This post is just the introductory background to what will be a brief series. Here's a fun fact to know and tell. According to some calculations, the United States imprisons a higher percentage of its population than any country on earth. (There are a few different ways to calculate this, and some have us more like fifth than first, but believe me, you don't want to be the competition.) Note that we're ahead of Russia and Iran, among others.
If you just want to look at more comparable countries, there's this:
And, no big surprise here I hope:
So in coming posts I will address three questions:
- Why is this happening?
- What are the consequences for society?
- What can we do about it?
Meanwhile, happy to hear your thoughts.
2 comments:
Well, we have all to many racists (people who believe in the non-existent concept of "race," coined to propagate colonialism and slavery) willing to comment that "if all those [brown people] would stop committing crimes, they wouldn't be in prison." That point of view is so ignorant and erroneous in so many aspects that it's not worthy of addressing or debating.
Four hundred years of oppression has led to lynching, killing by cops and others, segregation that leads to inequality, squalid living conditions and horrendous educational inequalities. The racism created by slavery has created a population of Caucasians and Latinos and others who consider people with brown skin to be inferior (you know, the people whose music all those others dance to at parties, and folks like Ali, Carver, Du Bois, Ellington and others too numerous to mention). People like Charles Murray publish pseudo-scientific screeds to justify incarceration and oppression.
So it's depressing here in the U.S. That's what happens when you start a country off with a genocide and create a system of ownership of humans.
At this point, short of burning the whole thing down, I'm open to any rational means of truly educating the populace on the country's true history. But Ron DeSadist and Don Shitler and all the other congressional Repugnantcans and their donors are doing their best to prevent that. And ignorant racists don't wanna know.
We need to realize that the most horrible crimes committed in this country are by people in absolutely no risk of going to prison: The Sacklers and Oxycontin; the folks on Wall Street who brought about the housing collapse of 2008; legislators who refuse to control firearms; tobacco lobbyists; climate change deniers.
If our climate goes off the rails that last group will be the greatest criminals in human history. I'd love to see us document just who they are so they can at least be immortalized in future histories.
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