-say "yeah it's fucked up but what can we do about it?"
It's really going to depend on how invested the person is in the system. When I was still a lib I would grab the wheel and steer the conversation straight into "end the war on drugs," but didn't really have a deeper answer than that. I guess that almost counts as "blaming republicans" but I was also annoyed that Obama did jack fuck all about it
if you follow any of those trains of thought it always leads back to racism too
-CHINA DOESN'T RELEASE THEIR ACTUAL INCARCERATION RATE
despite China having something like 3x the population, they have 400 million less prisoners.
They don't think about it at all, just like every other thing that might disrupt their comfortable life and world view.
idk, just ignore/suppress the cognitive dissonance. i dropped the "4% of the population 25% of the prisoners" shit in a discord as part of a conversation about china and the whole thread got nuked
They think it's horrible and think we need to let the nonviolent drug offenders out, but will immediately go apeshit about LETTING VIOLENT CRIMINALS OUT the second anyone actually proposes even the most milquetoast criminal justice reforms.
Here's a fun one:
Maybe the reason crime is down is because we have the highest incarceration rate.
- They don't think about it. It's easy to ignore people you rarely see.
- If you bring it up, they'll talk about half-assed tweaks around the margins that won't substantially reduce the prison population in our lifetimes.
If libs saw a big problem and concluded it needed a big solution, they wouldn't be libs.