Why America's prisons are shrinking and racial gaps are closing

6 pointsposted 7 hours ago
by marojejian
(nature.com)

11 Comments

marojejian

7 hours ago

Forget the why, I wasn't aware the gap was closing...

Someone with more, info feel free to refute this.

I can't defeat the paywall, but these posts have some more detail:

https://news.wisc.edu/incarceration-rates-are-declining-a-ne...

https://scienmag.com/u-s-prison-population-declines-as-racia...

toomuchtodo

7 hours ago

With more prison space than prisoners, correctional facilities are shutting down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48818747 - July 2026

> The trend reflects an end to an important chapter of the story of mass incarceration, an era in which drug laws became more punitive, the war on crime mushroomed and the number of people sentenced to time behind bars surged. States poured billions of dollars into new prisons.

> Now, the closures reflect a broader shift. Many states have revised sentencing laws and expanded education and job-training programs that help reduce the chances that people return to prison, JC Hendrickson, senior policy strategist for the Brennan Center’s Justice Program, told Straight Arrow.

> “States have similarly seen prison populations drop,” he said.

https://usafacts.org/answers/how-many-people-are-in-prisons-...

k310

5 hours ago

While poorly disguised concentration camps are increasing.

Until a stop is put to them.

pfannkuchen

4 hours ago

Isn’t this comparison actually quite offensive?

It equates Jews who were perfectly allowed to be in Germany until the N’s gained power and unilaterally eliminated their status for no legitimate reason, with people who are knowingly breaking perfectly good and long standing democratically created laws.

No Jew snuck into Germany, right? No Jew had the option of peaceably going back to their country of origin and refused, right?

And before you say that you aren’t referring to the German camps, you know very well that this is where the power of the term “concentration camp” comes from, and that power is why you invoked it.

k310

2 hours ago

Politics aside, Nobody, not even a coddled white collar criminal, deserves the documented torture, deprivation and horrible medical conditions leading to many deaths, of this paramilitary army, not operating under military rules of conduct, but seemingly impromptu and concealed rules and activities.

Terribly wrong, and concentration camps meet the operational definition, if not the "academic" one. Torture, suffering and death don't really care who and how. They are universally wrong.

People are people. Some get country club accommodations, even after conviction. Some get brutality "on ice".

pfannkuchen

42 minutes ago

Okay can you please justify your assertions?

Where are people being tortured? ICE is pulling off fingernails and shoving glass up urethras? ICE is chopping off hands and pouring scalding water on people? What are you calling torture?

How many deaths are you talking about?

What horrible medical conditions are you talking about? How long are these people waiting for a flight? Are they trying to avoid being flown home while this is happening, or is there a gigantic backlog?

What makes them paramilitary? Are they firebombing immigrant houses? Are they assassinating immigrant leaders?

Like if you guys wanted to get these people out but you just want it to be more civil or whatever, then yeah I’m listening, but you don’t! You want them to stay! That makes your hysteria seem motivated, because you aren’t ranting about how they should stay, you are ranting about implementation details, which as far as I can tell isn’t your core concern!

JumpCrisscross

an hour ago

> It equates Jews who were perfectly allowed to be in Germany until the N’s gained power

The refugees who were illegally deported had a right to be in America until they’d had due process. It’s absolutely valid to compare the two cases. Particularly given our Japanese internment in the 1940s, while abhorrent, did not reach the levels of violence of today’s concentration camps.

pfannkuchen

an hour ago

What due process is missing in deportation cases? Serious question, I haven’t looked into it too much because I am quite allergic to hysterical coverage of an area and I start to tune out and assume the hysterical people are probably wrong (in addition to being concerned about demo change as I don’t really want my grandkids to live in Brazil without having relocated).

When the infraction is about whether they are supposed to be in a place at all, I surface level can buy that this is a special case and you don’t need to let them stay while it gets figured out as that pretty basically does not scale as an approach. And also, getting a flight to your home country isn’t imprisonment, fines or forced labor which is what the rest of due process applies to, right?

Is there some argument against that or do I automatically lose for not wanting to become Brazil (since wanting to become Brazil is what progressive Jesus wants or whatever).

JumpCrisscross

35 minutes ago

> What due process is missing in deportation cases?

Every case where a judge has said ICE violated a court order.

> I surface level can buy that this is a special case and you don’t need to let them stay while it gets figured out

US citizens have been detained [1] and deported [2] and denied access to counsel or communication.

If this is fine, we don’t have the rule of law. (We don’t have habeus corpus.) Putting people in camps against their will outside the law, camps where they get injured and die and disappear, is quite literally a concentration camp. (It’s not a death camp or a labor camp, at least to our knowledge. But most Germans had about as much knowledge about what was going on at their concentration camps as we have visibility into El Salvador.)

> getting a flight to your home country isn’t imprisonment, fines or forced labor which is what the rest of due process applies to, right

They’re not only being sent to their home countries [3].

We have a system right now where Americans and immigrants with a legal right to be here can—based on race or religion—be disappeared to random places where they aren’t heard from again. These are absolutely concentration camps. Like, the Jews weren’t a sympathetic group to most people in the 1930s. There were plenty of reasons given for why they should be removed to a secure place until a more permanent solution could be worked out.

[1] https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-487

[2] https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/ice-deports-3-u-s-citize...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/ice-may-deport-migrants-cou...

pfannkuchen

15 minutes ago

You first link specifically says “by mistake”.

What percent of cases does this happen in?

If we have an imperfect system we don’t have rule of law? When has anyone ever had a perfect system?

Why do you need to be so hyperbolic? It makes it hard to take you seriously.

Can you restate your case in a non-hyperbolic fashion, ideally while taking some breaths? I am listening, but I just can’t stomach this kind of hysterical rhetoric, and so far you haven’t made a case without it, nor has anybody else I’ve read.

> Every case where a judge has said ICE violated a court order.

I don’t trust the courts already, so I need to understand at a conceptual level what sort of due process is being ignored. And I don’t really understand why people on your side aren’t stating it like that generally, uuuunless they don’t really have a strong case (not saying they don’t definitively but based on what I’ve seen written about this topic generally that is my starting place mentally, if there are strong conceptual arguments, where are they hiding!).

JumpCrisscross

9 minutes ago

> You first link specifically says “by mistake”

What happened after the mistake was caught? ICE dug its heels in. Some of these cases are ongoing.

> What percent of cases does this happen in?

We don’t know. We don’t have adequate records. Judges threatening to hold the administration in contempt have been asking for these and getting stonewalled.

> If we have an imperfect system we don’t have rule of law?

When judges are ignored, and complain they’re being ignored, yes.

> Can you restate your case in a non-hyperbolic fashion, ideally while taking some breaths?

Not sure if this is supposed to be ironic.

The definition of a concentration camp is a prison for politically-targeted demographics. When ICE openly admits it uses racial profiling, imprisons Americans because of their race, and then refuses to correct its mistakes to the point of having hundreds of judges around the country threatening contempt, or, alternatively, refuses to produce documents even identifying who these people are and where they’ve been shipped, yes, you need to be flexible with the definition to the point that the Jewish removals in the 1930s—and certainly the Japanese internment in WWII—would struggle to qualify.

> I don’t trust the courts already

You should have opened with this. The executive overruling the judiciary is literally the definition of losing the rule of law.

> don’t really understand why people on your side aren’t stating it like that generally, uuuunless they don’t really have a strong case

I don’t have a side on this. I think we have an illegal immigration problem and a brownshirt/concentration camp problem. The fact that Trump is deporting a fraction of what Obama did with an order of magnitude more funds sort of points to the grift that’s being run. The fact that it’s being excused by his supporters underlines either their media illiteracy or that the illegal-immigration argument was cover for something coming close to ethnic cleansing. (It takes acrobatics to pretend e.g. Miller isn’t explicitly for this.)

Which is fine. It looks like Trump has abandoned the GOP, and the midterms will bring some stability to that.