Thread by @ProjectVirginia

OK let's talk some real.

For-profit prison companies are an abomination.

While they remain in the mix none of the incentives change.

Creating an institution that benefits from increased imprisonment results in more and more imprisonment over time because financial incentives continuously demand it.

The US rate has long been outrageous and unlike any other in the civilized world.

To imprison people you have to arrest people, so drug laws also create all sorts of perverse and corrupting incentives, especially those aimed at popular ones such as cannabis where there are countless millions of potential "criminals" to arrest.

But all that makes a criminal here is the law. Laws against drugs are not natural laws as are laws against murder, rape, fraud, theft and so on.

Drug laws are morals enforcement.

That's not a proper role of government.

Our police officers should be PEACE officers. Their job should be to keep the peace. Where that requires strict enforcement to protect the people it must be done; but outcomes as negative as arrest and imprisonment should be a last, not a first resort.

Talk it out first. Talk.

Our police officers are sworn to keep the peace, but are often tasked as revenue collectors for municipalities.

This again leads to perverse incentives to unjust outcomes; officers must choose between siding with the people or the government, instead of getting to choose BOTH.

I don't really understand the whole of the history of how we got here, but I do know what is plain as day in the here and now: if you are black, the system is harsher in every way; whole neighborhoods as well.

Black people end up being the "product" in for-profit prisons.

So let's get to the root of this all - the financial incentives that start at the prisons and ripple the way out to enforcement and the creation of vicious cycles that wholly shame the idea of equal justice under the rule of law.

For-profit imprisonment must go.

Along with it we need to throw out things like arrest quotas, ticketing quotas, and the like.

Incentives for police to accost people who have done no harm must all go away.

A lot will have to change to get there. Still, that needs to be the goal. Let's figure it out.

These are all financial incentives to drive conflict in society, to destroy lives, to undermine the respect for the Rule of Law, to deplete the public treasury, to break up families and separate fathers from their children.

These are *objectively* destructive forces.

And then when the for-profit prison companies and other industries thus generated start donating to politicians, there really is no Rule of Law left. The financial incentives have taken over.

A market approach solves this - remove the incentive.

The #RacistWhiteLeft doesn't care; they can afford lawyers.

Conservatives don't know because they tend not to live in cities where black populations are concentrated and the abuses are worst, and they don't smoke weed so they are much less affected.

Result: blacks left hanging.

So this is what we have to do. Conservatives have to champion black civil rights, leverage understanding of market incentives to recognize that the system as-is has poisonous elements that must be removed for the wounds to heal.

This is "systemic racism" - the profit incentive.

P.S. That money itself is an elemental force that in sufficient quantity manifests a will of its own is the subject of a long ago piece from the Cantor-Brat primary, that I'll leave for anyone interested.

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