JohnRawls wrote:
Well it depends honestly if a country uses a punitive model then it is almost always the case. If your model is rehabilitative then the outcome is a bit different. The better question is why does US and other countries still use punitive justice instead of rehabilitative when the overwhelming evidence suggests that rehabilitative does wonders in this regard. This is not even a question of private, the model is what matters and not the type of ownership. Plus the private ownership in US for prisons is not that large anyways compared to other countries.
Just adopt the rehabilitative model and take Nordic model in this regard as an example.
This is a good question to ask.
There are a lot of threads of history that came together to create a culture that is more interested in punishment than rehabilitation today. I've always understood that this started with the cultural attitude that puritans embedded in American culture. Puritans relied heavily on shame and punishment to keep the community and faith together. This carried forward, and manifested in different ways throughout American history. After the puritans, we have the hyper-individualist culture fostered by westward expansion and the need to defends ones self and property. The notion of rehabilitation didn't exist, punishment was the only understood solution. This too, embedded itself in American culture. Then you have the Jim Crow era, where punishment and punishment of the innocent were a convenient tool to control the non-white population in America. Then we have the white flight to the suburbs, which further fostered hyper-individualism, disconnected people from their humanity into fiefdoms, and thus made it easier to rationalize more punishment for those outside the fiefdoms (in particular, the poor and non-white).
Couple the above history with the fact that a large segment of America is (and always has been) rabidly anti-intellectual. You get what we have today. These are people that have no interest in understanding, no interest in logic, no interest in data, no interest in history, no interest in science, no interest in reality. Thus, they don't really care to change course, even if the current course is going to send us off a cliff. They are too fucking dumb for their own good, and don't know it (Dunning-Kruger).
The people that have carried America forward, are those that have not been anti-intellectual. They have carried all the dummies on their backs for centuries. The issues we have today are that the dummies have now been organized by a sociopath (Trump) and have been turned against America's flawed democracy (it has always been flawed). They are now being manipulated into turning America into an authoritarian Hellscape. Because, they are just too god damn fucking stupid.
This is why we have dummies like scamp that think if they don't say the word race, or black or whatever, that they are not talking about race, even though they are. He's like an elementary school kid that thinks as long as you are not explicit in your communications, you can deny anything that is implied by it. Which... is foolish and not true of course.
@Scamp is so fucking stupid, that he thinks replacing the word "black" with "13% minority", means he's not talking about race. This is the intelligence of the Trumpist part of America.
I can think of 11780 reasons Trump shouldn't be president ever again.