My last entry built on an SL&P posting about fictionalized plea bargains that whitewash the defendant's behavior.That same blog now features an article titled, "Mass Incarceration Has Become the New Welfare." The thesis of the article, taking off from the work of black radical Ta-Nehisi Coates, is that America -- ever the cruel, racist nest -- has solved its welfare state problems by the morally indefensible expedient of building the "carcereal state" instead.
I shall refrain from addressing the premise of this view of things, or its implicit concession (or proclamation, I'm not sure which) that we would not, as the Left usually claims, save taxpayer money by de-incarceration. (Instead, we would simply move the expenditures to what the article views as a more benign expansion of welfare). Instead, I want to highlight this paragraph (emphasis added):
But, in characteristic fashion, [Coates] goes beyond this, asking readers to think in new ways about disturbing phenomena that they may take for granted. Bringing together Moynihan's concerns about black family structure with the cold fact of mass incarceration produces a striking conclusion: Mass incarceration actually causes crime.
Nowhere does the author cite facts to support this assertion, and it's not hard to see why. Since 1991, as incarceration has skyrocketed (a fact no one disputes), crime has dropped by half. On its face, the claim that "mass incarceration causes crime" is not merely wrong but preposterous -- so much so that the idea that such a claim is made as part of a good-faith debate becomes impossible to believe.
When you want to have a good-faith debate, you at least try to tell the truth; you don't belligerently assert its inversion.
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