You know all the standard names of “oppressive regimes” across the world?
Iran, China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Libya, you name it.
Here’s a fun fact.
United States incarcerates a greater percentage of its population in prison than any one of those countries.
Yes, just imagine the hypocrisy. Human rights abuser China, the country which has become increasingly softer and caring of its citizens in 2000s, is still demonized by America, which imprisons more of its population than China does. And those Iranians under the tyranny of those Ayotollahs somehow go through life with a far less chance of being thrown in jail than Americans do.
But here’s the deal - you pretend what I have just said right now is nonsense and casuitry. And then you look up the figures yourself. Search 'em.
The injustice would be why persons are imprisoned, not the quantity of them. If there’s a greater chance of being oppressed for free speech in Iran, then that would be more unjust. Perhaps, for instance, we simply have a more efficient means of capturing criminals (e.g., murderers, etc.).
Nah, you Americans have to live in a country where even in a state like Massachussetts, an elderly man is knocked out, hand-cuffed, put behind bars, deprived of sleep to get confessions, then taken to the courtroom where he is told that he is an international kingpin of drug smuggling, just because he happened to be growing a few flowers in his backyard that turned out to be recently banned drugs. Real story.
Nowhere in the rich world are so many jailed for so little.
Yes, I come from the other extreme of a place with less physically fit and less vigilant police, but just the simple horror stories of judicial tyranny, and trigger happy police in the US make me uncomfortable.
Plus aren’t most people simply executed or maimed in their justice system? Over here vast imprisonment is affordable since the division of labor is so much more exploitable IMO (just an opinion).
I think this is a widely cited statistic, actually. If you ask most Californians (a state sufferingthe extremely heavy burden of the prison-industrial complex), though, they want tougher crime policies. IIRC, by the way, ~70% of new prisoners are for non-violent crimes in California.
I’m pretty sure that our cops aren’t that much more physical powerful than your cops. Don’t get me wrong I’ve seen some well-built cops but most of them have too much belly fat.
Also, I’m pretty sure cops are on the margin, more concerned for their own safety than those they serve. For instance, it is legal I think, for cops to not help someone when they know that that someone needs help.
It’s what Hoppe once said that the state tends to overproduce vigilance in some areas and underproduce vigilance in other areas.
Such a mismatch between use of force and where force should have been applied is jokingly called “unauthoritarian tyranny” by some, especially as applied to how Serbia had lots of police in place for a gay pride parade, but not for ethnic violence being carried out regularly.
I happen to live in Massachusetts and I haven’t heard anything like this. Do you have a link to the story? I’m not saying I find it unbelieveable, just that I haven’t heard anything like it.
In California’s case (and New York’s, and whatever other state suffers from a large prison-industrial complex) it has to do with prison-related firms lobbying government to enact legislation which feeds their payrolls.
Strangeloop, I wouldn’t live in Iran or North Korea.
I wouldn’t actually go anywhere else other than my lovely home town, but don’t you feel that all of this needs to be kept in perspective by some of the educated elite foreign critics in the US? Just so that these self-appointed moulders of public opinion be a little more realistic and understand that if something is harsh abroad, it is also harsh if it happens and closer to their home, and warrants more of their attention.