Carceral Apartheid
The Spin
Left narrative
As Friedman persuasively demonstrates in her book, America's prison system functions as carceral apartheid — a white supremacist apparatus designed to control and destroy Black populations through state-sanctioned violence. In this capacity, the prisons serve as sites of oppression against political resistance by marginalized racial communities, employing extralegal violence, sexual assault, and torture to maintain racial hierarchy. It is a system that cannot, and should not, be reformed, leaving revolutionary transformation as the only possible way to dismantle these structures of racialized domination rooted in slavery and oppression.
Right narrative
Despite what Friedman claims in "Carceral Apartheid" about systemic anti-Black bias in U.S. prisons, the mass incarceration myth is fundamentally flawed. America’s large prison population, after all, did not emerge until the late 1970s — long after slavery and the Jim Crow era — and the median length of sentences has, in fact, been on the decline for decades. Today's prison framework, rather, largely reflects higher rates of violent and other serious crimes, as well as improvements in the justice system’s ability to catch perpetrators. Claims of systemic racism fail to take this into account, mistaking increased prosecutions for the worst crimes as oppression.
Liberal narrative
It is clear that the U.S. prison system cannot persist in its current form, nor is outright abolition a practical option, in light of the threat posed by the most dangerous criminal elements of society. The problem, more specifically, is that prison currently serves neither justice nor rehabilitation effectively; instead, it serves to warehouse people while creating perverse economic incentives in rural areas to sustain the status quo. What is desperately needed to solve this is prison reform that ensures those posing the greatest risk to others are safely and humanely detained, while helping others to rehabilitate and become productive members of society.
Metaculus Prediction
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