US is the Worst Police State in the World – By the Numbers

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/08/31-5



There’s no getting around the fact that the United States is the Mother of All Police States. China can’t compete in the incarceration business. With four times the U.S. population, it imprisons only 70 percent as many people – about the same number as the non-white prison population of the U.S. Even worse, 80,000 U.S. inmates undergo the torture of solitary confinement on any given day.

When U.S. corporate media operatives use the term “police state,” they invariably mean some other country. Even the so-called “liberal” media, from Democracy Now! to the MSNBC menagerie, cannot bring themselves to say “police state” and the “United States” without putting the qualifying words “like” or “becoming” in the middle. The U.S. is behaving “like” a police state, they say, or the U.S. is in danger of “becoming” a police state. But it is never a police state. Since these privileged speakers and writers are not themselves in prison – because what they write and say represents no actual danger to the state – they conclude that a U.S. police state does not, at this time, exist.

Considering the sheer size and social penetration of its police and imprisonment apparatus, the United States is not only a police state, but the biggest police state in the world, by far: the police state against whose dimensions all other police systems on Earth must be measured.

By now, even the most insulated, xenophobic resident of the Nebraska farm belt knows that the U.S. incarcerates more people than any country in the world. He might not know that 25 percent of prison inmates in the world are locked up in the U.S., or that African Americans comprise one out of every eight of the planet’s prisoners. But, that Nebraska farmer is probably aware that America is number one in the prisons business. He probably approves. God bless the police state.

[pipoman]

1. Having a bit of experience with US prisons..

I believe we must, hopefully sooner than later, decriminalize most drugs..at least in the model of Portugal..Beyond the drug offenders however, I don't think I want most of the offenders in prison on the streets until their sentence is served. I have also met many inmates who I hope never get out, and they probably will not..Any time I hear about solitary confinement, I think about my several visits and interviews with inmates at USP Florence ADX. Most of the inmates at ADX are "disruptive group" leaders, IOW they prey on other inmates and engage in organized crime within the Federal Prison system. They are in ADX, which is a solitary confinement facility, because they have ordered murders of other inmates and officials in the Federal system, or they have ran illegal operations like drug smuggling, prostitution, contraband distribution, gambling, etc. within the system, or actively participated in organized crime within the system. It is easy to speak collectively of the injustice of the US prison statistics, it is another story to look at individual inmates, their crimes, the victims of their crimes, and their individual propensity to commit crimes inside or outside of the prison system, then determine if society is better for their incarceration...in most cases society is better off having them incarcerated..