Ha, that is fair. I was just poking fun at dessalines’s habit of giving a free pass to any country that is openly mauling and torturing its citizens as long as they wear the right color hat. But yes, it is fully accurate that the US’s prison system is an authoritarian nightmare that preys on its minority population without rest or mercy. And, comparing the US against countries which don’t even make the claim of being “democratic” and finding it competitive with the worst of the open tyrannies is maybe fair.
Also, I just looked, and I don’t think these numbers are accurate. I think they’re straight-up ignoring some countries with millions of people, and I think the numbers are about 8 years out of date. The US incarceration rate has been falling back down to merely horrifying levels after the Stalinist peak it rose to after Reagan+Clinton teamed up to ruin the world.
The majority of states in our land of wonderful freedoms are newly competitive with such beacons of hope as El Salvador, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan. The march of progress!
Yeah I also looked on Wikipedia, which uses World Prison Brief data. The WPB is from 2023 and the Prison Policy data is from 2021, so maybe things changed, but I can’t find the WPB data for 2021 and nor do I want to spend anymore time looking :D
Ha, that is fair. I was just poking fun at dessalines’s habit of giving a free pass to any country that is openly mauling and torturing its citizens as long as they wear the right color hat. But yes, it is fully accurate that the US’s prison system is an authoritarian nightmare that preys on its minority population without rest or mercy. And, comparing the US against countries which don’t even make the claim of being “democratic” and finding it competitive with the worst of the open tyrannies is maybe fair.
Also, I just looked, and I don’t think these numbers are accurate. I think they’re straight-up ignoring some countries with millions of people, and I think the numbers are about 8 years out of date. The US incarceration rate has been falling back down to merely horrifying levels after the Stalinist peak it rose to after Reagan+Clinton teamed up to ruin the world.
US Incarceration Rate
List of Countries by Incarceration Rate
The majority of states in our land of wonderful freedoms are newly competitive with such beacons of hope as El Salvador, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan. The march of progress!
Yeah I also looked on Wikipedia, which uses World Prison Brief data. The WPB is from 2023 and the Prison Policy data is from 2021, so maybe things changed, but I can’t find the WPB data for 2021 and nor do I want to spend anymore time looking :D