🌱 All that is criminalized isn’t harmful, and all harm isn’t necessarily criminalized

All that is criminalized isn’t harmful, and all harm isn’t necessarily criminalized

Gilmore writes that “the California state prison population grew nearly 500 percent between 1982 and 2000.” The three-strikes law, which mandated twenty-five-years-to-life sentences for a third felony, had an especially severe effect on Black and Latinx communities. Mike Davis reported that, during the first six months of prosecutions under the new law, “African-Americans made up fifty-seven percent of the ‘three strikes’ filings in L.A. County,” even though they made up only ten per cent of the state population. This was seventeen times higher than the rate at which whites were being charged under the new law, even though white men were responsible for “at least sixty percent of all the rape, robberies, and assaults in the state.”

crime is a manifestation of social deprivation and the reverberating effects of racial discrimination, which locks poor and working-class communities of color out of schooling, meaningful jobs, and other means to keep up with the ever-escalating costs of life in the United States.These problems are not solved by armed agents of the state or by prisons, which sow the seeds of more poverty and alienation, while absorbing billions of dollars that might otherwise be spent on public welfare. The police and prisons aren’t solving these problems: they are a part of the problem.

Our current criminal-justice system is rooted in the assumption that millions of people require policing, surveillance, containment, prison