This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires

David Stockhoff · 12 Apr 2012, 20:25 · from 2012-April.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:25:37 -0400
Subject: (urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires
In-Reply-To: <4F8737D3.5020805 at gmail.com>
References: <SNT123-W45F61ACEF9D0190C4FF2FCCF3A0 at phx.gbl>
	<CAM0v-i5VqpS+P2FR-5dNUyFuoYM9aKQqsK0t6FvbhBELKfJw_g at mail.gmail.com>
	<4F8736E7.1030909 at gmail.com> <4F8737D3.5020805 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4F873A41.4040700 at verizon.net>

On 4/12/2012 4:15 PM, Ant?nio Marques wrote:
> Ant?nio Marques wrote:
>> Why think that how a society treats its prisoners will filter down to
>> how people treat each other in general and not the reverse?
>
> (I'm ready to believe a harsh penal system will result in a more 
> violent society, but not necessarily that a milder one will result in 
> a less violent one.)

So you see that a harsh penal system is a trap, since it can be 
ratcheted up but never down. Worse than harshness in its pernicious 
effect on society, however---and yet harshness always bubbles up in 
these discussions as though it were the only relevant dimension---is 
arbitrariness.

So it's not just a side note that black/poor men get imprisoned and 
executed at a higher rate in the US compared with whites and the rich, 
guilty and innocent alike. It's the very core of how the system 
/actually/ /works/. It's a failure that stains every state and every 
branch of government.

Fortunately, it's no longer "fashionable" to not care about that.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net