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Comment by CWuestefeld | Hacker News Reader

As I see it, the difference is only in degree.

In both cases, people are being denied their freedom and taken away from their families, for engaging in activities that hurt no one, not even themselves.

It's certainly true that American prisons are better. But given the OP's definition: "enduring starvation, torture, and rape while performing hard labor", we do hit a couple of checkboxes. My understanding is that prison rape, with guards just looking the other way, is still a real problem in America. And take a look down at Guantanamo for (an admittedly small number of) people who are imprisoned and tortured "without legal recourse", as the OP says.

So it's just a matter of degree. There's certainly a good deal of ground for comparison.

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In this case the degree is fairly important though. If we ignore degree completely we have most of the liberal democracies in the world lumped in with NK, Libya and Zimbabwe. Obviously lines must be drawn.

That just begs the question. Where must the line be drawn? Those disagreeing with my point seem to feel that the line should be right between us and whoever is more ruthless than us.

But why do we automatically view ourselves on the correct side of that line? I've we're engaged, as a matter of policy, in activities that many or most Americans believe to be evil, doesn't that put the drawing of the line into question?

I'm not asserting that the US has a superior human rights record or that we don't engage in policy that could be seen as 'evil'. The argument being made here seems to be that we lack the moral high ground to criticize the NK regime. I've heard a similar argument used to counter the US criticisms of China's human rights record, and while I think it could be relevant in that case, we're talking about mass death camps here. This is a completely different animal. We don't need to be perfect citizens to condemn abhorrant policy like this.

I don't really care to judge where the line belongs, but if we were to draw the line to include just one country, it would be North Korea as far as my moral compass is concerned. If we drew the line so it included the US, then we would also be including Russia, China, Mexico, and the vast majority of world nations.

So yes, lets not go ranking countries by evilness - but North Korea is so beyond that that your equivocating is offensive.

If we drew the line so it included the US, then we would also be including Russia, China, Mexico, and the vast majority of world nations.

It's not nearly so simple. If we drew the line according to what portion of our population we imprison, then the USA would be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with North Korea, with the rest of the world nearly an order of magnitude lower.

Consider https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/americas/23iht-23pr...

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, ...

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. ...

The United States comes in first, too, ... in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England's rate is 151; Germany's is 88; and Japan's is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

The problem is that a lot of those people belong in prison. I mean release the pot dealer serving 25-to-life, fine...but you'll still be left with a lot of 'real' criminals out there. And sure there are a lot of unique systemic failures in America that led to this situation, but they can't all be fixed by a few shifts in gov't policy.

"The problem is that a lot of those people belong in prison."

Why do you think the situation is different in North Korea?

You have got to be kidding me.

Well, for me sedachv's comment sums up all the "but in the US..." comments in this thread. It's just bizarre.

Don't people commit crime in North Korea? Or is it just a nation of activists and saints?

>It's not nearly so simple. If we drew the line according to what portion of our population we imprison

Yes, it's not simple. A single metric will not draw a meaningful line.

Compared to the average person in North Korea (imprisoned or not) American prisoners are very well treated. They have balanced diets, and can read anything they please. Even if everyone in America was imprisoned, I think America would still come out as a more humane dictatorship than North Korea if half of what I've read about that country is true.

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