Slashdot Mirror
South Korean Financial Blogger Faces 18 Months of Prison
eldavojohn writes "A South Korean blogger named Park Dae-sung has been arrested and charged with destabilizing foreign markets by blogging about declining companies. This is the same blogger who predicted the economic downturn that has been experienced the world over. The Korean Times offers more information on the community college graduate and the accusations levied against him."
Several readers have also sent in news that Omidreza Mirsayafi, an Iranian blogger arrested and imprisoned for his writings earlier this year, has now died in custody.
"On 18 March, 29-year-old blogger Alireza Mirsayafi died while in Tehran's Evin prison. According to an account by Hesam Firoozi, a physician also imprisoned in Evin, Mirsayafi had taken extra doses of his medication. Firoozi's account, as provided by the Human Rights Activists in Iran, notes that Mirsayafi suffered from serious depression. Firoozi was present during the initial stages of Mirsayafi's treatment inside the prison's medical clinic and reported that the prison doctors failed to provide proper care by not sending him immediately to a hospital to save his life."
Apparently this a problem everywhere:
Young men, persons with mental illness, alcohol and drug addicts, and people who are in custody, are amongst the most at-risk groups for suicide.605 Given the prevalence of all of these indicators concurrently among prisoners in the United States, it is not surprising that suicide attempts are a serious problem inside prison. A nationwide survey conducted by prison suicide expert Lindsey Hayes in 1995 found that suicide rates in state prison systems ranged from 18.6 per one hundred thousand all the way up to 53.7 per one hundred thousand.606 According to The 2001 Corrections Yearbook, the average suicide rate in prison was 0.26 per 1,000 prisoners, or twenty-six per 100,000, two-and-a-half times the rate of suicide in the U.S.population at large, which for 2000 was 10.6 per 100,000
Does that mean I hold Iran guiltless? Not at all. The guy should never have been in prison, and being in prison increased his suicide risk (assuming Iranian prisons boost the suicide rate like US jails do).