Those in power, who want to maintain control, use this invisible line of economic exclusion by race, ethnicity and class to heighten fear level to secure their own future. The sign of a sick society is when the decreased personal freedom, increased police power, punishment, incarceration and even widening the death penalty’s application are seen as appropriate responses to the refusal to accept a dismal future.
Think the war on drugs $400 billion and still counting with no measurable progress. The increasing number of criminalized acts, harsh mandatory sentences, the creation of for profit prison and debt services collecting public fines keep the lobby money flowing and a constituency dependent on jailing an ever bigger part of the population. Economic development becomes getting one group of poor people to guard another group of poorer people. If you don’t thinks so watch the talk of economic development when they build a private prison. None of it of course is for anyone but the safety of the folks trying to keep the scales tipped in their favor, nothing else and don’t forget it.
The way to do away with many social and criminal problems is to clear pathways to participate in the legal economy for all people. That means that all people have to have access to educational, health and employment opportunity, only then will individual merit rise to the surface. It is something that is harder to do when you lose an increasing number of well paying manufacturing jobs that provided those opportunities and push more people over that invisible line into the illegal economy. Just chart the growth of the loss of good paying manufacturing jobs and the growth of the largest incarcerated population in the world, right here in the good old U.S. of A.
Other sources include Wikipedia
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