29 August, 2018

When the Barriers Come Down

Posted by Socrates in Socrates, William Pierce, William Pierce Wednesday at 2:53 pm | Permanent Link

by Dr. William Pierce.

[…]

“In 1930, at the beginning of the Great Depression, the total population of the United States was 123 million people, and 117,000 of those people were in state and Federal prisons. That works out to less than one-tenth of one percent of the population. In other words, in the bad, old days of chain gangs and lynchings and poverty and Al Capone and so on, we had only one-fifth as many people in prison, on a per capita basis, as we have today.

Now that is about as stark a demographic statistic as you’ll find anywhere, and it’s a very interesting statistic as well. The total population of the United States slightly more than doubled during the 66 years between 1930 and 1996, while the prison population increased by more than a factor of ten. Why? How could that have happened in this kinder and gentler age? Isn’t that contradictory to everything we’ve been taught about the country becoming more and more enlightened and with a hundred times as many so-called “entitlement” programs and job-training programs and rehabilitation programs and Head Start programs and so forth now as then? How does that square with the government’s recent claims that crime of all sorts is falling these days? Murders are down, they tell us. Robberies are down. Then why does the prison population keep increasing?”

[Article].


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