I don't understand the theory of the revision here. I asked in the comments last time for more realism and clearer statement of the social situation. But the revisions make slight effort in that direction. We do not live in a society that regards rehabilitation as a goal of criminal justice. We imprison in order to incapacitate on a very wide scale, intentionally. We are holding a large number of young men, overwhelmingly poor, undereducated, underemployed, disproportionately from disfavored ethnic communities, who would otherwise be in the street, challenging our ability to maintain social stability. Our "stability maintenance" policy requires us to spend a larger proportion of our social surplus on imprisoning young men with little to lose than any other society on earth. Of course we also disfranchise them and put significant obstacles in the way of their recovering democracy. The point of the system is that it maintains social stability by discouraging what Aristotle called "democracy": rule by the poor.

Yet the essay counterfactually assumes that we are socially committed to rehabilitation, and that Equal Protection doctrine can be immensely expanded in its power, reversing the rule in Washington v. Davis, merely by referring to the central order-keeping policy of our oligarchy as "racism." This is not reality. Nor would it be sufficient to say we "ought" to be a democracy ruled by the poor, that we "ought" to send more Black men to college than to prison, that we "ought" to redistribute wealth so that 1% of the population no longer owns 40% of everything, and so on.

One route here is to describe the situation accurately, without proposing anything. Another is to propose politically feasible minor ameliorative changes, showing how they can be brought about in the actual political environment we have. A third is to describe a solution to the problem: a method for accomplishing democracy, that is, rule by the poor, despite the "stability maintenance" system of the current oligarchy. Unfortunately, that would be socialism, so it's not allowed.