But there is racism everywhere. I've lived in several countries, including Switzerland. I've never heard anyone except people that have lived in CH talk about how racist it is (very).
The difference, I think, is that the US is the country most likely to admit fault when they are racist. Americans themselves will say "yes, we're racist", while Swiss, Germans, Brits, etc. all seem to still be in that denial stage.
I think things like Brexit are starting to get people to think long and hard about their actual views on race / immigration. America just got to the party first.
Yes, this is tremendously accurate. I don't think racism is worse in the US, I think we have more heterogeneity which makes it more visible.
Part of what makes US unique is that it’s minority groups are much larger than most other countries. I feel that this means racist attitudes get acted upon more frequently, and that victims have a stronger voice here.
It’s a lot easier to spot a racist when the target of their ire is nearby, as compared to the one that Just mutters obscenities about foreigners while reading the newspaper.
No it isn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_et...
However, I think you might be conflating two issues. A country can have a very high incarceration rate without imprisoning a single innocent: that country could have a very high crime rate, or the bar for "crime" could be lower and more aggressively pursued. I think the vast majority of the US' "over-incarceration" can be attributed to those two factors, not to the US just throwing randoms in prison.
Do we also sometimes imprison innocent people? Absolutely. But so does every country. As far as I am aware, there is nothing unique to the US justice system that would cause a higher incidence of actually innocent people going to jail. But we do send more people to jail. But the vast majority of them are guilty of their crimes, the question is really "should smoking pot be an imprisonable offense?", or similar.
I think Germany is at the other end of the extreme; if it's your first conviction and it wasn't exactly cold blooded murder you almost always get away with probation, or a couple months tops. There were cases of people abusing children and only getting a year or two, which makes me furious.
And there have been cases in Germany where people were innocent too, of course. This is actually the most important argument for me against the death penalty. Since we know for sure that we make mistakes every now and then we should not carry out a sentence we cannot undo. Sure we cannot give the wrongfully imprisoned back their youth; but we can give them the rest of their life at least.
https://theintercept.com/2018/08/14/police-unions-prison-ref...
https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-price-of-prison-guar...
But those people aren't innocent. If your state/country makes smoking weed an imprisonable offense, and you smoke weed, you're not innocent. Is that a ridiculous thing to imprison someone for? Absolutely. But you're not innocent. So yes, we either need to reduce privatization of prisons, or we need to remove their ability to have a conflict-of-interest in this regard. Either way, it's a problem that needs solving.
But again, I think this flows more into the "mass incarceration" problem/rate than it does into the "imprisoning innocents" problem/rate.
Some of them certainly are; we get “beyond a reasonable doubt” wrong often enough with murder that there are fairly regularly news articles about exonerations after lots of resources from public interest groups dug out the truth.
Just because no one is spending the same resources—and even if they were no one would treat the results as newsworthy—on lesser offeses doesn't mean people aren't imprisoned wrongly for them (perhaps far more often, largely on plea deals, then is the cases for wrongful murder cobvictions.)
> But again, I think this flows more into the "mass incarceration" problem/rate than it does into the "imprisoning innocents" problem/rate.
Mass incarceration is a product of mass criminalization plus high imprisonment penalties on the books. That also produces a volume of criminal cases too high to handle without expedited process, and a heavy pressure tool in terms of high potential penalties that can be traded far down for guilty pleas. With many of the accused unable to afford more than the barest defense, that also creates a huge likelihood of significant imprisonment of the factually innocent on top of that which comes more directly from mass imprisonment plus the failure rate of even ideal criminal process.
That is, mass incarceration causes, rather than being a separate unrelated problem from, imprisonment of innocents.
I hadn't considered the pressure from heavy penalties on the potential for innocents to plead guilty, that's a good point. While I'll admit that's definitely a possibility, I'm not sure you can really claim that is actually happening without some sort of backing evidence? I'd love to see some numbers if you have them, even some good case-studies.
> A country can have a very high incarceration rate without imprisoning a single innocent
No. Unless you are talking imaginary scenarios like Star Trek.
Those are two different problems, with different solutions.
And yes, I was talking about imaginary scenarios. That was a statement about what is logically possible. Another way of saying it would be "you can bring down the rate of incarceration without bringing down the rate of innocent incarcertation, and vice versa".
The problem is the horrifyingly large number of people who are imprisoned for years, some times decades, even though they are innocent.
Do you not find that a problem? Innocent people being imprisoned happen in any country of course, but the problem is much larger in the US than in other first-world countries, both in absolute number and relative to population size.
France does not have similar numbers of innocent people in prison, even when adjusted for the countries size. Unless you will argue that the French police and judicial system is more than six times worse.
This was all in response to the comment questioning why we don't hear as many stories about innocent prisoners in France.
Remember, you can't really "look at the stats" when it comes to how many innocent people you've imprisoned until after the fact. You only know the count once you've actually put in the time to find innocent people in prison. My claim is that France is not doing this, so you can't really say they're 6x better. Unless countries are exerting the same effort to root out innocent prisoners, it's impossible to tell if a lower rate is due to an actually lower occurrence, or if it's due to a lower rate of discovery.
My original point was that I think all countries have an "imprisoning innocents" problem, and all countries have a racism problem. It just looks worse in the US because we're actually bothering to do the due diligence.
Just to be clear, do you understand that not every person incarcerated is innocent, and that is consequently an entirely different statistic/rate?
That is indeed generous. French prisons are notoriously awful. A bit of a catalogue of official condemnations is available at the Wikipedia page[1], but more telling are the many, many anecdotes of people who have done time in them.
Of course nasty prisons doesn't mean that the administration of the courts isn't impeccable, and I am hardly an expert, but I rather doubt it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_conditions_in_France
I personally think we just talk more about the USA because: - everything the USA does or says is heavily scrutinized anyway, - many more people can read English than French or Russian so news about cases like this one are more shared on social networks, including among foreign people.
The most generous interpretation is that the French penal system is more humane than the US, and sentences shorter, so that wrongful convictions don't necessarily destroy lives, and thus overturning convictions is not a priority either for activist groups, politicians, or law enforcement.
On the other extreme is the idea that challenging verdicts and the appeals process for introducing new exculpatory evidence after convictions is either too difficult or inaccessible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_miscarriage_of_justice...