Thread by @ClintSmithIII

It’s really something to watch powerful white people enter the marijuana market to make millions while black & brown kids are still locked up for it.

It’s *also* worth remembering that the narrative of prisons being primarily filled with “nonviolent drug offenders” isn’t true.

Even if you released every “nonviolent drug offender” in prison you would still have 1.7 million ppl incarcerated, which would be a fifth of the world’s total.

Focusing only on this group also distorts the blurry line between what constitutes as “violent” or “nonviolent” crime.

It would be fantastic to release ppl who committed nonviolent drug offenses but you won’t end mass incarceration that way

And if the focus is only on this group there’s a risk of creating a caricature of those who committed violent crimes that excludes them from the conversation

It’s egregious that so many people are locked up just for drug offenses. But the other part of this conversation is asking, does it make sense for someone who committed a violent crime to spend the majority of their life or the rest of their life in a cage?

That’s a much more difficult conversation for people, especially lawmakers, to have in public because it doesn’t fit into a narrative of someone that seems worthy of empathy.

But if ppl are serious about ending mass incarceration you have to think about punishment differently.

And there’s science for this. For example we lock up a disproportionate amount of young people for violent crimes and we also know that someone’s pre-frontal cortex, which handles impulse control, isn’t fully developed until they’re in their mid-twenties:

hrweb.mit.edu/worklife/young…

We also know that someone’s likelihood of committing crime significantly decreases after a certain age:

nij.gov/topics/crime/P…

We also know that at present, about 10% of incarcerated people are fifty-five or older, and by 2030, according to a report by the ACLU, that percentage will grow to about a third of our prison population:

themarshallproject.org/2015/08/27/whe…

We also know that people who grow up witnessing & experiencing violence are more likely to engage in violence themselves later in life:

rsfjournal.org/doi/full/10.77…

So ultimately it’s asking, does a kid who committed a violent crime when they were 16, for example, deserve to be sentenced to spend the rest of their life in a cage?

I would argue that they don’t. But our criminal justice system often cast these people off w/ no second chance.

Anyway, all of this is to say, it’s important to be aware that in an effort to illuminate how ridiculous it is that kids selling weed are locked up for so long, we might unwittingly contribute to a narrative that only certain types of people don’t deserve to be in prison.