Of course, the country to compare with is China:
. . . The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London. China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison.In terms of prisoners per capita only Russia come close. Interesting fodder for any human rights discussion.
4 comments:
These numbers tell us absolutely nothing regarding human rights. Nothing. How many people are wrongly convicted? How long are the prison sentences for particular crimes? How many crimes are actually comitted? How many crimes result in penalties other than a jail sentence? What sort of due process does the convicted criminal receive? What percent of crimes get solved and how quickly? Without answers to the above questions (and more), the number of people in jail now has no meaning in determining the human rights of any particular country.
Ah, how nice would it be if those criteria would also be used before calling any other state a police state!
Fons, you appear to say that the criteria need not be used in this case, but only in other cases -- a strange bit of logic don't you agree?
First, I actually do not think setting those criteria would be possible at all. And of course i would mean that if you are going to use criteria, you should use them for all countries.
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