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Comment by rimliu | Hacker News Reader

It's amusing how for many things you "cannot compare X and US in this way" for whatever reason. Seems that the US is beyond any comparison.

Go to this page, sort by the number of incarcerations per 100,000 population and enjoy the interesting picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...

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incarceration because war of drugs is fundamentally different from incarceration because I don't like my dear leader.

"One of Richard Nixon's top advisers and a key figure in the Watergate scandal said the war on drugs was created as a political tool to fight blacks and hippies" [1]

It's not that different.

1: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...

It goes even further. By having a large (Democrat-leaning) non-white population jailed up, it reduces potential Democrat voters - in some states for life even after incarceration. The only western democracy who does that.

https://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=...

This has always disgusted me. Civic duty is a foundation of representative democracy and we strip that right from former felons while talking about reintegration with society with the other side of our mouth.

I was addressing the number of people in prisons specifically, not the reasons for them being there. Being a larger country and thus having more prisoners says nothing about the incarceration rate.

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