language. President Trump said that North Korea would be met with fire and fury and some in error said that Trump misquoted Shakespeare's sound and fury line from the Tempest. Instead I think the phrase most likelier did not come from Romeo and Juliet...

Ihttp://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/08/trump-north-korea-warning-241409

t could be from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet Act 3 scene 1 “Away to heaven, respective lenity, “And fire-ey'd fury be my conduct now !" Trump may care about the U.S.A. and North Korean nuclear development so much that he isn't yet ready to send food and a State Depatment dancer

Chicago Sues to Resume Sanctuary from Lawfulness

In order to create their own laws conformal to their own desires several cities in America have declared themselves sanctuaries for law-breaking illegal aliens- presumably excluding members of ISIS and Al Qaeda. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/sanctuary-city-suit-chicago-doesn-t-want-go-back-abuses-n790406

Should cities be free to declare themselves sanctuaries from select federal laws?

Chicago in the day of Al Capone could have declared itself a sanctuary city from paying federal taxes and that leading citizen would not have been rudely arrested and deprived of his liberty by the U.S. Government.

This was a tactically excellent move by the Mayor to advance the global plutocratic imperial interests. That is creating sanctuaroes for lawlessness would radically acellerate sedulous disregard for constitutional protections of U.S. citizens inclusive of freedom to be free from illegal labor competion. Chicago is probably stuffed with cheap illegal labor and the party of slavery could not relenquish that any more than the confederacy.

Breaking up the U.S.A. a piece or city at a time with sanctuaries will bring down the rights to of actual citizens so theey can adjust to becoming subjects of the plutocratic global imperium.

Poverty, Punishment and U.S. Prisons

The majority of people in prison are poor. Why is that? Most perpetrate crimes while young. Youth hadn’t the time to become established and save money in comparison to older people. Sometimes they choose crimes for profit. Civil law, common law and customary and Islamic legal systems; there are several forms through which socieities seek justice. Africa alone has 3000 tribes, 1000 languages and a mix of legal systems. The U.S.A. has a common law and adversarial legal system rather than a civil systems loosely derived from Rome whereby a magistrate is judge and prosecutor. The U.S. system of an adversarial prosecutor covers fewer than 20% of the people of the world, yet it has evolved to a reasonably conservative compassionate status compared to what went before yet it has a long way to go to increase its efficiency at finding the golden means of justice for all.

Youth may lack good avenues for non-criminal progress living in poor social environments. Poor social environments may have higher crime rates and illegal drug use as aspects of their street economics that are lacking from affluent neighborhoods without criminal gangs.

At Rikers Island N.Y. 80% of the incarcerated are awaiting trial. That is, they haven't been convicted of anything. Half of the incarcerated couldn't afford a bail of $1000 or less. 

The poor may have no comparable ability with the prosperous to afford competent legal representation. Court fines and cost may be trivial to the prosperous and debilitating to the poor. Far too many vulnerable and even socially incompetent people perpetrating misdemeanors may be incarcerated to the cost of society and themselves. Plainly a separate system of corrective remedies for the lowest classes of misdemeanors that do not require incarceration should replace more harsh and ineffective corrections structures. Public service instead of fines and detoxification instead of jail are two obvious courses to pursue that would perhaps save public expense.

Incarcerated prisoners experience some of the depersonalization of military inductees with their private life and identity removed to a certain extent by rude and impersonal treatment. Having one’s freedom taken away is a drastic response by society to crimes against other people. That wasn’t too well noted by the empaneled round table. They have no right in that traditional criterion to expect any family life at all as if they were checking into a hotel. I am sure a better system could and should be designed, yet that it still the underlying premise. They have no more rights than when the sovereign throws a prisoner under a trap door in a dungeon crawl space in the darkness (as at Warwick castle). I am sure the courts have enumerated the rights of prisoners as citizens yet I just don’t know what those are really. I guess they might be limited to things like guards cannot commit crimes on prisoners.

Plainly society has allowed prisons to exist that allow prisoners (and some guards) to commit crimes on other prisoners. I would think that the state could be sued for making prisoners subject to crimes by other prisoners in a reasonable criterion, yet since they obviously haven’t the prisoners must have so little rights as citizens that they cannot expect to be free from violent crimes enabled by the state in that has every reasonable expectation that any given prisoners has a very good chance of being made a victim of crime even with grievous bodily harm.

Prisoners may be transferred as guards or administrators deem without notice or consent of the prisoners. Perhaps that is not only to destroy any sense of personal security by to prevent possibility for designing an escape plan.

Compulsory naked inspections by guards would tend to damage an inmate’s psychological sense of security in person-hood. That could affect behavior of prisoners upon parole as they may have been conditioned to treat other people with a similar degree of disrespect, or perhaps a higher degree of disrespect than those that weren’t incarcerated. It does at any rate seem a somewhat sado-masochistic perversion that should be avoided if possible with some sort of evolution to a security system that does not require human contact (indirect electronic and camera viewing for authority audiences to assure that there are no weapons or dope under the nutsack.

In reading the Gulag Archipelago of Solzhenitsyn I found the conditions were far more harsh than that of U.S. prisons generally-especially the initial arrest and interrogation at the Lubyanka. In the Kolyma District prisoners were stacked outside the transit hut like cord wood after freezing to death. Crowded into a space without room to sit down and with the temperature about -45 f and wearing like clothes without coats and half starved the prisoners were offered cold salt herring to eat. Those that ate the fish became thirsty and drank ice water, and that temperature lowered their marginal body core temperature and they died of hypothermia and were piled outside.

One needs to value the comparative better state of U.S. prisons to many of those around the world. Later I will quote from a book about African prisons.

Psychological torture at the Lubyanka included the routine practices of cold concrete floor and no furniture, being doused with ice water, being forbidden to sleep and things as trivial as not being allowed to put hands under ones blanket if given a bunk and blanket. Lights might never go off, and if they did be turned back on if one fell asleep. Of course beatings were given to encourage confessions. There are innumerable methods for psychological torture in and out of prison by both legal and illegal authorities I suspect.

Incarceration is a dumbing down environment as well as a sobering up (for some). The court costs for pre-trial time were hidden for me and seem absurd; the arrested did not choose to be incarcerated and should not be responsible for that even if found guilty later. The debt presumption seems consistent with a free market system however that system presumes a free rather than a duressed contractual relationship.

The incarcerated suffer high social opportunity costs (an economics concept) rather than correction in some cases. I think it worth reminding that not all of the arrested are the same socially or behaviorally. It is true that many may be poor, yet poverty is a condition of the young rather than the old generally, at least at the start of adult life, so the arrested who happen to be under 35 and delinquent from work and stable environment may be young and poor logically.

The prison system can't fix a badly designed economic system that permits poverty to exist, yet neither should one blame poverty for the choices people make to use drugs, alcohol and commit crimes. Marijuana and meth each cause brain damage to some extent. Laws to prevent that and encourage people to benefit society rather than to be degenerate and contribute to social decline are worth keeping. Some of the young don't realize that life is not just partying. It is necessary for the poor to eschew drugs and alcohol entirely, keep one's wits about and get a job. When they don't they may steal to pay for addictions that those already prosperous have no trouble affording.

A society that does not encourage employers to hire those out of work longest with tax credits cannot be serious about reducing poverty . Pre-trial incarceration, money bail and plea bargaining were the three biggest challenges that one public defender mentioned as problem, and they are related to the poverty of those incarcerated. To some it is evident the poor aren’t able to afford adequate and equal legal rights of defense as those not poor.

I was reading about prison conditions in Africa in order to be able to make some comparison with those of the United States. Africa like South America generally has a higher murder rate than the U.S.A. yet with a lower incarceration rate. Probably they lack the will or financial capacity to expand prisons some of which, like those of Portuguese Angola were built long ago during the colonial era, from 1570 and likely need to be replaced.

Following is a description from the book Crime and Punishment around the World, Volume 1: Africa and the Middle East; of prison conditions in Angola (in 1995)- (quote from page 6 on Angola)- “Most of these facilities are overcrowded with substandard conditions. Though prison conditions vary widely, some of these conditions include poor diet, sanitation, and medical facilities; prolonged interrogation, beatings, torture, and inhumane treatment; curtailment of visits by family and friends arbitrarily; and holding inmates incommunicado or moving them from one prison to another without notifying the family.”

People certainly do not want criminals running amok, yet one neither wants injustice to prevail such that poor people are locked up so people can have jobs in a system that requires that a pool of people be input and held like cattle for profit. Neither should parole conditions be unrealistic such as expecting that those released into a sub-zero city without possibility of work should be required to remain in that area instead of someplace with moderate temperatures.

Finally,if one wants to keep the poor from being drafted into the prison system there must be better odds for staying out of it through quality employment with good-paying jobs and affordable places to live that don't require a lifetime to afford.