181–190 of 202 posts
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Or a pretty serious opportunity, if you get to build/run prisons for a living. Given how corrupt US politics is, I'm sure the two are connected.
Unfortunately, its not just those building and running the prisons. In 2009, a pair of judges outside of Philly pleaded guilty to accepting $2.6M in kickbacks from private detention centers: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/us/14judge.html
I don't live in the US but when I read that kind of story or how Bradley Manning is treated (regardless of whether he's guilty or not), it really looks like the US is acting like the worst kind of police state or despotism (where the despot would be a mixture of corporations and corrupt media/politicians).
Keep in mind that the US is a very distributed system. You can have a local District Attorney who decides to pursue cases like this, but in the next jurisdiction over, you could very well have a DA who is an entirely reasonable person and would never allow something like this to happen. Eventually these things usually get sorted out in some higher court, but that can take years and can really mess up a person's life…
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EDIT: Here's another fun stat: america has more black people in prison than in college: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/ americas/2223709.stm This claim is a little misleading - the absolute numbers are true (or close enough depending on your source) but it compares blacks in all age groups in jail with blacks going to college. If you limit the comparison to college-aged blacks, there are far more blacks in college…
A good point. It is still not exactly encouraging that these two figures should be anywhere near each other, considering it is not only young people that should be going to college. EDIT: I wonder what would happen if you injected the racial makeup of the prison/university management and staff into the calculations.
25% of the world population in jail is American. 737 out of 100.000 Americans are in jail, that's almost one out of a hundred. As a comparison Denmark has 59 out of 100.000 people in jail. And the number of Americans in jail has been rising steadily for the last 20 years. This is a pretty serious problem.
Stupid war on drugs :(
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And a massive cash cow if you're selling the products of the cheap labour that goes on in US prisons. http://www.cio.com/article/595304/Prison_Labor_Outsourcing_s... http://newworkerfeatures.blogspot.com/2010/02/us-prison-labo... Paying someone who you have in complete physical bondage under $1 an hour is slave labour as far as I'm concerned, even if it is nominally voluntary. At best its unconscionably exploitative.…
It is slave labor. The US constitution bans slavery except for prisoners. Here is the text of the Thirteenth Amendment, Section 1: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” – edit: To add a bit more substance, here is an article about the recent Georgi…
Slave labor convictions for blacks were very common in the South from reconstruction up until World War II when they fell out of favor. For 70 years from 1870 to 1940 it was quite routine whenever slave laborers were needed for companies to pay local sheriffs to round up blacks on bogus charges such as loitering, convict them in sham trials, and then sell them to corporations to do hard labor 6 days a week 14 hours a day. This is extensively documented in Blackmon's "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II."
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A good point. It is still not exactly encouraging that these two figures should be anywhere near each other, considering it is not only young people that should be going to college. EDIT: I wonder what would happen if you injected the racial makeup of the prison/university management and staff into the calculations.
Two things you should consider: 1. Prison terms often last longer than the average university education. 2. Once you've finished your term in university, there's not much encouragement (regardless of racial group) to continue. For example: You have a BS in Computer Science, and are now working. Why should you go back for a MS? Or a PHD? Or Post Doc?
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Criminals are created by (a) laws, (b) their transgression, and (c) their enforcement. You seem to think that the whole issue is in (b) - that there's something about the US that causes more people to act unlawfully, to transgress. Have you considered other possibilities, such as unjust laws, or unequal application of laws? Besides that, there's social issues, whereby subgroups are disadvantaged and have fewer opport…
Well, let's consider (a) and (c). We're comparing statistics to other Western countries, and other Western countries have largely the same criminal laws the US does. Some of them legalize prostitution more than the US does, but everything else (violent crimes, property crimes, drug crimes) that's illegal in the US is illegal in the countries we're comparing the US with. So that rules out (a) for the purpose of this d…
There are people in prison in the US because they were 18 and they had sex with their 17 year old girlfriend. What european countries also do this?
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I'd suggest that our living arrangement (get isolated from community, earn and spend money to purchase a simulacrum of what community used to provide) has a lot to do with the bleakness of American life, and bleakness is probably a bigger predictor of criminality than anything else. If you want to fix the US, go back 60 years and fight highway and auto subsidies.
Given that crime rates are vastly higher in walkable urban settings than sprawling suburbs, I'd suggest that highway subsidies are a poor indicator of crime rates.
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All crimes are crimes because we decided to make them so.
Depends on your definition of "decide." Some things are crimes because it is in human nature to revile them, and to enforce social mores against them.
Rape? What we call rape in many states in the USA, an 18 yr old having consensual sex with a 16 yr old, is accepted in other parts of the world. Or let's take Sweden's definition, having consensual sex without a condom. That's not against the law in most places. Pedophilia? Anthropologists claim found that it is common and accepted in Polynesia and other cultures. Cannibalism? Again, supposedly many cultures practice it and consider it an acceptable and beneficial practice.
What exactly is universally reviled by human nature? Copraphilia? That's not illegal though.
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It's certainly the case that (b) is a major role. Forget about convictions - lets just look at crimes. The US murder rate is 5/100,000 people, Britain, Denmark and similar countries have about 1/100,000 people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona... The reason why we are different from much of Europe isn't a secret, it's just taboo to discuss. Most of our crime is confined to a small subset o…
What subset are you talking? The link you provided to fbi.gov doesn't indicate it.
It's not really taboo if rationally discussed in a small group (like a college classroom) since there's a long and complicated history surrounding the contributing factors which have been fairly unique to the Americas, but in an open forum on the internet it's practically impossible without moderators.