7 ms·

Reading the descriptions of the prison system in the US, it's hard to believe they call themselves a developed nation.

• s0sa 4y ago
  As opposed to which other superpower?
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    A superpower can afford not to be a hellhole for the majority of its citizens, and may choose that. Less powerful countries often succeed at it.
  • King-Aaron 4y ago
    Note that I said 'developed nation', not 'superpower'.
• Ekaros 4y ago
  Always remember that they are a country with slavery enshrined in their constitution. That is they fully support it in certain cases. Should tell everything about their justice system.
  • ajdude 4y ago
    Also a country that fought a bloody civil war to abolish slavery less than 90 years after its founding.
    • krapp 4y ago
      The US didn't abolish slavery, they made it illegal "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted," meaning only the federal and state governments were allowed to practice slavery from that point forward. That intentional backdoor has been used to oppress and re-enslave America's black population via unjust laws, incarceration and forced labor ever since that bloody civil war ended. There's a reason prisons in the South make their (predominantly black) inmates pick cotton, and it isn't because that's cost effective. Prison labor is a direct reinstatement of the former slave labor system, and many prisons in the South were formerly slave plantations.
    • Ekaros 4y ago
      Or was it about control, subjugation and power? Ofc, centuries of propaganda and mind washing does wonders. After all history is written by victors...
      • steventhedev 4y ago
        100% about slavery (from the mouth of the southern states themselves): https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati... That was just the first result from searching for "letters of secession"
        • Ekaros 4y ago
          Question wasn't about secession, but the following invasion.
          • steventhedev 4y ago
            The invasion was in response to Confederate attacks on Union forts - starting with Fort Sumter. Saying the civil war is not about slavery because the invasion was about responding to Confederate belligerence is like saying that someone who died with Covid-19 actually died from heart failure. You might be technically correct (most people's hearts fail when they die), but it's at best pedantic and at worst disingenuous.
• ncmncm 4y ago
  Yes. The US has become a third-world country with an admixture of rich people. The experience reported here is absolutely normal for underclass people.
  • ge96 4y ago
    > US has become a third-world country Not sure why people like to say this
    • KingOfCoders 4y ago
      Because to someone from Europe it looks that way. Though to me, whenever I have been there, especially California, it looks more like the American South before the Civil War, with poor people doing bad jobs (people with broken arms at the cash register, Mexicans doing hotel rooms or people 70+ years old packing groceries) and rich people in big cars driving around with an oversized cup of coffee. There is the rich elite and the servants. So this is why people say this.
      • ge96 4y ago
        I think it's a stretch. I came from third world, had parasites, pull water out of a well, lived on dirt, crapped in the woods. I would not consider the US third world.
        • turtledove 4y ago
          Plenty of folks in the US do that, and not by choice.
      • ncmncm 4y ago
        It is this way here because the people whose preferences count want it that way. The changeover happened in the early 1970s. The Powell Memorandum spells out the political program enabling it. Starting in the '70s, while the GDP has continued ever upward, middle income leveled off, and has barely risen since. All of the difference has been carefully diverted into the pockets of the 0.1%. Now the US has many billionaires and many, many millionaires, and "the rest", who are what is called a "managed population", our apparent collective consent to all this carefully curated. Rebelliousness is channeled carefully into increasing the divide. The radical increase in fortunes of billionaires over the past four years is always blamed on something about COVID, not on very deliberate policies enacted by the government in power at the time.