Look, I'm as critical of U.S. mass incarceration as anyone. And there are many problems--overcriminalization, mandatory minimums, rampant plea bargaining, prose

Look, I'm as critical of U.S. mass incarceration as anyone. And there are many problems--overcriminalization, mandatory minimums, rampant plea bargaining, prosecutorial misconduct, wrongful conviction. But despite all those problems, equating it with slavery--actual slavery as it was practiced in the U.S. through the Civil War--is senseless. You are equating criminal incarceration (even unjust incarceration) with intentionally terrorizing innocent African villages, capturing their people and shipping them to another continent to live in chains. It's a little like the tendency to call bad things, when they are bad enough, "genocide" or "holocaust" despite the very specific meanings of those words.