The History of American Incarceration

 Bonus update:

Thread: The U.S. has 570,000 people who are homeless each night, but 17 million vacant homes. How does this connect to police budgets? (1)

— Alec Karakatsanis (@equalityAlec) April 3, 2021

A Little Sunday Fun

 

No comment..!🐦🦜👼👶🐤🐥❤️❤️🐥🐤👶👼🦜🐦 pic.twitter.com/RM2QHRNtey

— World birds (@worldbirds32) December 19, 2019

The Prison Paradox: More Incarceration Will Not Make Us Safer

by Don Stemen

Despite its widespread use, research shows that the effect of incarceration as a deterrent to crime is minimal at best, and has been diminishing for several years. Indeed, increased rates of incarceration have no demonstrated effect on violent crime and in some instances may increase crime. There are more effective ways to respond to crime—evidenced by the 19 states that recently reduced both their incarceration and crime rates. This brief summarizes the weak relationship between incarceration and crime reduction, and highlights proven strategies for improving public safety that are more effective and less expensive than incarceration.

Key Takeaway

Increased incarceration has a marginal-to-zero impact on crime. In some cases, increased incarceration can even lead to an increase in crime.
 

Publication Highlights

• Research shows that any crime reduction benefits from increased incarceration apply only to property crimes. Higher incarceration rates are not associated with lower violent crime rates.
• Each increase in incarceration rates is associated with increasingly smaller reductions in crime rates.
• The United States is spending heavily on jails and prisons while under-investing in less expensive, more effective ways to reduce and prevent crime.

Read the whole thing here.

Michael Hudson addresses the Oxford Economics Society about the imperialism of currency

Here's the source, and a few excerpts are below. Well worth a read.

The loans to Ukraine, the loans to Greece recently that ended up bankrupting it, the loans yet again to Argentina have demoralized the IMF staff. They complained that every forecast they make shows that the debts can’t be paid, but the IMF continues to make them anyway. The IMF has become a pariah among competent financial analysts throughout the world. The United States is still trying to force countries into the IMF as a means of controlling them, saying “Either you engage in a pro-American war against labor and [engage in] neoliberalism, or the alternative is wreckage.”

...The conflict is between neoliberalism – a financialized world order that wants to privatize all infrastructure and create monopoly rents for transportation, education, healthcare, like what occurs in the United States – and having these basic investments in the public domain, to be subsidized and their services provided at minimum cost. The question at issue is what kind of economy the world is going to have. Will it be a neoliberal economy, a privatized economy – Reaganized, Thatcherized and financialized, organized by central planning in Wall Street – or is the government going to plan?

China and Russia do not want a centrally planned economy anywhere near as centralized as the United States is promoting with Wall Street. In the United States the center of economic planning has been shifted from Washington to Wall Street financial institutions.