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The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

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Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#131

Post by campl3r »

rayiner wrote: post #60
khazhoux wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s worth a debate, even though in American culture we hold this idea as beyond any consideration. Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying "it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer". That's a noble thought, but those 100 criminals can cause suffering of 100s of others. So his assessment isn't necessarily accurate. Every innocent father jailed in El Salvador might save 1…

Note that Franklin was the product of a society that had been executing felons for hundreds of years. The homicide rate in both England and New England in the early 1700s was around 2 per 100,000, lower than any western hemisphere country today.

2 per 100,000 is not lower than any western hemisphere country. Where did you get this from?

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#132

Post by hayst4ck »

dawatchusay wrote: post #111
hayst4ck wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the unholy union of a new unregulated form of communication, social media, and unregulated privatized intelligence companies, such as Palantir and Cambrdige Analytica. Ironically China implemented the GFW because they correctly predicted this exact scenario being used to destabilize themselves.

I don’t think that’s why the GFW exists but ok

You can't subject people who were illiterate subsistence farmers who never left their home town 50 years ago to highly processed foreign propaganda and expect good outcomes.

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#133

Post by elihu »

I came across this article[1] the other day, after reading about the US sending people to a prison in El Salvador and wondering what we actually know about the place.

An incongruity that I didn't notice at the time but realized a bit later is that the prison is called "The Center for Terrorism Confinement" and it has a capacity of 40,000 people. Why would El Salvador or any country need a terrorist detention facility that holds 40,000 people?

According to wikipedia, El Salvador has a population of about 6 million.

The United States famously kept people accused of terrorism charges at Guantanamo Bay, and 780 prisoners have been kept there over the last couple decades since GWB established the prison. There are currently 15.

Presumably there are a lot more people who would fit the description "domestic terrorist" being held in jails in mainland US, but certainly not 40,000 of them.

Presumably president Bukele's administration is using it as a detention facility for regular criminals as well, but it wouldn't be surprising if there's a lot of people there that shouldn't be in jail in the first place.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/17/americas/el-salvador-prison-t...

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#134

Post by CapricornNoble »

hayst4ck wrote: post #11

I don't think many people have actually contemplated what absence of law, defined as rules that apply to rich and powerful people too, is like. In a world with law, there are restriction on what society's most powerful can and can't do, because there are police officers, detectives, lawyers, and judges, who all work together to make sure there are consequences for crimes. In a world without law, the only restriction…

> Who would stop that abduction from happening with force? What if the men doing that are police officers? What if they go after your family the day after?

Now you understand why the Black Panthers arose: the black community realized that it needed to arm itself to protect against the oppressive power of the state. It could be argued that modern infringements on the Second Amendment are largely a reaction of the government in response to a minority community resisting law enforcement tyranny.

I can't even count how many times I've read anti-2A arguments on HN...people laughed at the idea that people should need to arm themselves against their own government. Well......now everyone can see how quickly state power can turn malevolent, and why the Right to Bear Arms matters.

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#135

Post by xyzzyz »

tastyface wrote: post #103
rayiner wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

How do you know that the "overwhelming majority" are "bad people who prey on others" without a functional judicial system to prove it? As the number of incarcerated grows from 2% to 5% to consolidate Bukele's power, what recourse will anyone have outside the party elite? The pattern of strongman politicians, indefinite emergency measures, and erosion of liberties to manifest full bore dictatorship has repeated over a…

> How do you know that the "overwhelming majority" are "bad people who prey on others" without a functional judicial system to prove it?

You think the murder rate went down by two orders of magnitude by locking up good, innocent people?

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#136

Post by smt88 »

ixtli wrote: post #83

This is just the outsourcing of something the US has been doing for a long time.

This is absolutely new, happening to law-abiding residents, and seemingly immune from judicial review.

The only comparable situation is the Japanese internment camps from WWII.

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#137

Post by tastyface »

xyzzyz wrote: post #135
tastyface wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that the "overwhelming majority" are "bad people who prey on others" without a functional judicial system to prove it? As the number of incarcerated grows from 2% to 5% to consolidate Bukele's power, what recourse will anyone have outside the party elite? The pattern of strongman politicians, indefinite emergency measures, and erosion of liberties to manifest full bore dictatorship has repeated over a…

> How do you know that the "overwhelming majority" are "bad people who prey on others" without a functional judicial system to prove it? You think the murder rate went down by two orders of magnitude by locking up good, innocent people?

If there are 10,000 murderers out there and you lock up most of them along with 20,000 innocent people, you get the same result. (Bonus points if you happen to snag some annoying journalists, activists, and civil rights leaders in your dragnet, since they can push back on your power play and cast doubt on your stats.)

But you can just read the article if you don't believe me: "While polling consistently shows that Bukele is quite popular in El Salvador, surveys also show a steady increase in fear of public criticism of the government — to degrees that sometimes match the president’s approval rating. 'There’s a sector of the population that feels better, because it’s true that we perceive more security, we’re no longer afraid of the gangs. Now we’re afraid of the regime,' says Ramirez. 'We see soldiers everywhere, police everywhere, patrol cars, and they’re arresting people.'"

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#138

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #49

The homicide rate in El Salvador has dropped from 100 per 100,000 to 2.5 per 100,000 in just a decade: https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-... . The El Salvadoran government has literally brought the country to an entirely different level of development, vastly improving the lives of most of the country’s 6 million people. Disorder and dysfunction doesn’t just hurt those who are killed. It’s a…

[deleted]

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#139

Post by sofixa »

hayst4ck wrote: post #132
dawatchusay wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that’s why the GFW exists but ok

You can't subject people who were illiterate subsistence farmers who never left their home town 50 years ago to highly processed foreign propaganda and expect good outcomes.

Funnily this (only its local not foreign propaganda) is kind of what's happening in India. The BJP (party in power) is leaning very heavily on propaganda towards the uneducated masses to boost their image.
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