People have just kind of gotten used to it, I guess, but it’s actually insane that it’s possible to get 15 convictions. Like that literally shouldn’t even be possible.
https://twitter.com/tedfrank/status/1838917777299476540
You really cannot overstate how completely our national conversation about crime has disconnected from reality. In no country that actually mass incarcerated its citizens would it be possible for someone to have 15 convictions and still be free on the street. Therefore, the United States quite plainly does not have a mass incarceration problem. You can’t have a reasonable conversation about this with normal people, because they all take for granted that we do. So basically everybody except me and like five other people on the Internet are wrong about the most basic facts of the case. It is my burden in life to know this thing nobody else knows and to be completely incapable therefore of having normal conversations with my neighbors.
We of course do have a lot of people in prison, because we have a crime problem. Not a mass incarceration problem. A crime problem. But we are not in fact quick to put people in jail, which is how you have people with 15 convictions walking into peoples houses in the middle of the day and stabbing them 40 something times with their own kitchen knife.
That’s a crime problem, not a mass incarceration problem.
That’s a crime problem, not a mass incarceration problem.
Even the mistakes our criminal justice makes I conceive of as downstream of our incredible crime problem. The fact is that the system is stretched way beyond its capacity, because we have so much crime. We get into these debates about whether there was more crime in 2024 or 2020 and how that relates to the peak crime rates in the 1990s, but the fact of the matter is that our crime rates were very high by the standards of our peers around the world in every single one of those years.
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