Chelsea Manning Responds After Top UN Official Labels Her Imprisonment 'Torture' | Hacker News Reader

Chelsea Manning Responds After Top UN Official Labels Her Imprisonment 'Torture'

gizmodo.com

50 pointsrbanffy13 comments

There are many ex-prisoners who tell their stories about solitary confinement. For instance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg4epUX7_Ew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hWJSsTt6I8

It's very disturbing. Nobody deserves such a treatment.

Shaka Senghor spent seven years in solitary. Everything of his that I've watched / read / listened to is extremely thought provoking. Check out his recent appearance on Conversations with Tyler: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/shaka-senghor/

I haven't followed the case closely, are they really just holding her because she won't testify? Is she legally compelled to? What's the other side here? It's hard to believe that the US government is this blatantly tyrannical.

> It's hard to believe that the US government is this blatantly tyrannical.

You are not paying attention. This is normal for the US gov.

Whoever is downvoting the parent would you share why you feel they are wrong?

One example of US tyranny is that it has the highest incarceration rate in the world (https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/largest-prison-populatio...). Other countries with high incarceration rates are developing countries, often with struggling democracies. Just one of many examples I can think of.

That rate is because we have a high crime rate, combined with functioning law enforcement. The true tyranny is if you let crime go unchecked.

A "high crime rate combined with functioning law enforcement" is a contradiction in itself.

No it isn't. How do you arrest people before they commit crimes?

Law enforcement is much more than arresting people after the crime has already happened.

> The true tyranny is if you let crime go unchecked.

First of all, you contradict accepted legal principles, which demands that a false negative is better than a false positive. The more the number of people in prison, more the chances that there are innocent people in there.

> That rate is because we have a high crime rate, combined with functioning law enforcement.

Second, the state's goal is to reduce crime. Catching criminals is one of the many ways to do so, and punishing criminals after catching them is only one of the things the state can do. The state can alternatively spend money on reducing the root causes of crime (like poverty), and it can spend money on rehabilitation instead of punishment. These are among the wide variety of strategies a modern state can pursue to reduce crime.

I have, it just appears that even my very low opinion was too high.

Government has all sorts of feedback loops that affect how the individual decision makers make their individually unimportant decisions and once things start moving in the "we're really gonna screw this person" direction it's very hard and incredibly rare for it to change course even if no individual involved likes the course they're on. The incentives are simply not favorable to reversing course.

It's also supposed to have failsafes that prevent this sort of thing from happening.

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