Reply #159: Like on the Pacific Islands?

[lancemurdoch]

It's amazing how people living on Pacific islands have no government, no laws yet manage to exist nicely. Not at the economic level of the average American perhaps, but with many benefits lacked by most Americans - no crime, strong communities, no prisons, lack of rapists and a lot of other oddballs. In many ways capitalism and government generate these problems - as capitalist states obviously have these problems while other places don't.

The US locks up more of it's population than any other country on the world - yet people still feel unsafe, women don't walk around at night (my grandmother used to walk around New York City in the middle of the night feeling perfectly safe). Michael Moore showed in his movie how Canadians don't even lock their doors. The US has tons of prisons, sends more black men to prison than college, has laws more draconian than other industrialized countries, yet it still has a massive crime problem.

It's clear to me that more and more and more prisons hasn't solved anything. They're not a solution to a problem, they're a way of trying to contain a problem generated by another source.