Arizona inducing the labor of pregnant prisoners against their will

> Term is 35 (but inducing that early isn't ideal

Conflating natural delivery (where the body has decided, for whatever reason, that it is now time to deliver the child) with induction is not an appropriate comparison.

> 37 is the earliest you want to go if you can choose).

I would be willing to wager money that you are not going to find ANY obstetrician in the US who will induce at 37 weeks for no other reason than familial "choice" ("elective induction"). In fact ACOG specifically says that it should not happen without medical basis.

> The idea that you got busted for an 1oz of weed and went to prison isn't aligned to reality.

Perhaps you should read more about prison in Arizona, and of law enforcement officials like Sheriff Arpaio.

Here: https://hernandez-hamilton.com/the-arizona-criminal-justice-...

Some quotes from that and the ACLU:

> It is grotesquely expensive, unduly punitive, discriminatory against minorities (especially against Latinos) and does little to actually keep our communities safe or cut down on recidivism.

> About 1 out of every 40 Latino men in Arizona are currently in prison. Even more are currently in the various other phases of the criminal justice system (pretrial release, jail, probation, parole, warrant status etc.). Arizona prison population is more than 40 percent Latino, but Latino’s only make up about 27 percent of our overall population.

> Our legislature is to blame for these insane prison statistics because it allows itself to be influenced by Arizona prosecutors to scuttle any prison reform initiatives. Prosecutors have a powerful lobby called Arizona Prosecuting Attorney’s Advisory Council (“APAAC”) which it uses to influence the legislative process to its own benefit. In the last few years alone, Arizona’s prosecutors have opposed bail reform, sentencing reform, and lighter drug sentences while supporting stiffer penalties for a number of offenses.

You may recognize APAAC - it's one of the sources you quoted with reference to "prison is full of dangerous and violent offenders". When I first read it it sounded like a District Attorney's campaign speech, and no wonder - it's their lobbying organization, that has opposed each and every reform bill in AZ in the last 24 years.

> You didn't steal a bicycle.

Or of an Arizona man convicted of several thefts in the space of three months from yards, sheds, all agreed by the state to be non-violent offenses, and only a couple involved entering any structure at all... his sentence? Two hundred and ninety two years. What did he steal that earned this sentence? A drill, flashlight, telescope, credit card.

Arizona also repeatedly sentences people sentences, up to life, with parole. Including plea bargains. And then it abolished the concept of parole. For nearly 300 people, this means now the state has "changed the terms of the deal or sentencing after the fact". (https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-investiga...)

Your attitude of "most of these people are dangerous criminals" is also not entirely aligned with reality.

> Percentage of criminals in AZ that have committed violent felonies or are repeat felony offenders: 94.2%

You can be a repeat felony offender with only non-violent drug offenses to your name. Explain to us how multiple drug possession felonies makes you "dangerous" to society?

> This myth that the US incarcerates prisoners not because we have a huge criminal class,

The US has a “huge criminal class” because of its criminalization, incarceration, and disenfranchisement (not just voting, but more general engagement in society) practices, which grew up initially as a concious, direct replacement for chattel slavery.

The size of the criminal class is not the trigger for the policy, but its objective. Initially out of racial animus and desire for commercial exploitation, including via the (now closed by federal statute despite the absence of a Constitutional prohibition, formally, though many would disagree that it is actually eliminated in practice given the nature of prison labor policies) penal servitude loophole in the 13th Amendment, but now the institutional interests of the politically powerful law enforcement—prison—industrial complex in protecting and expanding its own role is layered on top of those interests.

The irony of complaining about cherry picking statistics while yourself cherry picking statistics is astounding. If you combine federal and state prisons about 40% of prisoners are reported to be in prison for violent offenses (in 2019 according to statistics prepared by the Bureau of Justice Statistics). So, yes, the majority of prisoners are in fact imprisoned for non-violent offenses. But this is not the end of the story, there is no universal standard for what is considered a "violent crime" so states are free to set their own standards (often under considerable political pressure from the local legislature). Some states consider any theft involving drugs or even embezzlement as violent crimes. Beyond this, these statistics are collected and maintained by the same institutions which have a direct monetary incentive to over report violent crime in order to obtain increased funding. This is a clear conflict of interest.

But even if violent offenders were the majority, violent offenders in general are, perhaps surprisingly, less likely to reoffend. This is because the best predictors of violence in the general population are age and secondarily gender. The overwhelming amount of violent crime is committed by male adolescents and young men. While we may be fascinated with macabre cases where serial killers and other extreme offenders were released, these are outliers. We should not base policy decisions on our emotional responses to crime but on measurable outcomes.

I think there are many examples in history where discussing morals was more important than discussing the letter of law. When women couldn't vote, was "what's right" or "what's legal" the more important question?

You speak as though the law is not subjective, but legal rules are ultimately subjective just like moral rules. Was the holocaust legal? Most people when faced with the holocaust think "who cares what the law was, this is morally wrong". I'm sure there's some arguments out there that the holocaust was in fact illegal, and that's a fine academic argument about the law to have, but at the end of the day the people in power did what they did, and so I guess the legality of it all wasn't that important.

Arguing morals is very important.

And so back to my point, the more interesting question is "what is morally right and how do we want to structure our society in the future?" But if one side is arguing about morals and the other side is arguing about legalities, and they don't realize they're talking about different things, then it's hard to make progress.