Conversation

@pluralistic spreading some truth in The Bezzle:

America will never make life better for the millions of souls it has imprisoned. Never. It is not in our character. To be an American is to live with the festering background knowledge that you are in a land that imprisons more of its people than any country in the history of the world—a land with more prisoners than Stalin’s USSR or Hu Jintao’s China or P. W. Botha’s Apartheid South Africa.

With so many in prison, either you have to believe that you are living in the midst of a great many secret criminals, or you have to confront the fact that you live in a place where the only thing standing between you and decades in a prison (running at two or three times its nominal capacity) is luck … and connections.