Statistical abstraction itself criminalizes prisoners by erasing their differences.
Evidence
I hesitate to make unmediated use of such statistical evidence because it can discourage the very critical thinking that ought to be elicited by an understanding of the prison industrial complex. It is precisely the abstraction of numbers that plays such a central role in criminalizing those who experience the misfortune of imprisonment. There are many different kinds of men and women in the prisons, jails, and INS and military detention centers, whose lives are erased by the Bureau of Justice Statistics figures. The numbers recognize no distinction between the woman who is imprisoned on drug conspiracy and the man who is in prison for killing his wife, a man who might actually end up spending less time behind bars than the woman. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 247
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes the learned pattern from Media at the Margins and Troubling Transparency about how quantified framings distort justice. — connects to: Invisible compartmentalization, not invisibility itself, makes crimes permissible
Related
- Invisible compartmentalization, not invisibility itself, makes crimes permissible (similarity 0.84)
- Harsher penal measures show no connection to actual crime rates. (similarity 0.79)