The Mass Incarceration No One Is Talking About
When criminals go free, the innocent are de facto imprisoned.
There’s a mass incarceration creeping across America. You’ll find evidence of it in CVS and Walgreens. You can see it at grocery stores and public parks, in metal spikes on sloped surfaces, and metal detectors at high schools.
American institutions are slowly adopting precautions better suited to a prison. I’ll offer a lengthy list of examples shortly.
Why are institutions doing this? Because they can’t count on the state to incarcerate the insane, evil, and/or dangerous. Or — in the case of state-run institutions — they’re ideologically committed to ignoring the root cause of their troubles, and at best focus on treating the symptoms.
When the state fails to lock up criminals, the public is assumed guilty. The cost of presuming innocence is just too high. Thus, innocent people end up living alongside criminals in a de facto open-air prison.
A few examples of what I’m talking about:
Locked merchandise at drug stores.
Receipt checks at the door of a grocery or retail store.
Bag checks and no-bag policies at stores.
Major retailers removing self-checkout lanes because theft losses are so high.
Businesses leaving neighborhoods altogether.
Dwindling numbers of public restrooms.
“Hostile architecture” resulting in less comfortable (or fewer) benches.
Parks closing down at certain hours to avoid becoming open-air drug markets.
Cities spending millions on taller, harder-to-jump fare gates.
Clear backpack mandates at schools.
One can escape these conditions by making sufficient money. Making sufficient money permits you to send your kids to private schools, or live in a district with “good schools.” You can buy a nice home security system, and reduce your chances of being victimized by living in a nice, probably gated, neighborhood. You can own a car instead of taking public transportation, where you risk being threatened, stabbed, slashed, or pushed onto train tracks. The latter is frequent enough that the New York Post has a dedicated tag for “Subway Shoves.”
Contrary to popular leftist belief, the best quality of life intervention the state could make on behalf of the poor and middle class would be to lock more people up.
As I discussed here, a small number of people do most of the crime.
One example: 327 people were responsible for nearly a third of New York City’s shoplifting arrests in 2022, according to the New York Times.
Incarceration is multi-purpose. One of the primary purposes is public safety. A well-ordered nation would have locked up someone like Iryna Zarutska’s alleged killer — a serial criminal prior to allegedly murdering the young woman — a long time ago.
A term coined by a prominent paleoconservative thinker clearly explains our situation.