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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

#81
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…

>It’s such a slap in the face to see that the only news coverage of this is from privileged Americans who can’t possibly understand what this means for the standard of living in that country.

Or, you could just acknowledge that it is inherently inhumane, despite the improvements it's making for your country. Of course authoritarian measures bring results and of course in a country like El Salvador, in it's previous state, they might even be warranted - but it is still inhumane. Inhumanity sometimes has to be fought with inhumanity, Americans of all people should acknowledge that. If you want to argue that it is not inhumane, however, then you are wrong. Imprisonment without due process is inherently inhumane.

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

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sending people there and then saying you don't have jurisdiction over them anymore is dysfunctional by any reasonable measure.

[flagged]

Note that this often happens because countries won’t repatriate their own criminal citizens: https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/23/politics/trump-visa-sanctions...

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

#84
post #77
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where did you get that figure from? There are many sources online that agree, so I won’t bother to link them, that the population of New England was ~100k in 1700 and ~300k in 1750. The claim that that actual rate of murder in all of New England was 2-6 per year is not believable.

https://images.app.goo.gl/ZomfSetCVGTWj1bS9

https://www.cold-takes.com/unraveling-the-evidence-about-vio...

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

#85

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…

Americans, not content with learning from others' mistakes, will now be learning them first hand. The horrors are just beginning.

Europe is also seeing far-right ideology spreading and taking over mainstream politics so this really isn’t an American problem only right now.

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

#86

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…

The problem with Americans is that they believe themselves to be temporarily embarrassed millionaires. In its original context we find this a funny if depressing cliche but when applied to our current context I think it explains in a very dark way why no one does anything and collective defense never forms.

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

#87
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…

> England punished all felonies by death for centuries

No.

For less than a century, during peak "Bloody Code" almost all felonies specified a death sentence .. that doesn't in any way mean that all felonies were punished by death.

  A large number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century statutes specified death as the penalty for property offences (even minor ones), meaning that the vast majority of the people tried at the Old Bailey could be sentenced to hang.

  This body of statutes, which later came to be criticised as a “Bloody Code”, meant that one could be executed for stealing as little as a handkerchief or a sheep. Nevertheless, judicial procedures prevented a blood bath by ensuring that sentences could be mitigated, or the charge redefined as a less serious offence.

  [..]

  As a result, as documented on the Digital Panopticon website, between 1780 and 1868 less than a fifth of convicts sentenced to death were actually executed.
Take it from the Old Bailey: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/about/punishment

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

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s always too early, until you’ll be disappeared for saying it.

Like in the UK for spicy social media posts?

There you get arrested for being a Nazi. In America you get disappeared for not being one. There was a bit of excitement in the 1940s that gives us moral guidance on what to do when Nazis rear their heads.
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