• pjwestin@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    But the crime bill did not increase the number of Blacks incarcerated

    Boy, I know I said I was going to stop, but you’re just so wrong all the time and I just can’t stop dunking on you. The crime bills of the 80s and the 1994 bill absolutely did increase the number if incarcerated black men. Even when the percentage went down, the population went up. Let’s look at those statistics in terms of real numbers:

    1970: 328,020 prisoners, 134,488 black

    1980 503,586 prisoners, 231,650 balck

    1990 1,148,702 prisoners, 608,812 black

    2000 1,937,482 prisoners, 697,494 black

    2020 1,675,400 prisoners, 536,128 black

    Source

    So, even if you see the percentage going down, the actual number of black men being thrown in prison was increasing until the end of the Trump years. It’s also worth noting that we’re only looking at the racist implications of mass incarceration, but all in all, mass incarceration itself is a terrible, right-wing policy that has increased under Democratic and Republican administrations.

    Funny enough, the only significant fall came during the Trump years, when the prison population fell 500,000 between 2018 and 2020. I highly doubt that had anything to do with Trump, and imagine it had more to do with Covid than anything else (and potentially state-level legalization of Marijuana), but it again shows that Democrats did little to curb mass incarceration.

    OK, I’m really done now. I know I said it before, but I’m really done this time. I’ll stop spreading all this, “Russian propaganda,” that I became aware 20 fucking years ago when I was in college (damn, those Russians play a long game, huh?). I’m out. Good luck.