Feb 23, 2021
On this episode of the Resistance Library Podcast Sam and Dave
discuss the prison industrial complex in the United
States.
"Where you find the laws most numerous, there you will find also
the greatest injustice."
- Arcesilaus, Greek philosopher and student of Plato on power
and personal sovereignty
There’s no two ways about it: The United States of America and its
50 state governments love putting people in prison.
The U.S. has both the highest number of prisoners and the highest
per capita incarceration rate in the modern world at 655 adults per
100,000.
(It’s
worth noting that China’s incarceration statistics are dubious, and
they execute far more people than the United States. Indeed, the
so-called People’s Republic executes more people annually than the
rest of the world combined.) Still, that’s more than 2.2
million Americans in state and federal prisons as well as county
jails.
On top of those currently serving time, 4.7 million Americans were
on parole in 2016, or about one in 56. These numbers do not include
people on probation, which raises the number to one in 35. Nor does
it include all of the Americans who have been arrested at one time
or another, which is over 70 million – more than the population of
France.
For firearm owners in particular, the growth in this
“prison-industrial
complex” is troubling because felons are forbidden from owning
firearms and ammunition under the 1968 Gun Control Act. As the
number of laws has grown and the cultural shift for police has gone
from a focus on keeping the peace to enforcing the law, more and
more Americans are being stripped of their 2nd Amendment
rights
(not
to mention other civil rights like voting – as of 2017, 6.1 million
Americans cannot vote because of their criminal records). All told,
eight percent of all Americans cannot own firearms because of a
felony conviction.
For American society as a whole, the prison-industrial complex has
created a perverse incentive structure. Bad laws drive out respect
for good laws because there are just
so many
laws
(not
to mention rules, regulations, and other prohibitions used by
federal prosecutors to pin crimes on just about anyone). How did we
get here?
You can read the full article “Locked
Up: How the Modern Prison-Industrial Complex Puts So Many Americans
in Jail” at Ammo.com.
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