Perception of Criminals

Why are criminals so negatively perceived by the public? There stigma against criminality is really alarming. It doesn't amount to the public's 'believing in the law', because it is unavoidable to acknowledge the huge disparity in enforcement of almost any law over varying geographies, times, and, most importantly, types of people differentiated by age, gender, race, and probably a host of factors. Thus, someone's criminality cannot be a good indicator of their morality on any stable basis. Once this is acknowledged, approving of law's enforcement amounts to endorsing the 'logic' behind these disparities in enforcement, which is to say agreeing with tremendous bias.

Lately, it seems the facts are out more than ever, and that there is a lot that could push perception in the right direction:

1. Compelling statistics about the flaws of the prison industrial complex are everywhere: the number and fraction of prisoners jailed for misdemeanors like possession of marijuana, and the fraction thereof who are nonwhite; the number of black prisoners outnumbering the antebellum slaves; the huge costs of prisons. The public should be appalled by the institutions and should be mistrustful of the infrastructure that fills them.

2. The policies of law-enforcers, particularly in Arizona and New York, being made so explicitly terrifying. It seems to me that 'stop-and-frisk' and racial profiling have probably always happened, but I doubt they were so explicitly written into law. That could definitely be wrong, but even if it's not, the public backlash fills news channels with troubling statistics and arguments against these law-enforcement policies.

3. Possibly a stretch, but sympathetic close-ups of prisoners in the media might have an effect, e.g. the television series Orange is the New Black. One of the top movies on the IMDB list is The Shawshank Redemption!

Considering all this, it just baffles me that so much of the American public can be so non-anti-prison, and that the prison industrial complex is still growing. Not that I actually do anything to combat it myself except try to vote conscientiously.

What will it take to shake the public into revulsion? Or, at least, how can we realize that our revulsion directed at criminals is probably misguided?