Yeah, seriously... Humans love to work. We just don't like being told what to do and pressured to do it on someone else's time frame

There have been numerous studies about this, and they have all shown that this doesn't happen. Canada did a multi-year trial with one town in the 2000s (before the program was shut down and the records sealed/destroyed by the conservative administration once they gained power) that showed a drop in workers in only two groups: high-school kids and pregnant women. It also coincided with a general increase in economic activity as well as a sharp increase in both grades in school and the number of kids graduating and going on to college afterward- especially among poor households. The general theory was that the extra money created financial security in poorer households and high-school kids didn't have to work/drop out and get a job to help put food on the table and could therefore focus more on school and have a better chance at going to college and better job prospects in the future, breaking the cycle of poverty.

This is the main problem when it comes to politicians not caring that incarceration costs more than helping people.

An entire industry is built on profiting from legally-permissible slavery, and the only way to achieve growth is to either extract more value from the prisoners or the number of prisoners. The former isn't an option since prison work isn't mandatory, so that means growth is only achievable by imprisoning more people.

To make that happen, the prison-industrial complex uses lobbyists to encourage more "tough on crime" laws and harsher sentencing.

It really isn't a surprise that the whole idea of rehabilitation scares the politicians getting kickbacks from a private prison industry that thrives on recividivism and driving people to do things that get themselves incarcerated. They don't give a rat's ass that it costs the taxpayer more money when the alternative means that their own livelihood will be negatively affected.

And that's precisely why we need more elected progressive politicians. The career politicians we have right now don't care about their constituents, they only care about themselves and by extension their corporate masters.

Turns out that imprisoning people in USA is a GREAT way to move public funds into select private pockets....

Traitor lunatics don’t care. They say stuff like “deport every last one of them illegals even if it costs a trillion dollars”. But I think you’re right that most people have been manipulated into thinking there isn’t even an alternative to harsh enforcement.

One thing I will say about Obama is that he did try. Years ago, somebody put together a list of all his campaign promises and the only one he didn't do anything about was closing Guantanamo Bay. Every other campaign promise said "blocked by Republicans" next to it. People forget that the rest of the government was controlled by a Republican party who said that even in the short time they didn't have majority control that they'd rather burn the government to the ground than let a black man pass any laws. The Democrats capitulating at every like they always do didn't help, of course, but it wasn't like he didn't try to do what he said he was going to.

All the other stuff he did, though? Yeah, that's on him. There was plenty of "business as usual" during his terms when it came to things like drone strikes on civilians and deportation camps.

Poverty is a feature of this state. The same state that needs to go.

Part of me wants to say that if Trump can skirt the law so much and even run a third time so can Mamdani, but another part of me is realistic.

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