While private prisons are abhorrent and unconscionable, they aren't even close to the root cause of our prison problem. Hint: it's systemic racism and our militarized police culture.
Louisiana, the #1 on the list supposedly had 0 private prison inmates in 2021. Blaming private prisons at this point almost feels like deflecting from the real issues.
It is always depressing to read people all of a sudden worried about other countries like China or Russia, don't even giving a minuscule fuck about what is happening in their own country.
Its been a few years since I checked, but as of 2015 at least the US, which is 5% of the world's population, give or take a few, had over 25% of the world's prison population. Total. Fucking. Insanity
A lot of communists like W.E.B. Dubois dedicated a good amount of research to the 2nd phase of reconstruction after the US civil war, often called the counter-revolutionary phase, where a lot of the gains of the civil war were lost.
Their belief is that slavery was allowed to be reinstituted in a limited form in the south (mainly in prisons), black leaders removed from their posts and replaced by confederates, white terrorist orgs like the KKK reformed and turned a blind eye to, and the harsh enforcement of miscegenation laws (many of which only got repealed in the 1960s).
That campaign of terror is what drove black mass migration out of the south and into the US west coast, and north throughout the 20th century.
Obviously the US hasn't really changed that policy, and still lets the south have slavery in limited forms.
The books black reconstruction, and michelle alexander's the new jim crow are great ones abt this.
Was it worth it, drug warriors? All the unnecessary deaths, at the hands of police and unregulated drugs of a unknown potency? Was it worth sacrificing all our civil liberties on the vain funeral pyre that is the United States of America?
When humanity is victorious in the drug war and all drugs are legalized, will drug users criminalize sobriety?
Will people high as fuck demand everyone to piss in a plastic cup to make sure they are high?
Will drug users ruin sober people's lives with felonies and time in prison with hardened criminals?
Will drug users dissolve civil liberties and prop up a bipartisan police state that gives cops a license to kill?
NO!
Who would want to do that to someone? To a fellow human for doing what they want with their own bodies? Prohibitionists... that's who. And we are not them
Feel fortunate we want justice, not retribution.
Nothing lasts forever drug warriors. Tick tock. We will be free one day, and you will wail and moan and your cries will fall on deaf ears.
exactly the real numbers for amerikkka are way higher when u take into account all the cia and military prisons across the world that we know next to nothing about.
I mean I would be shocked if it was just a coincidence that the top states are the ones you'd immediately name off the top of your head if i asked you to name the most racist states you can think of.
If every state in America were only 1% worse than every other country, then again the first 50 entries would be the American states. This is barely saying more than "America has the highest incarceration rate," so it shouldn't be a surprise.
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!
The Gulag at the peak housed about 7,500 (edit: 1,340) per 100k of the Soviet population.
(And yes, the US's 531 is still also an atrocity.)
Where did you get 329? I actually couldn't find any post-Kruschev numbers, but I know after privatization, Russia was pretty competitive with the US's dystopian nightmare.