Max Security Prison's Debate Team Bests Harvard

[MentalGiant]

I wasn't thinking of extreme exceptions. I just meant generally.

That is, sadly, not an extreme exception. It's actually the norm in low income areas. Parents who can't earn enough to support their children or parents who are drug/alcohol addicted and neglect their kids. Children raising children (be it their own or their siblings). Young teens who have the burden of supporting their child/younger siblings/parent(s). Abusive/dysfunctional homes where teens are safer on the streets than at home. It is the exception to have good parents, functioning family, enough food/necessities and the ability to focus on things like getting exceptionally high grades/extracurriculars to get into college in many areas no matter how smart you are. There also isn't a lot of jobs, so these kids get caught up in crime and can't get out, even as adults.

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I also think theres a misconception that all is rosy and wonderful in the middle class all the time. Theres not poverty issues, but theres still pedophiles, abusers, narcissistic parents ect... that drive otherwise intelligent kids who may have had a bright future into drugs and street life. After all, it is SHAMEFUL to have an addict or criminal child. The rich simply disown them. And the parent would never admit they caused it. They may not come from poverty, but they end up an adult in an impoverished area, in and out of prison, living a life of crime nonetheless. And that ALSO drives up the number of high IQ individuals in prisons. Many DO come from the middle/upper middle classes.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

I wasn't thinking of extreme exceptions. I just meant generally.

But that's just the point. Those aren't "extreme exceptions"; he just decribed well over half the prison population's life-story, at least in part. Had he included kids who got into gangs because dad's already in prison or dead, and mom has to work three jobs to keep food on the table, so the predators get almost 24/7 to influence the kids of the neighborhood, while the authorities assume they're all already gang members and harass every kid they see, leading to a loathing of authority...

The biggest tragedy of the prison system, to me, is that I found that all but the absolute worst of them (maybe 1 in 6 were "criminally minded", or psycho/sociopaths, in the traditional sense-- still a lot, but nowhere near the majority) were actually pretty nice guys underneath their layers of programming and culture, and that under other circumstances could have lived pretty normal lives, given the environment and advantages I enjoyed. 

This fraction's implications slapped me in the face, one day, when I realized that we incarcerate approximately seven times as many people per capita as the rest of the world. We have practically set up our economic and legal system to manufacture a criminal class, millions of felons who can then fill the slave-wages part of our economy and keep certain groups from attaining power or influence.

http://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/10/incarceration.aspx

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While the United States has only 5 percent of the world's population, it has nearly 25 percent of its prisoners — about 2.2 million people.

Over the past four decades, the nation's get-tough-on-crime policies have packed prisons and jails to the bursting point, largely with poor, uneducated people of color, about half of whom suffer from mental health problems.

This startling reality has cost U.S. society in many ways, concludes a sweeping National Research Council report produced by an interdisciplinary committee of researchers.

"We reached a broad consensus on what negative impacts these policies have had on individuals, on families, on communities and on the nation," says Craig Haney, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, a report co-author and member of a committee that in July briefed the White House on the report's findings.

One out of every 100 American adults is incarcerated, a per capita rate five to 10 times higher than that in Western Europe or other democracies, the report found. Though the trend has slowed in recent years — from 2006 to 2011, more than half of states trimmed their prison populations — in 2012 the United States still stood as the world leader in incarceration by a substantial margin.

While the United States has 707 incarcerated people per 100,000 citizens, for example, China has 124 to 172 per 100,000 people and Iran 284 per 100,000. North Korea is perhaps the closest, but reliable numbers are hard to find; some estimates suggest 600 to 800 per 100,000. (See "Incarceration rates per 100,000" chart.)

"No other country in the world imprisons its citizens as we do in the United States," Haney says.

The prison boom also has meant more resources spent on corrections — about $60 billion annually on state and federal prisons, up from $12 billion 20 years ago, according to the Pew Center on the States.

"Our incarceration policy is very costly with relatively few benefits and a lot of deleterious effects on our economy and our families and on the fabric of our communities," says June Tangney, PhD, a psychology professor at George Mason University who studies offender rehabilitation.

"Being the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world is really something we need to take a second look at," she says. "It's not that we have any more criminals than the rest of the world; we're just doing different things with them."
How did we get here?

For decades, the United States had a relatively stable prison population. That changed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some factors included a rise in crime from the 1960s to 1980s; rising concerns over crack cocaine and other drugs, resulting in huge increases in drug penalties; a move to mandatory minimum sentences; and the implementation of other tough-on-crime policies, such as "three-strikes" laws and policies to ensure prisoners served at least 85 percent of their sentences. These harsher sentencing laws coupled with the dramatic increase in drug penalties added up to a state and federal prison population of 1.5 million, up from 200,000 in 1973. And that's not including nearly 750,000 Americans in jails on a daily basis (as well as an annual jail population of close to 13 million, says Tangney). [...] 

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(Bolded empasis my own.)

[Edwardo Piet]

Half the prison population yes.... but not half the population of intelligent people.........

I was only saying that I would hope that most intelligent people wouldn't have to turn to crime.

[MTL]

It's not about want, Evie. When you live in a hard place, among hardened people, you too become hardened. It's the thing that most of us white, relatively privileged middle-class types have trouble imagining. Nice as you are, I promise if you grew up in one of our "projects", you'd be a very different person with a very different set of outlooks on everything.

I agree with this comment, but I really want to know how Pyrrho managed to give this post kudos, twice.

[Violet]

I would have expected the intelligent people to rather want to be poor than a criminal that's how I feel!

Depends on the cards you draw. Sometimes you count the cards, get a good wager on the odds, and, with a skosh of luck: plop down a full house, with a white picket fence, and win a hand... with enough in your pocket to comfortably buy into the next round.

Other times, you're on your last little nest egg, and the hand is a fold... but you don't have enough to buy in... so you bet the farm, because in the game of life: the option to 'just not play' is, ahahah, suicidal.

Some of us are quite well enough in our minds to up'n shank the right blighter what takes our last tuppence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLbVI44FA6Q