Slashdot Mirror

Don't want mass biometric surveillance in prison? Don't do something that would put you in prison, dumb ass. If I had my way, you wouldn't get out again.

That would be all well and good if the laws and justice system in the US were a little more sane. The population of the US is currently 326 million (2017). The population of the world is 7.5 billion(2017). The 2016 US prison population was 2.3 million including federal, state, local, immigration, military, juvenile. and civil detention facilities. The 2016 prison population for the entire world was 10.35 million. The US has 4.3% of the worlds population but houses 22% of the prisoners in the world. There are also 3.8 million people on probation and 820K on parole. That works out to 6.92 million people who are actively registered in the criminal justice system. That's a little over 2% of the US population.

With the number of laws on the books in the US, damn near the entire population could be arrested on any given day for an infraction. It just matters if you get caught, of if a police officer feels like finding something to charge you for. There are many states that have laws about which positions are legal to have sex with your spouse, in the privacy of your own home. In one of the Carolinas it's illegal to sing off key. There's a town in Arizona that it's illegal to wear suspenders, and another that it's illegal for a woman to wear pants.

There are 646K people incarcerated in local jails. Of those, 70% haven't been convicted yet as the justice system is backed up. There are almost 5500 people who are in civil detention centers in over a dozen states. These are people who were convicted of sexual crimes and have already served their entire sentence. But they are still confined, well, because.

How ironic, someone from a country with the highest imprisonment rate in the western world calling Australia penal colony.

How dare you sir. I will not stand here while you insult the great land of freedom that is the United States. We have the highest number of prisoners, in both raw number and per capita, in the entire world, not just the Western world. Rest of the world always trying to minimize our accomplishments... We're Number 1! And not even the most oppressive authoritarian and totalitarian regimes in the world can touch our incarceration rate. Wait a second... if... Nevermind! Credit where credit is due, we take great pride in this achievement, especially in our non-violent drug user mass incarceration program.

Submersible hunter-killer drones lie in wait to defend America's freedom cable and orbital defense platforms defend the space above from communist tyranny. Long live freedom's reign.

Says the guy living in the country with the highest incarceration rate on Earth source

We're defending something, sure, but I don't think it's freedom.

I feel like I'm barking up a dead (burning) tree here, so to speak, but what you just did is exactly the kind of non-thinking knee-jerk self-defense of what America used to be that the grandparent poster was so eloquently talking about. To reiterate:

Not only is our citizenry unable to have an intelligent conversation about world affairs, but they can't be led by facts or argument to any truth that conflicts with their jingoist worldview.

And sure enough, here you go excusing your country's willful atrocities (ones previously reserved for third-world shitholes and dictatorships) and stating things like "there most certainly is a process at gitmo, even if you don't know or understand it" as if you temporarily forgot what "due process" actually means. (I know you know, you were probably just too pissed off to argue rationally - I hope.)

Sadly, cementing the GP's points in the minds of international readers, you go on to display your eerie lack of understanding of the outside world - or even the willingness to read or believe a fact stated numerous times in this very discussion - by stating:

China has more prisoners by what an order of magnitude or 2.

Your thought experiments are retarded.

China has more than four times the population of the United States, in addition to being an oppressive communist dictatorship, so that should be a fair assumption to make. In fact, in order for the US to have as many people in prison as there are in China, it would need to be locking up a chunk of its population 4.3 times as large.

So, let's take a look at the facts:

http://www.prisonstudies.org/info/worldbrief/wpb_stats.php?area=all&category=wb_poptotal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate

As you can see, the United States has 1.5x as many people in prison (2.4 out of 311mil) as China does out of 1.344 billion (from a population that size, 1.6mil is not really a large amount). So in fact, despite what you were led to believe, your country actually imprisons a group of people 7 times as large as China does compared to the size of your country.

2 - If anybody actually thought that the eqyptian government was going to be all good now because of the uprising clearly has not been paying attention. Id love to visit but not until there is another revolution there.

There's a few things about Egypt you should probably know. For one thing, the poverty rate there isn't much worse there than the United States (15% versus 20%) despite the radically different size of the economy and median income ($6k versus $40k). And before you jump down my throat on "proving that", I sourced that information from the CIA World Factbook. They have a significantly lower violent crime rate than here as well -- almost four times less (and yes, I can back that up too from a reliable source, The UN Office on Drugs and Crime. And when it comes to jailing people, the United States ranks #1. Egypt? #165. (Oh yes, sourced that too).

So when you get all uppity about how they're jailing a blogger for three years for publishing something anti-muslim, I want you to remember the terror watch lists. I want you to remember Guantanamo Bay. I want you to think of the hundreds of political prisoners (Citation? Got you covered. I assume Harvard Law School is prestigious enough?) we ignore. You talk about media control and manipulation in other countries like Egypt like they're somehow worse than those of the west.

The truth is... they're better. Three years for pissing off the government here is a comparatively light sentence: We put people in jail for at least a year for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Don't ask for a revolution before considering visiting Egypt. Chances are good, your country needs one more.

1 in 7 of those people are justified in that belief, since they're in jail. We have the highest incarceration rate of any country on the planet, by a significant margin.

1 in 7 incarcerated? That would be over 40 million people! Who modded this crap up? Common sense should be enough to give pause, and actual figures of roughly 1 in 135 are readily available. We do top the list (due mostly to the wasteful war on drugs), but there are many smaller countries with incarceration rates greater than half of ours, and a few large countries such as Russia; the next 7 (mostly small) countries on the list have rates greater than 1 in 200. The next closest western nation (assuming Ukraine isn't considered "western") is UK at roughly 1 in 650, so we're far worse than any western nation, but that's not what you wrote.

- T

With more prisoners in the system than the rest of the world combined,

That's just NOT true. That's a lie, a calumny, a vile piece of propaganda.

We just have more prisoners (2.3 million) than China (No. 2, at 1.650 million) and Russia (No. 3, at 806,000) and India combined (No. 5, at 384753).
source

1. More laws
2. More crimes
3. More criminals
4. More prisoners
5. £39k per prisoner
6. ???
7. More money for the State.

Except now we've got Guantanamo

But the parent said: "jailed in the US"; and Guantanamo is technically outside the US.

Anyway, US prisons actually don't rank all that well internationally: International Center for Prison Studies.

Quote: "execute all the pedophiles, murderers and rapists, problem solved."

What about cases where the convicted are later found innocent of the crime?

As for the incarceration rate, this paper (http://www.soros.org/initiatives/justice/articles _publications/publications/intl_incarceration_2003 0620/intl_rates.pdf) I discovered generally suffices: "In this regard, the U.S. rate of
incarceration of 702 inmates per 100,000 population represents not only a record high,
but situates this nation as the world leader in its use of imprisonment. The continuous
rise in the prison population in the U.S. has vaulted this country ahead of our old Cold
War rival Russia to become the world's leading incarcerator.

"For comparative purposes, the U.S. now locks up its citizens at a rate 5-8 times
that of the industrialized nations to which we are most similar, Canada and western
Europe. Thus, as seen in the accompanying chart, the rate per 100,000 population is 139
in England/Wales, 116 in Canada, 91 in Germany, and 85 in France."

Furthermore, according to http://www.prisonstudies.org/ this rate is relatively similar; with "293.66 million at 1.7.2004 (U.S. Census Bureau)" and 2,131,180 held in prison/jail reaches a ratio of 726 per 100,000. If, however, jail is not counted then the ration drops to 486 as reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. So, I suppose one would have to settle on including those in jail or not.

Whether it is a result of our culture or not is not so important as how can those people be helped back into society so they wont need to commit criminal acts or feel the compunction to do so (for whatever reason they do it). I imagine the growing wealth gap certainly doesn't help some of those incarcerated, nor the heavy penalties for drug use compared to more violent acts.

Back up the boat, boys, the anchor's fallen off.

The US already has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 701 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. The Russian Federation is a distant second place, with 584 per 100k. (Source: International Centre for Prison Studies.) We're standing silently by, watching as our civil rights and protections are being stripped away at an alarming rate. The Fourth Amendment is being all but repealed... and some bozo lawyer in The People's Republic of California wants to make it still easier to put more of us behind bars?

There seems to be some flawed notion that law enforcement is failing in this country -- the fact is that the violent crime rate has been falling for several years. It's not because we have incarcerated so many, but simple demographics: The number of males in the more crime-prone age group has decreased.