Why do I consider what has occurred to me to be a plausible set of circumstances?
Reading, and research. I read things leftists like
@christiefan915 apparently do not, and I consider the implications.
For example;
Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (Russell Sage, 2006).
xiv, 247 pages : 24 cm
archive.org
Lifetime-risk papers in the same stream
- Becky Pettit and Bruce Western, “Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course,” American Sociological Review (2004).
- Bruce Western and Christopher Wildeman, “The Black Family and Mass Incarceration,” Annals of the American Academy (2009).
Summary of the risk tables often reused later:
https://prisonstudiesproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Incarceration_and_Social_Inequality.pdf
National Research Council,
The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (Travis, Western, and Redburn, eds., 2014).
Free PDF:
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/c...eration-in-the-united-states-exploring-causes
OJP abstract:
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-l...arceration-united-states-exploring-causes-and
Too cerebral for JPP leftists, I suppose, but here it is, anyway:
The prison/police abolitionist movement did not appear from criminology alone.
It was assembled, popularized, and morally licensed by a specific current of leftist thought, then carried into mass politics by Black Lives Matter and the Democrat aligned officials and institutions that celebrated that movement.
The theoretical lineage is explicit. Angela Davis’s
Are Prisons Obsolete? treated the prison as a racial and capitalist institution to be dismantled, not tuned.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore defined abolition as a presence—new social provision—rather than a vacuum, while naming “organized abandonment” as the condition prisons manage.
Mariame Kaba and allied organizers translated that into the slogan that went from pamphlets to streets: “defund the police,” “care not cops,” “we keep us safe.”
Critical race and prison-studies programs supplied the claim that disparity after Shannon and Western is not leftover crime but the system working as designed.
Black Lives Matter made that academic-activist package a public liturgy.
After Ferguson and again after George Floyd, the Movement for Black Lives platform put prison and police abolition, not “community policing plus body cameras,” at the center.
The demand was not that Shannon’s 33 percent be studied.
It was that a state which marks that many Black men has no legitimate claim to the monopoly of force in Black neighborhoods.
Western’s and the National Academies’ findings on policy-driven mass incarceration were cited as proof that the scale was chosen; Davis and Gilmore were cited as proof that the choice was racial domination.
Democrat celebration completed the circuit.
In 2020, party officeholders, campaign surrogates, urban mayors, universities, foundations, and newsrooms treated BLM as a moral consensus: with kneeling, murals, “systemic racism” resolutions, and budget fights framed as racial justice.
“Defund” was sometimes walked back as messaging; the underlying story was not.
Elected Democrats and their aligned institutions (media, education) endorsed the premise that American policing and imprisonment are constitutive of racial hierarchy, that the Western/Pettit life course is an indictment of the state, and that legitimacy flows to the movement that named that indictment.
Once that premise is official culture, abolition is no longer a fringe inference from Demography articles.
It is the policy horizon those articles are said to require.
That is the link.
Shannon counted the marks. Western and the NAS described the policy machine that made them.
Left theorists named the machine illegitimate.
BLM made the naming a movement.
Democrats, in celebrating the movement, treated that naming as the respectable account of race and the carceral state in the United States.
After reading this (if you did), now you might consider things a little differently.