Aurora Sky Castner, a Texas teen who was born in jail and graduated at the top of her class this week, will be attending Harvard University in the fall
So the fact that the US has the largest prison system in history, with nearly 1% of its entire population imprisoned, and nearly 25% of the entire world’s prison population, doesn’t make you think that maybe society has some role in deciding how many people get sent to prison? Do you think that the US is just somehow filled with an especially “criminal” class of person?
And going to prison does enormous harm to individuals. You don’t know what that woman’s life might’ve been like without prison, without the poverty that prison causes, or without the poverty-to-prison pipeline, without having her daughter forcibly taken away from her.
And of course she’s a criminal, but that’s a legal status. There isn’t some separate lower class of human being that is a “criminal”. You seem to be talking as if she is a “criminal” in some other sense of the word.
So the fact that the US has the largest prison system in history, with nearly 1% of its entire population imprisoned, and nearly 25% of the entire world’s prison population, doesn’t make you think that maybe society has some role in deciding how many people get sent to prison? Do you think that the US is just somehow filled with an especially “criminal” class of person?
And going to prison does enormous harm to individuals. You don’t know what that woman’s life might’ve been like without prison, without the poverty that prison causes, or without the poverty-to-prison pipeline, without having her daughter forcibly taken away from her.
And of course she’s a criminal, but that’s a legal status. There isn’t some separate lower class of human being that is a “criminal”. You seem to be talking as if she is a “criminal” in some other sense of the word.