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As far as I can tell US prisons (in generally, not necessary all but I think most) are basically a heap of human right violations. In that context I think extr

As far as I can tell US prisons (in generally, not necessary all but I think most) are basically a heap of human right violations. In that context I think extraditing anyone to the US should be treated as a human right violation and as such should not be done. And even if we ignore their prisons from a German Law POV a lot of their law is fundamentally in conflict with the values represented by the constitution and might also be in conflict with the human right charter, which at least for Germany (and potentially other countries, too) is another reason why extradition to the US should not be allowed.

colinmhayes 5y ago
Generally the federal prisons are better than state ones. They still have solitary though so there are definitely major issues.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  If a country does not obey human rights charters I don't think we'll send you to one of our good prisons really works, because that a prison is good is just a happenstance and there is no legal reason why it should continue to be good.
minikites 5y ago
People harp on China or North Korea being police states but the United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation by a significant margin. The US justice system is rife with discrimination and the prison conditions are dire (as you point out). People should absolutely not be extradited to the USA until this changes.
- mc32 5y ago
  We do incarcerate a lot, however, keep in mind some of it has to do with the dismantling of the equally problematic mental health institutions beginning in the late sixties. Lots of people who would better be served in psychiatric units are housed in regular prisons.
  - throwaway4good 5y ago
    You also over-incarcerate black men by a factor of XXX - hardly you can use the excuse of lack of psychiatric units there.
    - mc32 5y ago
      How do you explain Cuba, Grenada, or Maldives? There are historical factors which contribute to higher incarceration rates (poor, lack of opportunity, unemployment benefits structures (unreported income does not affect eligibility), etc which contribute to higher probability of running afoul of criminal law. Moreover, you can see a marked increase from the '80s on. That strongly implies economic factors (in conjunction with Clinton's tough on crime agenda). What precipitates this is the hollowing out of American jobs overseas. No longer could a high school graduate live on the income afforded by a HS graduate. As people's in the lower socio-economic rungs saw decreasing purchasing power, few alternatives were available to them. Steel Mills closed down, Shoe factories, Clothing, the FT cleaning crew was replaced by low wage imported labor, etc. Some of the same reasons are seen in countries with populations of poor people. Belarus, Thailand, Bahamas, etc.
    - pkaye 5y ago
      Do they keep similar incareration statistics for UK, France, Germany, etc? I'd like to see if there is works there.
    - pkaye 5y ago
      Looks like UK has a similar over-incarceration disparity though. > People from BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) backgrounds constitute only 14% of the general population in England and Wales, but make up 25% of its prison population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_prison_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_prison_populati...
  - NationalPark 5y ago
    Those were dismantled for themselves being full of human rights violations though.
- eloff 5y ago
  You need to drop North Korea from that to make any sense at all. Not only do they incarcerate far more people per capita than the US, but the conditions make US prison seem like paradise. No exaggeration. Prison in North Korea is much closer in spirit and implementation to Nazi concentration camps during the second World War, or the Soviet gulags. Many people die within months of being sent there.
  - minikites 5y ago
    >Many people die within months of being sent there. I take your overall point, but here in the US police just execute people on the streets and then face no consequences for doing so. I continue to think the comparison fits.
    - eloff 5y ago
      No. Trying to say they're somehow equivalent is whataboutism, it's insulting to the US and demeaning to survivors of North Korea. I know the US is not perfect, but you can't just go saying it's like North Korea.
      - coldtea 5y ago
        >Trying to say they're somehow equivalent is whataboutism Which is another name for "putting things in perspective" and "addressing all bad actors, not singling out one for the benefit of the other".
        eloff 5y ago
        No. It's another name for tu quoque, a logical fallacy by attempting to deflect criticism through pointing out hypocrisy. The Soviets used it as their go-to defense for their hideous system by pointing to racism, prisons, lynching, etc in the US. As if that made their shortcomings acceptable. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Whataboutism You can criticize some party or entity all you want, just make a logical argument free of fallacies. I don't abide using whataboutism to make false equivalencies. The US is nothing like North Korea. To compare the two, unless done extremely carefully, is insulting to people in the US, and demeaning the experience of people in North Korea. To think of it another way, if you compare working in McDonald's to slavery, you're insulting the people that work for McDonald's and demeaning the experience of survivors of actual slavery.
vizzier 5y ago
I'm not sure that UK prisons are a huge amount higher in quality having read news reports about them. Though state controlled they're far from being the nordic model of rehabilitation. That said, a similar argument does prevent the UK from extraditing anyone accused of a capital crime due to the death penalty being banned in the UK.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  It seems like the UK certainly imprisons fewer people, which can affect the tenor of the conversation.
- tailspin2019 5y ago
  > I'm not sure that UK prisons are a huge amount higher in quality having read news reports about them. Not a "huge amount" no. But from what I've read and heard, definitely _an_ amount.
zepto 5y ago
Consider Assange in Belmarsh. For the Uk to rule that Us prisons are human rights violations it would have to apply the same ruling to itself.
- dathinab 5y ago
  Yes, they should. But then just because there is a similar problem elsewhere doesn't mean we should ignore either of them or only fix them together.
  - zepto 5y ago
    > But then just because there is a similar problem elsewhere doesn't mean we should ignore either of them or only fix them together. What are you talking about? This seems like a non-sequitur.
creddit 5y ago
> As far as I can tell US prisons (in generally, not necessary all but I think most) are basically a heap of human right violations. Excited to learn about the German prisons that respect human rights. The "prisoners" just come and go as they feel? The whole point of prisons is to take away a human's rights. That's like fundamental to the concept of incarceration. Or are you concerned with US prisons violating too many human rights in comparison to German prisons?
- dathinab 5y ago
  Prisons are NOT meant to take away your human rights, they will take away some of your rights temporary but that's not the same. The main point of prisons is to temporary take away your freedom (which is often perceived as on of the most valuable rights) as a form of punishment for you crime, but that's where it stops. You are sentenced to 10 years of prison not 10 years of torture, and potential random death. If your arbitrary put people in solitary confinement, expose them to unnecessary risk from other inmates or risk of health due to absurd temperatures you are effectively arbitrary non lawfully adding additional punishments on top of the prison sentence a person has. Which is in direct conflict with what a state of law is supposed to be. I mean lets say you committed a minor crime with a small prison sentence of but now you are forced to stay in a room which massively increases your chance of dying in the next few hours (heat+ heart disease), this means instead of being sentenced to 2 weeks of prison you are now sentenced to 2 weeks of prison + torture + a high chance to it arbitrary getting a death sentence. Furthermore the worse the prison is the harder it gets to proper rehabilitate the person afterwards, which gets worse in the US due to treatments of ex-convicts. But again your sentence was 2 years in prison not 2 years in prison and hardly any chance to life a normal life afterwards even if you try. The last point is even worse because it's not just bad for the convinced, it's especially bad for the rest of society which now has to coop with a increased crime rate as direct consequence of how prisons are handled. Which in turn will cause more people to be dragged into situations where they will commit crimes leading to a vicious crime increasing cycle. There are more then just a few studies which relatively clearly show that treating prisoners as imprisoned but still human and help with rehabilitation will decrease effective crime rates and will in total benefit society, even if it might sometimes seem unfair in specific cases. EDIT: To be clear the temperature is just one easy to understand example, but not the only problem and not applicable to all prisons. For people not aware of it, during very hot days some prisons get so hot that using ventilators or water vapor makes the situations worse, e.g. the are blown over by the ventilator is so hot that instead of giving your body a chance to cool it heats it up further.
vmception 5y ago
A US citizen in Norway escaped extradition to US for federal prison as the Norwegian top court reached the same conclusion
plandis 5y ago
Did I miss something? The person in question is a British national in the UK being asked to be extradited to the US. What does Germany have to do with any of this?
wil421 5y ago
He’s not going to those kinds of prisons no matter what, if anything, he is convicted of. White collar crimes done by rich people go to white collar prisons. If you or I did this on a smaller scale we would probably go to regular prison but not a billionaire.
- downandout 5y ago
  The kind of prison he goes to will depend on the length of his sentence. Federal prisons have a reputation for being relatively tame, but this is only true at the minimum security level. Inmates with more than 10 years on their sentences cannot be placed at minimum security facilities, however. The remainder of the security levels - low, medium, and high - are the the kinds of places you see in movies with all of the attending violence, sexual assaults, and generally nightmarish life. In the federal system, sentences for fraud are based on amount of loss. For an $11 billion fraud, he would be sentenced to either life, or hundreds of years in prison - and there is no parole in the federal system. That length of sentence would require him to be kept at a high or medium security facility until his death - natural or otherwise - even though his crime was technically white collar. Basically, if he is extradited to the US, he will never see the light of day, and will regularly experience every horror that the US prison system is rumored to have everyday for the rest of his life until he dies. So deciding to extradite him is a really big decision. It’s not just a slap on the wrist - it’s torture until he dies.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > For an $11 billion fraud, he would be sentenced to either life, or hundreds of years in prison Well, none of the charges has a life sentence available, so that option is not possible. It does look like the statutory maximum for the offenses at issue combined is 280 years, but I haven't bothered to pull out the sentencing guidelines and see if, even, with $11 billion in frauds, that's likely without factors not obvious from the charges. > and will regularly experience every horror that the US prison system is rumored to have everyday for the rest of his life until he dies. Well, no, every rumored problem isn't real, and every real problem isn't experienced by every prisoner at all (much less daily.)
nceqs3 5y ago
Cause UK prisons are so much nicer?

colinmhayes 5y ago

Generally the federal prisons are better than state ones. They still have solitary though so there are definitely major issues.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
If a country does not obey human rights charters I don't think we'll send you to one of our good prisons really works, because that a prison is good is just a happenstance and there is no legal reason why it should continue to be good.

minikites 5y ago

People harp on China or North Korea being police states but the United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation by a significant margin. The US justice system is rife with discrimination and the prison conditions are dire (as you point out). People should absolutely not be extradited to the USA until this changes.

mc32 5y ago
We do incarcerate a lot, however, keep in mind some of it has to do with the dismantling of the equally problematic mental health institutions beginning in the late sixties. Lots of people who would better be served in psychiatric units are housed in regular prisons.
- throwaway4good 5y ago
  You also over-incarcerate black men by a factor of XXX - hardly you can use the excuse of lack of psychiatric units there.
  - mc32 5y ago
    How do you explain Cuba, Grenada, or Maldives? There are historical factors which contribute to higher incarceration rates (poor, lack of opportunity, unemployment benefits structures (unreported income does not affect eligibility), etc which contribute to higher probability of running afoul of criminal law. Moreover, you can see a marked increase from the '80s on. That strongly implies economic factors (in conjunction with Clinton's tough on crime agenda). What precipitates this is the hollowing out of American jobs overseas. No longer could a high school graduate live on the income afforded by a HS graduate. As people's in the lower socio-economic rungs saw decreasing purchasing power, few alternatives were available to them. Steel Mills closed down, Shoe factories, Clothing, the FT cleaning crew was replaced by low wage imported labor, etc. Some of the same reasons are seen in countries with populations of poor people. Belarus, Thailand, Bahamas, etc.
  - pkaye 5y ago
    Do they keep similar incareration statistics for UK, France, Germany, etc? I'd like to see if there is works there.
  - pkaye 5y ago
    Looks like UK has a similar over-incarceration disparity though. > People from BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) backgrounds constitute only 14% of the general population in England and Wales, but make up 25% of its prison population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_prison_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_prison_populati...
- NationalPark 5y ago
  Those were dismantled for themselves being full of human rights violations though.
eloff 5y ago
You need to drop North Korea from that to make any sense at all. Not only do they incarcerate far more people per capita than the US, but the conditions make US prison seem like paradise. No exaggeration. Prison in North Korea is much closer in spirit and implementation to Nazi concentration camps during the second World War, or the Soviet gulags. Many people die within months of being sent there.
- minikites 5y ago
  >Many people die within months of being sent there. I take your overall point, but here in the US police just execute people on the streets and then face no consequences for doing so. I continue to think the comparison fits.
  - eloff 5y ago
    No. Trying to say they're somehow equivalent is whataboutism, it's insulting to the US and demeaning to survivors of North Korea. I know the US is not perfect, but you can't just go saying it's like North Korea.
    - coldtea 5y ago
      >Trying to say they're somehow equivalent is whataboutism Which is another name for "putting things in perspective" and "addressing all bad actors, not singling out one for the benefit of the other".
      - eloff 5y ago
        No. It's another name for tu quoque, a logical fallacy by attempting to deflect criticism through pointing out hypocrisy. The Soviets used it as their go-to defense for their hideous system by pointing to racism, prisons, lynching, etc in the US. As if that made their shortcomings acceptable. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Whataboutism You can criticize some party or entity all you want, just make a logical argument free of fallacies. I don't abide using whataboutism to make false equivalencies. The US is nothing like North Korea. To compare the two, unless done extremely carefully, is insulting to people in the US, and demeaning the experience of people in North Korea. To think of it another way, if you compare working in McDonald's to slavery, you're insulting the people that work for McDonald's and demeaning the experience of survivors of actual slavery.

vizzier 5y ago

I'm not sure that UK prisons are a huge amount higher in quality having read news reports about them. Though state controlled they're far from being the nordic model of rehabilitation. That said, a similar argument does prevent the UK from extraditing anyone accused of a capital crime due to the death penalty being banned in the UK.

ashtonkem 5y ago
It seems like the UK certainly imprisons fewer people, which can affect the tenor of the conversation.
tailspin2019 5y ago
> I'm not sure that UK prisons are a huge amount higher in quality having read news reports about them. Not a "huge amount" no. But from what I've read and heard, definitely _an_ amount.

zepto 5y ago

Consider Assange in Belmarsh. For the Uk to rule that Us prisons are human rights violations it would have to apply the same ruling to itself.

dathinab 5y ago
Yes, they should. But then just because there is a similar problem elsewhere doesn't mean we should ignore either of them or only fix them together.
- zepto 5y ago
  > But then just because there is a similar problem elsewhere doesn't mean we should ignore either of them or only fix them together. What are you talking about? This seems like a non-sequitur.

creddit 5y ago

> As far as I can tell US prisons (in generally, not necessary all but I think most) are basically a heap of human right violations. Excited to learn about the German prisons that respect human rights. The "prisoners" just come and go as they feel? The whole point of prisons is to take away a human's rights. That's like fundamental to the concept of incarceration. Or are you concerned with US prisons violating too many human rights in comparison to German prisons?

dathinab 5y ago
Prisons are NOT meant to take away your human rights, they will take away some of your rights temporary but that's not the same. The main point of prisons is to temporary take away your freedom (which is often perceived as on of the most valuable rights) as a form of punishment for you crime, but that's where it stops. You are sentenced to 10 years of prison not 10 years of torture, and potential random death. If your arbitrary put people in solitary confinement, expose them to unnecessary risk from other inmates or risk of health due to absurd temperatures you are effectively arbitrary non lawfully adding additional punishments on top of the prison sentence a person has. Which is in direct conflict with what a state of law is supposed to be. I mean lets say you committed a minor crime with a small prison sentence of but now you are forced to stay in a room which massively increases your chance of dying in the next few hours (heat+ heart disease), this means instead of being sentenced to 2 weeks of prison you are now sentenced to 2 weeks of prison + torture + a high chance to it arbitrary getting a death sentence. Furthermore the worse the prison is the harder it gets to proper rehabilitate the person afterwards, which gets worse in the US due to treatments of ex-convicts. But again your sentence was 2 years in prison not 2 years in prison and hardly any chance to life a normal life afterwards even if you try. The last point is even worse because it's not just bad for the convinced, it's especially bad for the rest of society which now has to coop with a increased crime rate as direct consequence of how prisons are handled. Which in turn will cause more people to be dragged into situations where they will commit crimes leading to a vicious crime increasing cycle. There are more then just a few studies which relatively clearly show that treating prisoners as imprisoned but still human and help with rehabilitation will decrease effective crime rates and will in total benefit society, even if it might sometimes seem unfair in specific cases. EDIT: To be clear the temperature is just one easy to understand example, but not the only problem and not applicable to all prisons. For people not aware of it, during very hot days some prisons get so hot that using ventilators or water vapor makes the situations worse, e.g. the are blown over by the ventilator is so hot that instead of giving your body a chance to cool it heats it up further.

vmception 5y ago

A US citizen in Norway escaped extradition to US for federal prison as the Norwegian top court reached the same conclusion

plandis 5y ago

Did I miss something? The person in question is a British national in the UK being asked to be extradited to the US. What does Germany have to do with any of this?

wil421 5y ago

He’s not going to those kinds of prisons no matter what, if anything, he is convicted of. White collar crimes done by rich people go to white collar prisons. If you or I did this on a smaller scale we would probably go to regular prison but not a billionaire.

downandout 5y ago
The kind of prison he goes to will depend on the length of his sentence. Federal prisons have a reputation for being relatively tame, but this is only true at the minimum security level. Inmates with more than 10 years on their sentences cannot be placed at minimum security facilities, however. The remainder of the security levels - low, medium, and high - are the the kinds of places you see in movies with all of the attending violence, sexual assaults, and generally nightmarish life. In the federal system, sentences for fraud are based on amount of loss. For an $11 billion fraud, he would be sentenced to either life, or hundreds of years in prison - and there is no parole in the federal system. That length of sentence would require him to be kept at a high or medium security facility until his death - natural or otherwise - even though his crime was technically white collar. Basically, if he is extradited to the US, he will never see the light of day, and will regularly experience every horror that the US prison system is rumored to have everyday for the rest of his life until he dies. So deciding to extradite him is a really big decision. It’s not just a slap on the wrist - it’s torture until he dies.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > For an $11 billion fraud, he would be sentenced to either life, or hundreds of years in prison Well, none of the charges has a life sentence available, so that option is not possible. It does look like the statutory maximum for the offenses at issue combined is 280 years, but I haven't bothered to pull out the sentencing guidelines and see if, even, with $11 billion in frauds, that's likely without factors not obvious from the charges. > and will regularly experience every horror that the US prison system is rumored to have everyday for the rest of his life until he dies. Well, no, every rumored problem isn't real, and every real problem isn't experienced by every prisoner at all (much less daily.)

nceqs3 5y ago

Cause UK prisons are so much nicer?