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Comment by diyorgasms | Hacker News Reader

So the new face of mass incarceration is white rural conservatives, the same demographic that is largely responsible for the "tough on crime" push that led to disproportionate incarceration of poor people of color. Now that their fortunes are shifting, I wonder if the rural white conservatives will still be so gung-ho for harsh criminal penalties.

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FWIW, it was Democrats who pushed for severe mandatory sentences to create a hot button electoral issue:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/143/t...

> Eric Sterling: The Speaker convened the Democratic leadership, the Steering and Policy Committee, the chairs of the committees, and says we're going to put together an anti-drug bill. It is going to be a Democratic initiative and I want everybody involved. We're going to have a comprehensive anti-drug provision. And I want it out of committees before we go on our August recess, August 14 or 15. And this set off about a four week stampede. They were told, look, you've got one month to put together your anti-drug agenda and then you're going to go home in the middle of August and you're going to campaign the hell out of that agenda. And we're going to come back in September, we're going to take it to the floor, and we're going to vote on it. And this is what we're going to ride to electoral victory in November. That's the plan.

"Tough on crime" has always been incredibly popular. But Nixon was the "law and order" candidate. Reagan was the "tough on crime" guy. Center-right Bill Clinton continued and expanded Reagan's policies. So yeah, there's a lot of blame to go around. But I think you're being disingenuous if you think liberals support mass incarceration policies to the same extent that conservatives do. I don't think urban liberals are the ones clamoring for harsher law enforcement.

I disagree that I'm being disingenuous but I could be a moron. Are you disputing the claim that congressional Democrats initiated the tough-on-crime laws that are responsible to this day for harsh mandatory minimums for low-level drug crimes? The piece I linked to is from 1999 and it refers to bills initiated by Democrats in the 80s which are still largely in effect today, and for which we can plausibly argue a correlation with a 700% increase in the prison population and Bureau of Prisons's budget [0].

I agree Democrats are pushing for reform today (and some sentencing reform was passed when they controlled Congress in 2010). Republicans [1] and conservative think-tanks [2] today are also actively fighting for sentencing reform. Tt's one of the few issues that are bi-partisan today. You can make a judgment based on how you've ascertained the composition of political cockwalking, but in the end, it's the actual laws that get passed that put people in prison.

[0] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2016/04/08/addressing-...

[1] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/s2123

[2] http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/228145-charles-k...

There is a difference between your average liberal and what the politicians did. it's widely known that liberals have always been against mass incarceration. However I don't dispute that Democratic politicians did that to gain votes in a center right country. (at that time)

I don't disagree with you that Democrats pushed some of these bad laws. I just disagree with the characterization of Democrats as not-conservative, especially during and after the Reagan years. Certainly there are some Democrats who are not conservative, but as an aggregate I would consider the Democrats to be a center-right or simply right party.

> I don't think urban liberals are the ones clamoring for harsher law enforcement.

In the 90s it was urban blacks clamouring for harsher law enforcement, since it was their neighbourhoods which were suffering the effects of drug-related violence and other crimes.

Blacks aren't really liberal or leftist on the whole, but they consistently support the left-wing party.

blacks are actually surprisingly conservative in a lot of ways. I remember seeing that some protester at a black rights matter rally was also protesting for lgbt rights and was turned against by the reallt anti gay black crowd

I think it's more accurate to say that blacks are surprisingly diverse, as they are too often perceived as a hivemind/bloc. This could be said about any group of course, but as an Asian, I would agree that blacks* have it worse in this regard.

* even referring to them all as "blacks" blurs the significant difference between African-Americans who trace their heritage to American slavery, and contemporary immigrant/refugee communities from Somalia, etc.

> blacks are actually surprisingly conservative in a lot of ways.

> I remember [this one anecdote]

Substitute whites or men for blacks here, and you'll see the problem in assuming blacks are a monolithic voting block. We saw the same lazy thinking in the (false) claim that blacks made Prop 8 fail in CA.

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