you know what. i am physically sick as hell this week so i'll bite. i read the original slate article, which is free to read so i don't know why OP chose to screenshot instead of let people draw their own conclusions. i agree with MANY of the writer's points on the need for comprehensive criminal justice reform, but i also care a lot about numbers and stats and increasingly, this bullshit "democrats are the same as republicans" messaging is straight-up delivered using propaganda tactics
this is going to be an incredibly long post and i had to use GOOGLE SLIDES and GOOGLE SHEETS which i hate so so much so in the words of twitter kpop stans please don't let this flop
let's look at the numbers, claim by claim
claim #1: "the number of people held in ICE detention has increased by 70 percent since Biden took office"
if you click through 3 link layers from the slate you land at cbs as the source for this which tells you that mainstream media is certainly not immune to playing with stats to make the democrats look bad
fortunately ICE detention stats are easily publicly available thanks to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which does the lord's work of crawling through federal agency publications and submitting tedious FOIA requests to collate useful data
here is the data -- not only was cbs not wrong about the total number of detainees at the time of publication (25k in aug 2021), but the increase from when biden was inaugurated is actually 90%, not 70%. look:
well holy shit!!! that's terrible. biden is the worst and he hates immigration reform and the democrats are no different from trump, right?
actually, Jan/Feb 2021 was at the absolute low for detainees, after a full year of covid restrictions slowing down or minimizing gov't operations of all kinds AND reducing border volume
and if you actually want to compare the biden admin to the trump admin?
relative to Aug of 2019, after 18 months the biden admin has reached a 56% decrease in the number of detainees. even if you look at only the month before COVID lockdowns really hit, it's still nearly a 40% decrease
and to put the total numbers in perspective, at NO point before COVID did the trump admin have fewer than 30k people in ICE detention. most of the time it was well above 40k, or about 2x more than under biden
that's not to say that immigration reform isn't still needed, but it IS to say that myopically comparing current-state to january 2021, aka one of the WEIRDEST months statistically on record ever, is going to give you crap perspective
claim #2: "the federal prison population has grown for the first time in a decade"
by now we know that federal data is public so let's go look for it
and indeed the federal bureau of prisons has made 45 years of federal prison data available for download
so this should be straightforward! it looks like the inmate population did in fact peak in 2013, the start of obama's second term, before decreasing. obama made reducing the number of people in prison one of his key focuses and was in fact the first president since jimmy carter (term 1977-1981) to leave office with fewer inmates than when he started
this trend continued under trump. in fact, the rate of decrease at the end of trump's presidency was even bigger than obama's -- turns out the republicans were BETTER than the democrats at criminal justice reform?!
(it is worth noting at this moment of sarcasm that a bipartisan group of senators did actually manage to get the First Step Act bill through the senate gauntlet and onto trump's desk for signature, which lowered some sentences)
(note i've only included data from 2005 onward so it's easier to actually see what's going on in the last 10 years. for those who like math, these are CAGRs calculated over each presidential term)
but there it is -- decline in populations accelerated under trump. surely both parties same. surely democrats actually worse than republicans
ARE YOU SAYING THAT ... THERE IS AN OUTLIER?
THAT SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN COUNTED?
so it turns out that under trump, the trend had decelerated to less than half the rate of change at the end of obama's last term
that precipitous drop we see is ... covid. it's pretty much just covid, during which federal prisons stopped accepting new prisoners, courts were closed and couldn't hand down sentences, and parole officers weren't sending people in for minor violations
here's what things might have looked like had there been no covid outlier:
now that assumes trump wasn't successful at slowing down the momentum from the obama years
this is what it might have looked like had we perhaps ended up with a second trump term:
again this isn't to say that biden is pure and perfect on criminal justice, even if there were some agreed-upon definition of what pure and perfect legislative or policy priorities would look like
it's to put the context back into place around the data
are the democrats and republicans actually the same or are we being fed a diet of pruned stats and catchphrases to make us simultaneously angry and disempowered
last claim: "federal covid relief funds are being used to pad local police budgets"
you know what, this one is relatively not decontextualized
for example, $10B of ARPA grants to state and local gov'ts has been committed to āpublic safety programs, including domestic violence prevention efforts, drug abuse and mental health services, and bonuses for hiring and retaining police officersā
it's hard to know how much went to cops, but knowing how much cops take up of local jurisdiction budgets it's unfortunately probably a significant share
biden doesn't help his case by going on record telling states and local jurisdictions to use ARPA funds to shore up before summer, when crime typically goes up (same source as link above)
that said in the grand scheme of even just ARPA funds, this is what $10B looks like, so like ... is this the hill to die on
we don't stop pushing for immigration or criminal justice reform
or any other reform that is sorely needed
but using data in incredibly selective ways, out of context, to promote a narrative that somehow democrats are the same or even worse than republicans
ESPECIALLY the republicans of today
propaganda by definition uses kernels of truth and then presents it in a biased way to attempt to push a narrative
pretending that the democrats are exactly the same as the republicans is propaganda, and i'm like 80% sure it's right-wing propaganda designed to discourage left-wing turnout that has somehow been accepted by an online population that doesn't understand statistics
draw conclusions that you can back up
and for fuck's sake, vote
