[odie5533]

I would think hard on Ghana. It has no shortage of black people living in poverty. Yet it's extremely safe compared to the US as a whole. You're far less likely to be the victim of a violent crime walking down a street in Ghana surrounded by impoverished black people than you are in many streets in the U.S. Not all of Africa is like that. Many countries are more dangerous than the U.S. But Ghana shows pretty clearly that it's not a racial or even strictly a poverty issue. And that increasing our incarceration rate is quite possibly the opposite of what needs to be done. We need to consider other solutions.

It feels good and easy to say lock the bad people up. But the numbers don't show that as a solution if the real issue you're trying to solve is decrease violent crime.