They built prisons while they were closing schools.
https://x.com/nxt888/status/2099781751598178790
They built prisons while they were closing schools.
In the 1980s and 1990s, while the United States was systematically defunding public education in poor communities, it was simultaneously undertaking the largest prison construction boom in the history of human civilization.
By 2000, America had more people in prison than any country on earth.
Not per capita.
In absolute numbers.
More than China.
More than Russia.
More than any "authoritarian" state it pointed to as examples of what it was not.
The people in those prisons were not randomly distributed across the population.
They came, with statistical precision, from the communities that had been denied the schools, the jobs, the healthcare, the infrastructure, the political representation.
The communities that had been managed rather than served for generations.
And then the prison population was used, in many states, as unpaid or nearly unpaid labor.
And then those communities were counted in the census to allocate political representation, representation that went to the districts containing the prisons, not the districts those people came from.
This is an internal colony.
Not a metaphor. Not hyperbole.
A system of extraction, control, and managed poverty operating inside the borders of the country that lectures the world about freedom.
posted by Satish Sharma at
14:41
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