Certain crimes. But how many people do you think are currently in prison that are truly beyond rehabilitation?
Do you think that 68% of prisoners are mostly evil people who cannot function in society? 68% of men in prison don't have a high school diploma. Or are these mostly people who were born and raised in shitty circumstances with little hope for avoiding prison, hence why they didn't even finish high school?
Do you think 1/3 of black men are simply beyond rehabilitation? Because 1 in 3 black men will end up in prison at some point in their lives.
Let's just ignore the fact that the number of nonviolent drug offenders in prison and jail has increased 1,100% since 1980. Let's ignore the fact that black people use drugs at the same rates as whites and even sell drugs at lower rates yet at state and federal level they're incarcerated far more than whites http://www.csdp.org/publicservice/kids.htm . Let's ignore the fact that 4.1% of death row sentences are erroneous, and that 95+% of all convictions happen through plea bargains, meaning that the rate of false imprisonment is probably quite high, even higher than 4.1%.
I'm guessing that a very, very small percentage of the prison population is beyond rehabilitation. In those cases, prison makes sense. But our prison population has exploded since 1980, and I doubt that most of the people that have been swept up in that growth are like Anders Breivik.
Here they quote U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2020 with around 1.7M of prisoners. That's about 15% lower than that number, but still quite high.
After watching the documentary "13th" on Netflix recently, I wondered about how the US prison population affected this. Something like 1 out of 100 people in the US are in prison, which must be close to 2 out of 100 men. And another chunk of people who's function in society is to monitor those in jail. Plus the difficulties of getting a job as a felon. Seemed like all put together must have a serious impact on productivity.
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