This article is somewhat myopic because the prison system cannot correct for the cultural shifts that have occurred over the past 50 years of broken families, single-parent households, and fatherlessness. The article assumes that the measure of "effectiveness" is the role of the prison system to "reform" people when the real reformation needs to occur primarily in the culture. All one has to do is look at the 1965 Moynihan Report to find the correlation between fatherlessness and increase in delinquency and disdain for authority that leads to confrontation with the police resulting to higher arrests and jail time. All of this was predicted 50 years ago. One can make the Marxist argument about the private prison system and "Capitalism" but that is nothing more than a deflection from the underlying causes of rising incarceration.
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I welcome dissenting voices
I think the often cited benefits of the traditional family is unfairly comparing a relationship that is not working out and likely to break up with a functional family. If we force relationships that are not working out to remain together, would that guarantee a better environment for the child? That is the pertinent question. Forcing bad relationships don't automatically make them healthy, and comparing them to healthy ones is an unhelpful bias.
More to the point, I do feel that having strong corporate profit incentives align with maximising the number of people incarcerated is perhaps not the way to go about it.
Your argument apes the typical cliche presented by Cultural Marxists for the past 50 years who stated aim is the dissolution of the nuclear family. The idea that divorce should be "easy" because a "bad"marriage harms the children. However the statistic do not show this to be the case. Prior to "no-fault" divorce, there needed to be a valid "A" justification for marriage dissolution. The "A" being one of the following: abuse, adultery, addition, and abandonment. However with no-fault the predominate reason for divorce is the rather narcissistic "dissatisfaction" and the real concerns of children be damned. Rather than try to find some measure of reconciliation, the culture encourage acrimony as well as alimony and the statistic show that children fair much better in a nuclear family than in a split up family usually without fathers.
In addition to divorce you also have the high rate of out of wedlock births. Today in the Black community a whopping 73% of children are born out of wedlock and nearly two-thirds of Black children grow up never having ANY contact with the biological fathers.
As I pointed out in my previous post, the correlation of delinquency and fatherlessness was made 50 years ago in the Moynihan Report. Much of the dysfunction we see today was predicted in this report and this correlates to the rise in criminality and the increase in the prison population.
Prison is the consequence of Cultural Marxism that encourages broken families and fatherlessness and until this is address we cannot look to the system of incarceration to make up for what families should be providing to children.
You are covering for a greedy police state that profits from incarcerating as many people as possible, while simultaneously victim blaming the very people being targeted by the prison industrial complex. How many of those broken families do you think were destroyed by locking up non-violent drug offenders? Marxism and fatherlessness didn't lock up all those people. Racist cops and judges did. The cognitive dissonance it must take some of you right-wingers to accept fascism while claiming to support liberty and small government is mind-blowing.