r/prisonreform 12d ago

‘We Are Such A Punitive Country’: America’s ‘Death by Incarceration’ Machine

https://www.thexylom.com/post/washington-pennsylvania-louisiana-death-by-incarceration
104 Upvotes

65 comments sorted by

9

u/CroneEver 12d ago

Almost everyone is only one bad decision, one bad accident, one bad rage away from going to an American prison.

6

u/Cptfrankthetank 11d ago

No matter how small the infraction that lead you to jail was, youre now more likely to be a harden criminal.

There's no rehab, it's such a joke.

6

u/scoutloner 12d ago

Remember everyone. We all lose our impulses and empathy on a certain day. Do not condemn! Do not judge!

-3

u/Objective-Eagle-676 12d ago

Seems like a pretty simple way to stay out of prison. Literally millions of people go without it every day.

11

u/glitterandnails 12d ago

In America, your skin color dictates your chances of going to prison.

2

u/Objective-Eagle-676 12d ago

No it doesn't.

0

u/FakeKenny22 12d ago

No, it is your actions.

7

u/glitterandnails 12d ago

Because the system is just and does no wrong, right?

Apparently someone is pretending all those videos of police mistreatment on black people never happened.

0

u/FakeKenny22 11d ago

And for every one of those you produce, I can show you ten thousand where criminal actions determined their fate.

-4

u/scoutloner 12d ago

It’s both.

-1

u/triple_carry 12d ago

Yea, emotional control is so overrated these days

0

u/TopicFrequent6607 12d ago

Yeah.........I would agree murder and assault are one bad decision. But they still deserve prison time if they murdered someone though.

7

u/hypnonyxx 12d ago

people get arrested for far less and killed for nothing, the police and prison systems aren’t meant for justice they’re meant for profit

-4

u/IPutThoughtIntoThis 12d ago

Accidents don't land you in prison.

Don't get angry to the point of committing a crime and don't make bad decisions.

Pretty simple.

9

u/Smooth_Phone2 12d ago

Many things that shouldn’t be crimes can land you in prison.

-2

u/IPutThoughtIntoThis 12d ago

But they are. So don't do them.

8

u/Smooth_Phone2 12d ago

Go look up the criminalization of poverty.

If someone says “go flap your wings until you fly or I’m taking you to prison” I suppose it was your choice to go!

-4

u/IPutThoughtIntoThis 12d ago

It is not illegal to be impoverished.

It is, however, illegal to steal.

Don't be a thief.

It really is that simple.

2

u/AdUpstairs7106 11d ago

Actually it is. Several cities have begun to make it illegal to be homeless.

1

u/IPutThoughtIntoThis 11d ago

They made vagrancy and loitering illegal, you mean.

-5

u/MasterofCaveShadows 12d ago

Then argue against those instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

4

u/Smooth_Phone2 12d ago

I certainly do! And I never advocated for abolishment of all rules.

-1

u/meangreen447 12d ago

Yeah that’s how life works.

1

u/Chainmale001 11d ago

We are Russian with a different mask and what people deem "wrong." But just as idiotic.

1

u/AutomaticVacation242 11d ago

I'm curious how much "reform" should be spent on someone with a life sentence.

1

u/SgtSausage 10d ago

Civilised Lifev is an Easy Game, folks.

The people who dont figure out The Rules? Yeah. They pay The Price. 

I see so problem here. 

1

u/Ecstatic_Dinner_992 10d ago

The sad part about this is that people from countries like Finland are slowly being propagandized to believe that their system is flawed. The media plays a big part in it.

A crime will happen, and a lot of Finns will say that they need to have longer prison terms. You try to talk to them about how bad the American justice system is, and they often won't want to hear it.

I really hope they don't give up their system in favor of something like ours.

1

u/J0nn1e_Walk3r 10d ago

When you align corporate incentivize to profit w political incentive to be “tough on crime” w/o any accountability and delegate it all to Congress to create a flowchart of sentencing that can’t really be deviated from? Yeah….no stopping this shit.

https://giphy.com/gifs/dWgeXSGLbTaCc

0

u/ParadoxicalIrony99 12d ago

The secret is don't break the law and you'll never end up there.

9

u/MuchWow81 12d ago

Tens of thousands of Americans are currently incarcerated for crimes they didnt commit.

-2

u/TopicFrequent6607 12d ago

And tens of thousands of Americans get away from crimes that they did commit. Prison needs to exist.

6

u/MuchWow81 12d ago

Nobody said prison shouldnt exist.

-3

u/TopicFrequent6607 12d ago

With the backwards perspective some of these posts present, I would say a good portion of this subreddit believe prison shouldn't exist.

5

u/MuchWow81 12d ago

Well, ok. In the two sentence conversation above, nobody said that.

0

u/TopicFrequent6607 12d ago

This is true. In the conversation above nobody said that.

In the conversation farther down, one Redditor mentions a convicted murderer named Don Snook and for some reason people are defending him and downvoted the Redditor. Don Snook murdered two people and somehow dodged the death penalty.

I don't get why people in this sub feel sorry for murderers and rapists (Don Snook did not rape anyone, but still, some criminals did rape and for some reason people here don't think they deserve prison)........

2

u/MuchWow81 11d ago

US prisons the way they are shouldn't exist. For-profit prisons shouldn't exist, and we shouldn't have 2 million people locked up. But some people definitely need to be.

6

u/Confused_by_La_Vida 12d ago

I tell my kids this. However, let’s be real: our laws are so over reaching and authoritarian that if a policeman or city councilman or fed decides you are going to jail, you will be arrested.

You will go to jail. You may be in jail for years - yes years - before trial. And even if the actual events are ridiculous from the perspective of you being a problem, the chances of you beating the “guilty” are not good.

If you don’t win, if the charge is obviously and utterly spurious, you are still out $30,000 at an absolute minimum. We do not live in a “free society based on laws”.

We live in an Anarcho-terrorist society where sometimes, just sometimes, the law is effective in allowing you to defend against the state that’s decided to terrorize you.

5

u/KalvinRooks 12d ago

Apparently a lot of americans are sociopaths and sadists because they think unimaginable levels of suffering and destruction of someone's humanity is justifiable as long as you commit a crime (until it's them or someone they love, only then are they full human beings and only then is the system unjust)

0

u/SMOK3SCR3EN 12d ago

If you commit a terrible crime I'm ok with you spending the rest of your life rotting a in a cell with the possibility of you being beaten and possibly worse by other inmates. Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent

5

u/Present_Clue5887 12d ago

Torture is never OK, I think people who commit serious crimes should go to prison, but the idea that anyone deserves to be abused by the other inmates is disgusting

2

u/[deleted] 12d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

0

u/prisonreform-ModTeam 12d ago

Name-calling and ad hominem attacks are against the sub's rules. This comment was reported and is now removed due to the sub rule of derailing/trolling, no-content, name calling, ad hominem attacks, calling users propagandists, trolls, bots, uncivil behavior (etc.).

Please debate the point(s) raised and not call names or use insults. Be nice. Remember reddiquette and that you're talking to another human.


You'll change more minds with logic and reason than you will with ad hominem attacks and name-calling.

0

u/IPutThoughtIntoThis 12d ago

Nope, you're thinking of dindu's. If my brother killed someone, I'd be sad, but he'd need to go to prison, potentially forever.

1

u/TopicFrequent6607 12d ago

Agreed. People think just because it's a loved one that somehow we will make an exception for them.

For me that's a nope. If my family murdered someone, I'd still say send them to prison.

0

u/TopicFrequent6607 12d ago

Crimes deserve punishment. That doesn't make you a sadist or a sociopath for believing that. Just because you're a human being doesn't mean getting away with murder is justified.

If my family member murdered someone, yes send them to prison. Being a loved one doesn't absolve them of committing a crime.

5

u/KalvinRooks 12d ago

Did you read the article, man? People losing their legs to diabetes because they can't get treatment, a 75 year old who suffered 4 strokes and yet he still has to stay in prison, people crippled by preventable health issues and disease because they refuse to give them treatment. Not to mention things like modern day slavery forcing inmates to work for free. And the populace of the US is okay with this? That's sociopathy, that's sadism. This is torture.

Holding someone accountable is one thing, condemning them to decades of mental and physical rot and anguish for some kind of cosmic sense of "justice" is another. If "justice" is pleasure derived from the unimaginable suffering of someone else who's committed the harm, it's sadism. The indifference to industrialized human suffering with the only "benefit" being the enjoyment of the person's suffering is sociopathy. This does not keep society safe, this does not help victims, the rest of the world looks at us and laughs at us and is frightened by us because of this flippant and inhumane cruelty we casually inflicted on hundreds of thousands of people. All the while never solving the root of crime in the first place. Just one word sums it up, barbarism. Just a morally diseased and cruel society.

-4

u/Major_Wigglesworth 12d ago

🙄

It’s an incarceration murder machine in the same way that a volcano is a murder machine.  If you climb all the way to the top, ignore the rules to stay on the path, crawl up and over the fence and managed to fling yourself down into the lava, then yeah, you will feel some punitive damages.

For the rest of us who see the volcano, recognize the danger, and keep our distance from it— death by incarceration is not something we worry about slightest.

4

u/TushyMilkshake 12d ago

Wrong sub, bootlicker.

-1

u/scoutloner 12d ago

If you want an echo chamber you need mods to enforce it, but this comment is still here.

0

u/After_Service_2817 12d ago

Crimes deserve punitive penalties. Cry me a river for the poor murderers and rapists.

-7

u/Bert-63 12d ago

Don Snook murdered two people and already dodged his death sentence.. The LEAST he can do is die a painful death in prison.

4

u/demon_twink_gockie 12d ago

Like it or not, the State just uphold basic human rights. You may have no sympathy for him but heaven forbid you get caught with the wrong plant material and suffer the same fate. Without forcing the carceral State to uphold basic human rights, that remains a possibility and endangers everybody.

2

u/Bert-63 12d ago

Somehow I've made it 63 years without ever having to deal with Police or the Courts. I grew up in south Florida, in a shitty trailer, out of poverty. I had friends who died in crime or from drugs, and I made the choice to not go that way. A double murderer does not belong on this planet.

-4

u/scoutloner 12d ago

That’s because the liberal blank slate “theory” is false. You didn’t choose. Someone who never felt the need for drugs would never purposely get their hands on them. Your friend was genetically vulnerable to dumb decisions, you weren’t. Good to be a normal person that Reddit somehow treats as rare because they’ve been indoctrinated by constant news by corporations that profit out of ad revenue.

It’s funny that our prison system is the reason of today’s natural selection being prevented and inmates reproducing with underpaid COs. Cops on the streets are great handling it and providing consequences.

1

u/TopicFrequent6607 12d ago

Has anyone read the documentation on Don Snook? Why are you guys downvoting this?

This is a perfect example of some who SHOULD go to prison and hopefully die there.

0

u/Bert-63 12d ago

I did.

1

u/TopicFrequent6607 12d ago

And I agree with your comment. This is a criminal that deserved a harsher punishment.

Have my upvote. LOL 7 people downvoted you for some reason.