Thread by @fenrir_71

<Unintended Consequences>

Or

<Why it's Not Biden's Fault His Crime Bill Ended in Mass Incarceration>

A thread:
1/

First off, y'all that know me know I usually provide reciepts in my threads, but I'm too doped up on pain meds to do that work right now, so please forgive.

You're just gonna have to trust my knowledge this time.

Let's get to it, shall we? This ones gonna be a doozy.
2/

Most legislation passed in our nation ends up with unintended consequence. Joe Biden's Crime bill is a prime example, but I'm going to use a better known, even better intended bill to illustrate my point first: Affirmative Action.
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Most people know what the Affirmative Action law's purpose was, but in broad strokes it was designed to prevent racial discrimination in hiring practices, renting practices, etc.

What we're concerned with for my purpose here is a detail in that law.
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This detail is that a company with a certain amount of people on staff must have a percentage representative example of the racial makeup of the county it's doing business in. That's to say if a county is 4% black, 3% latino...
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...said company must have that same percentage of minorities hired on staff. It's also interesting to note that doesn't apply to salaried employees if both are present onsite. The minority percentage doesn't have to be in the management, just in the broad percentage.
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This sounds pretty legit right? Fairly well written into law, should help with employment discrimination overall?

And it did, for a while.

Then companies with the combination of hourly/salaried employees started leaving city limits: real estate for large facilities...
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...is cheaper outside of cities, the further the better. Well these new properties are located in mostly white counties, unlike the former urban facilities which might have had 30% minority populations. So instead of a factory full of a mix of folks...
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...we end up with mostly white workers holding the better jobs. Because all that's left in the cities is low waged service gigs. Like restaurants, stores and stadiums.

And if a minority from the urban area wants the good gig, they end up with a long commute.
9/

Now could this have been predicted? Maybe. But the size of the Affirmative Action bill would have been larger that it already was. These same factors ended up affecting rents, and properties in urban areas, just on a tighter geographic scale.
10/

Hope fully that all made sense, because I'm moving on to the crime bill.

Now, to many people forget that the country was CLAMOURING for a tough on crime bill at the time it was passed. Murder rates were through the roof, there was a TERRIBLE drug problem in our...
11/

...nation as well. And minorities were the principal victims of these crimes, as usual. The crime bill used, what we always use btw, a reactive rather than proactive (an attitude our government suffers from greatly) approach to lowering crime...
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...most notably stiffer sentences for convicted criminals.

People follow laws for three primary reasons: fear of punishment, societal consequences, or a moral aptitude. Our government always operates as though the former reason is most common.
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I disagree with that philosophy, but that's neither here nor there right now. Because the end result was a higher and longer staying prison population as the actual law breakers were caught.

So this had two unintended consequences.
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Firstly, it was the beginning of militarized cops. They needed higher budgets and more than just shotguns to take on criminals who were armed with AKs, Uzis and such. Obviously this hot out of control when the GOP decided it would be a good idea to give them military surplus.
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Definitely unintended consequences.

But the other unintended consequence was mass incarceration. THIS wasn't because of the crime bill directly. As state prisons started to fill up said states budgets started to be stretched pretty thin.
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And as that happened, the GOP started to make big inroads in state governments. If there's one thing the GOP loves, it's shrinking government's responsibilities, and that means outsourcing.

This brought on a wave of privatization of prisons, state and federal.
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These prison companies grew to some of the profitable and powerful corporations in our nation, and still are today. Well what's the goal of a corporation?

Increased profits: there's never enough.

So these newly powerful corps consistently lobbied...
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...state and local governments for ever more punitive sentences for even the most minor of crimes. They lobbied for jailing people who couldn't pay court fines even. THEY created the mass incarceration issue, not Biden's crime bill.

Because profit.
#HowToAmerica
19/

So really blaming Biden for mass incarceration is not only wrong, it's ignorant of our system, and it's CLEAR tilts against non whites.

Anyone that says differently just hasn't been paying attention, or is arguing in bad faith.

Oh and I blame typos on the meds.
😄

<fen>

Addendum: @sikntyrd54 kindly gave me a detailed correction.

https://twitter.com/sikntyrd54/status/1271824663954538498?s=19

*lobbied the state and federal governments