The Guardian is currently running a series of video adverts, each of which features a comment by someone whose opinion The Guardian considers worthy of advertising. One of these videos features an American journalist called Eric Schlosser. Please take less than five minutes to watch it.
I will not claim to know anything like as much about the American penal system as Schlosser, and so I will assume that the factual content is accurate.
Schlosser claims that the prison population in the USA has increased considerably over the past thirty years or so, and yet so too has the non-white population. Schlosser also asserts that a large proportion of inmates are black or Hispanic, which might lead any rational person to ask whether or not black or Hispanic people are more likely to turn to crime than non-Hispanic white people.
Schlosser uses the word poor to describe a lot of these inmates, but this is misleading. Many people in Britain in the 1960s endured a level of poverty which would be hard to imagine nowadays, and yet very few of them turned to crime. If white people can suffer hardship without turning to crime, then surely black people can do the same.
Schlosser also mentions the fact that many inmates are in prison for non-violent crimes, and in doing so appears to be implying that prison should be only for the violent criminal. He notes that many female inmates are in prison because they refused to inform on boyfriends who were dealing in drugs. If their loyalty to an evil boyfriend exceeds their loyalty to humanity, then maybe prison is the best place for them.
Schlosser may perhaps make some good points here and there, but this video appears to be in large part just a leftist rant with little substance.
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