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Is it as clear-cut as you claim? The US has far more people incarcerated per capita than Hong Kong, or mainland China for that matter.

deleted 6y ago
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eloff 6y ago
Is the US more free than China in every dimension? Perhaps not. But generally, yes. There are societal reasons why the incarceration is higher (per-capita) in the US. It's also worth noting that if you execute a criminal after a non-fair trial and send his parents the bill for the bullet, it saves some space in the jails, plus has somewhat of a deterrent effect on crime.
adventured 6y ago
Yes, it's that clear-cut. Which also doesn't imply that the US is somehow perfect. The US puts people in prison for too long for violent crimes due to minimum sentencing laws. That's the reason the prison population is so high (although it has been rapidly declining for the past decade), not because it's randomly putting a million people into prison. The US gets an immense amount of flak for its mandatory minimum sentencing laws and rightfully so. As one example, everyone knows the US has a high murder rate compared to other affluent nations for example (typically five or higher per 100k). If you have half a million murders every 30 years, it stands to reason you're going to have a lot of people in prison just from that one category and all of its intertwined consequences and related crime. China has zero human rights, the government can do anything it wants to, to anyone, at any time, with or without a reason. That's not an exaggeration, it's how their system works de facto. They don't apologize for that and they flex that power routinely. Their government is all-powerful, it assumes all rights by default (anything you're allowed to have is a privilege they're granting to you, and they may revoke it at any time). Referencing US incarceration numbers isn't enough. You have to demonstrate to a very high degree that the people in prison didn't commit the crimes in question, such as armed robbery, rape, murder, and so on. You need to show that a very large percentage of those people didn't commit the crimes they're in prison for (and no, it's not good enough to reference a few cases, you have to show that it applies to hundreds of thousands of instances). The majority of people in prison in the US are there for violent crimes.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

eloff 6y ago

Is the US more free than China in every dimension? Perhaps not. But generally, yes. There are societal reasons why the incarceration is higher (per-capita) in the US. It's also worth noting that if you execute a criminal after a non-fair trial and send his parents the bill for the bullet, it saves some space in the jails, plus has somewhat of a deterrent effect on crime.

adventured 6y ago

Yes, it's that clear-cut. Which also doesn't imply that the US is somehow perfect. The US puts people in prison for too long for violent crimes due to minimum sentencing laws. That's the reason the prison population is so high (although it has been rapidly declining for the past decade), not because it's randomly putting a million people into prison. The US gets an immense amount of flak for its mandatory minimum sentencing laws and rightfully so. As one example, everyone knows the US has a high murder rate compared to other affluent nations for example (typically five or higher per 100k). If you have half a million murders every 30 years, it stands to reason you're going to have a lot of people in prison just from that one category and all of its intertwined consequences and related crime. China has zero human rights, the government can do anything it wants to, to anyone, at any time, with or without a reason. That's not an exaggeration, it's how their system works de facto. They don't apologize for that and they flex that power routinely. Their government is all-powerful, it assumes all rights by default (anything you're allowed to have is a privilege they're granting to you, and they may revoke it at any time). Referencing US incarceration numbers isn't enough. You have to demonstrate to a very high degree that the people in prison didn't commit the crimes in question, such as armed robbery, rape, murder, and so on. You need to show that a very large percentage of those people didn't commit the crimes they're in prison for (and no, it's not good enough to reference a few cases, you have to show that it applies to hundreds of thousands of instances). The majority of people in prison in the US are there for violent crimes.