Mass Incarceration in the US

[DeSwiss]

vlogbrothers · Published on Apr 4, 2014

Thanks to Visually (http://Visual.ly) for facilitating the creation of this video, to http://youtube.com/kurzgesagt for the animation, and to The Prison Policy Initiative for research help and fact checking. (http://www.prisonpolicy.org).

It wasn't easy to pick this topic, but I believe that America's 40-year policy of mass incarceration is deeply unethical, not very effective, and promotes the security of the few at the expense of the many.

It's hard for me, as a person who was born into privilege, to imagine the challenges convicted criminals face, often for crimes that are utterly non-violent.

If you're feeling like you want to do something about this, I'm mostly just making this video as an informational resource and to encourage people to think of felons not as bad, scary people but just as people.

The people at The Prison Policy Initiative were very helpful in the creation of this video and if you want to learn more about their work and how to get involved go to http://www.prisonpolicy.org

- The greatness of a society isn't based upon how many people it can kill, but upon how many people it can heal.


Sweden Is Closing Prisons Due to Lack of People to Put In Them

[tclambert]

1. I'm old enough I remember a time our prison system talked about rehabilitation.

The idea was to train convicts to fit into society better, not commit more crimes, teach them at least minimal job skills so they could make an honest living. Some where we gave up on that, not just on methods that didn't work very well, or on certain cases that didn't work, but we gave up on the whole idea for everyone. Now it seems standard to assume that convicts suffer from an incurable disease and should never live amongst decent people. We give them no way to live outside of prison, and fully expect imprisonment for one small crime to lead to a lifetime behind bars.

The ironic part is that one of the arguments against rehabilitation efforts was the expense. Yet when you compare the cost of lifetime imprisonment versus the cost of teaching someone to live at a subsistence level on the outside, well, it seems like every success story saved millions.

[Malteil]

2. They need to do more videos on a lot of different topics.

[DeSwiss]

3. Here ya go......

https://www.youtube.com/vlogbrothers

[KoKo]

4. Conveniently Masks the Rate of Unemployment. Good for Wall Street and Good for Politico's

And, that's the sad thing about it. But, the worst is that there are so many "innocents" in there that might have had a better life if we had a supportive network of social programs rather than spending all our money on Wars and keeping the 1% so Happy.

What a difference many of those people might have made in our life and culture. No all...but Many who are locked up there because of our failed social policies for Decades.

Feeding that 1% Beast will ..in the end..destroy us all. (in my dark mood right now...)