THE POLICE PROBLEM

Yes, there are many people who genuinely want to help. The heads of our drug and alcohol counseling, the head of Recidivism reduction/re-entry was very passionate, all the academics and people like me working to provide this data were, at least, supportive of major reform. I got to meet John Fetterman, and while I can only say I know him in a professional sense, he is the real deal when it comes to wanting to actually implement progressive reforms. The issue is that there are a lot of congressional, and executive level, politicians who are simply owned by big industries.

There, for a long time, was the implementation of a school of thought from the Chicago School of Economics that pushed and idea called economic justice. This, in it's self is actually a worthwhile idea, and in many ways is needed to really improve lives. Basically if you structure things to economically target groups on the down side of disparity you will relieve a lot of the issues with social justice.

However, that school was like a think tank for right wing Libertarians. They used this idea as a vehicle to implements justice in a manner like a market. Determine demand, create supply, etc. It was heavily pushed by a man named Richard Posner, a judge, Juris Doctorate. He was very influential in pushing this concept. However, almost 50 years later, all he saw was skyrocketing prison populations even though a lot of crime was actually going way down. That among other things kinda made him pull back and he started working more with providing assistance to people in a more direct, social safety net fashion. Then he died not too long ago. Well this concept is, slowly, declining in use. It was not universally popular. Posner was almost definitely denied a position the USSC due to their hesitance to bring someone with his ideas on board. This is a major reason we privatized so many services within the prison system. Privatizing aspects of the prison system is a mixed bag, in terms of cost to benefit, operation violations, etc. However, fully private prisons have not gotten very popular because they are plagued with human rights issues. More so than government run ones.

Anyway, to stop rambling, look into that, a lot of how things work will make sense once you know the whos and whys of the current systemic structure. It has caused more problems than it solved, and it is slowly being walked back. There are people who want to push forward with the concept, or some variation of it but, for now things are very slowly moving towards reform. Drug courts, re-entry programs, more and more education, particularly VoTech, taking non violent drug addicts and putting them into longer term rehab, etc. It has a lot of problems, but it is slowly changing.

Though I do worry that, from what I read int he 2025 Project proposed by the gop's most influential organizations, that we may be in for a big shit storm if the GOP is able to position themselves to implement their idea.

https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

This link is to the 2025 Project manifesto. It is almost 1000 pages but, it is essentially a manual for the the GOP to take control of the the vast majority of the government and consildate most of the executive power to the president, while using some archaic laws to bypass posse comitatus and bring troops in to basically stop protests, etc.