What homogenous countries with a comparable level of economic wealth have situations that even remotely resemble our mass incarceration and drug war policies?
If you are Chinese, you are fucked, with the exception of powerful bureaucrat maybe; but if you are foreigner, you generally get off free, maybe a policeman will give you a stern speech about not breaking law again.
One thing I find funny though, is despite the war on drugs, average Americans, rich or poor, are still doing them, giving police more bodies to send to jail.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat...
If you meant "countries": no. No other country jails that many people, either compared to its population, or in absolute numbers. Not now, not ever.
The US is not "the land of the free", it's "the land of the jailed".
"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"... and I will promplty put those bums in my private prisons where I'll watch them be raped to death.
That should be the quote on the so-called Statue of "Liberty".
We should ask for that statue back.
Reform is definitely needed, no question.
What I was saying is that other countries also disproportionately incarcerate their poor. It's not a uniquely American racist thing. Go to Angola, Nigeria, Russia, China, it's no different. Yes, we overdo the incarceration fixes all ills thing, we've got an unhealthy fetish for it, but my point was, the poor everywhere are disproportionately affected.
People seem to take it that I'm okay with that. I'm not, but its not uniquely American and its not a policy to target ethnicities. If America were all white or all black we'd still have a problem of overrepresentation of poor in the system. By overrepresentation I mean normalizing for crimes.
But incarceration-fetish is uniquely American. No other country has ever done that in all of history.
When it is done in such huge numbers it really isn't "law enforcement" anymore, it's just some form of apartheid.
The rest of the world should subject the US to the same kind of shaming that was used against South Africa. But of course, the rest of the world doesn't have the balls to do that, so here we go.
The problem is economic and cultural (we allow for guns) so the police take maximum caution, and given the police are the only expression of government in some areas, the negativity falls on them. It's not as if most of the community in a blighted area don't want police - they do, but they also want police to act as if the areas didn't have a violent characteristic. Any area of the world with high crime, be it Russia, china, France, germany, greece will have police act differently in those communities. It's a reaction to the dynamics in such places. It takes effort to overcome and the local Govs typically don't put in the necessary effort.