This includes migrants who claim to be children, but who are actually 18 or older, as well as adults who falsely claim to be parents of minors they're traveling with, according to Brian Hastings, chief of law enforcement operations for Customs and Border Protection.
Now demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt, with vast supporting evidence, that most of those people shouldn't have been in prison for the crimes in question.
The NY Times and Washington Post routinely rail against our prison population and sentencing laws. Morally they're right, our sentences are too long. They never substantiate the premise that a large share of people in prison were wrongly convincted. In fact, to date, nobody has ever proven such an outlandish thing: because it's not true. The critics don't even attempt to prove that premise (at worst they'll point to a few select prominent cases). The problem with the US incarceration rate isn't that the US wrongly puts millions of people into prison, it's that the US puts people into prison with sentences that are too long.
> Now demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt, with vast supporting evidence, that most of those people shouldn't have been in prison for the crimes in question.
"Shouldn't have been" is a value judgment; by my values, anyone in prison for a non-violent drug "offense" should not be there.
Just did a quick search, and for federal crimes, looks like the drug-related prison population is a whopping 46% of the total, at just under 70k inmates. Not sure what the violent vs. non-violent breakdown is, but even if the violent ones are 75% of those, 17k people () is still a lot. If we assume that the federal prison population is composed similarly to all the state prisons, that's 250k inmates for non-violent drug crimes.
Yes, I know I made some guesses and assumptions around those numbers, and if anyone has some better figures, I'd be happy to correct myself, but there's 250k people should not be in prison in the US, based on my values.
SalmoShalazar|5 years ago
refurb|5 years ago
[1]https://www.npr.org/2019/04/10/711850056/fake-documents-a-gr...
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
adventured|5 years ago
The NY Times and Washington Post routinely rail against our prison population and sentencing laws. Morally they're right, our sentences are too long. They never substantiate the premise that a large share of people in prison were wrongly convincted. In fact, to date, nobody has ever proven such an outlandish thing: because it's not true. The critics don't even attempt to prove that premise (at worst they'll point to a few select prominent cases). The problem with the US incarceration rate isn't that the US wrongly puts millions of people into prison, it's that the US puts people into prison with sentences that are too long.
kelnos|5 years ago
"Shouldn't have been" is a value judgment; by my values, anyone in prison for a non-violent drug "offense" should not be there.
Just did a quick search, and for federal crimes, looks like the drug-related prison population is a whopping 46% of the total, at just under 70k inmates. Not sure what the violent vs. non-violent breakdown is, but even if the violent ones are 75% of those, 17k people () is still a lot. If we assume that the federal prison population is composed similarly to all the state prisons, that's 250k inmates for non-violent drug crimes.
Yes, I know I made some guesses and assumptions around those numbers, and if anyone has some better figures, I'd be happy to correct myself, but there's 250k people should not be in prison in the US, based on my values.
catalogia|5 years ago
That's basically the opposite of how it's meant to work.