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Reminder that the USA has the largest incarcerated population in the world. Beating out even China and other such jail happy and/or third world nations.
In fact, at its height the USA has a greater prison population, at times, than the USSR under Stalin and GULAG. No, not just in raw numbers because the USA is bigger. In per capita rates too.
If you really believe there are no significant innocent people caught between the cracks of the system. That such an idea is an impossibility. Would you bite the bullet and say the same of the Stalin's prison state? Or is it that Americans are just sooo much more criminal than Soviets or really anyone else.
What percentage of the population in the USSR or China is African?
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How so? We live in an era wherein technological advances such as DNA testing, GPS tracking, and ubiquitous video surveillance have made the ascertainment of guilt trivially easy for most crimes. Certainly there exist crimes for which those technologies are insufficient for adjudicating guilt - for example, “date rape” where the physical evidence will allow for multiple competing interpretations based on testimony and subjective judgment - but such crimes comprise a very small percentage of what people in the U.S. are imprisoned for.
The problem with the gulags wasn’t how many people were imprisoned; it’s what they were imprisoned for. Large numbers of Soviet prisoners were there because they criticized the government. That’s bad, and appears not to bear much resemblance at all to the American justice system. To the extent that the gulag system included a very large number of non-political prisoners - murderers, burglars, fraudsters, etc. - that’s a perfectly reasonable outcome of how large the Soviet population was.
Yes, this is just manifestly true. America has a very large criminal underclass - mostly, but not entirely, non-white. Demographically alone, our country is so radically different from China and Europe to make such comparisons functionally meaningless. If anything our country has an underincarceration problem, wherein large numbers of individuals with long criminal records are out walking among us, instead of in prison or in the grave where they belong. If you’re freaked out by how large our carceral system is, you should join me in supporting a considerable expansion of the death penalty and its efficient usage.
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I mean, I'm quite confident that Americans are much more criminal than Chinese.
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Doesn't the US also have a much bigger problem with violence? I seem to recall lots of complaints about high gun violence rates. The correlation we want is between crime and prison.
https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(15)01030-X/pdf
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