Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Here'1.s some context on this issue:

1. If mass incarceration worked, the US would be the safest country in the world. The US has 5% of the world population but 25% of the world's prisoners [1]. The US has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world [2];

3. Executing prisoners is really expensive. There have been a ton of studies on this. For example, Maryland estimates that each executed prisoners has a total cost of $3 million [3] once you factor in higher security incarceration and legal defense in appeals;

4. Since 1973, at least 195 people sentenced to die have been exonerated [4];

5. Death sentences are significantly more likely when the allegend offender is black and the victim is white [5]. The point is that this has almost nothing to do with "justice" and everything to do with anger and vengeance.

6. Of the people xonerated, 25% had confessed and 11% had plead guilty [6], both of which show massive problems with police practices and the difficulty, costs and risks in defending one's innocence.

Restorative justice is both cheaper and more effective at reducing crime. The biggest problem to solve is income inequality.

Unfrotunately, locking people up is big business. It creates jobs. Voncict labor is an unfortunate loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment otherwise banning slavery (eg [7]). Prisoners increase population without increasing the number of voters (sort of; it's a little complex). Prisoners are further milked through outrageous commissary fees, communication fees (leters and phone), medical co-pays and the failure to provide basic living conditions like sufficient food and medical care.

Mass incarceration and retributive justice have been an abject failure in the US. Spend a few minutes looking at Riker's Island. You may be tempted to call it an exception. You shouldn't. It's systemic. Retributive justice simply does not work so we need actual reform of this system.

[1]: https://www.aclu-wa.org/story/keys-our-mass-incarceration-cr...

[2]: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/US.html

[3]: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/urls_cited/ot2016/16-5...

[4]: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/innocence

[5]: https://innocenceproject.org/innocence-and-the-death-penalty...

[6]: https://innocenceproject.org/research-resources/

[7]: https://thecrimereport.org/2022/11/23/angola-will-remain-a-s...

> The US has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world.

Among those other lower-incarceration countries are Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China, which moderate their incarceration rate by means of considerably easier standards for execution than the US.

I assume that's not the solution you have in mind.

I’d assume people would compare what they think is the greatest civilisation of the world with civilisation of compatible systems, but yeah if you want to race with Iran, SA and China and just be better than them, go ahead, be better than Iran, it will be great for Americans, there is also Afghanistan if you want to go a level further

Iran [1]:

> Iran carried out at least 977 executions in 2015, at least 567 executions in 2016,[7] and at least 507 executions in 2017.[8] In 2018 there were at least 249 executions, at least 273 in 2019, at least 246 in 2020, at least 290 in 2021, at least 553 in 2022, and at least 309 so far in 2023.

There is no public information on China. This doesn't significantly change the prison population. Estimates are roughly 2400 annually [2].

Saudi Arabia executed 172 people in 2023 [3]. Again, this is statistically insignificant compared to prison population.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Iran

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_China

[3]: https://reprieve.org/uk/2024/01/02/saudi-arabia-executed-at-...

> 1. If mass incarceration worked, the US would be the safest country in the world. The US has 5% of the world population but 25% of the world's prisoners [1]. The US has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world [2];

I keep hearing this and I just have a hard time believing it. Like okay maybe technically Saudi Arabia does have fewer people in prison than the US but that's because the punishment for theft is having your hand removed rather than going to jail, I guess yes technically that isn't prison, but generally in an elightened society we moved away from those methods of punishment for the most part. Then of course China, I mean China also consistently reported the lowest COVID numbers, and are their numbers including people all those Uighyr's that are undergoing "reeducation"?

Honestly every time I hear this I get the same feeling as when the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women condemns the US treatment of women's rights despite having on it's board such well known champions of Women's rights as Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Suadi Arabia, The Russian Federation and Turkey. Something just seems to not smell quite right.

> ... Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Suadi Arabia, The Russian Federation and Turkey

A key issue in women's rights is reproductive freedom. To varying degrees, abortion is legal in every country you just mentioned. Abortion is generally allowed under Islam. Afghanistan and Pakistan have stricter laws than, say, Turkey but they have usable exceptions (life of th emother, life of the fetus) where the states in the US that have enacted abortion bans generally have the patina of exceptions. These are exceptions so vague and so strict that they're intended never to be used (eg [1]).

Russia has started limiting abortion access. India allows abortion.

So yes, by some measures, the countries you mentioned do, to varying degrees, have more freedom for women.

The issue I think is that many in the US have very skewed views of both how draconian and restrictive some US laws are and a warped view of life in Islamic and other non-Western countries.

Back to prisons, the US has roughly 2 million inmates [2], roughly 1% of the adult population and by every metric this makes the US the most carceral state on Earth. So why aren't we the safest?

[1]: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/11/texas-abortion-lawsu...

[2]: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2023.html

It's easy to believe because the US is very good at commercializing and entrenching perverse profit motives, i.e. prison industrial complex and the US health sector knows how to extract more from bodies. The US was also rich/socially broken enough where locking up more people made political and economical sense (for some) and had decades of head start refining the process. Take PRC, Western estimates of Uyghur internment at 1/12 of population, or about lifetime internment of US blacks. Vast majority of mass internment was measured in months because they had to process prisoners through limited new facilities over a short period of time - the point was to filter problematic populations and find edge cases who were slapped with 10-20 year sentences. Majority was was released after a short stint. There's limit on how much country that intern on politics can extract value from industrializing prison, because they prefer not to have # dissidents get out of hand in the first place. Even coerced labour or organ harvesting is lame profit driver compared to the service jobs as a result of the US prison sector that benefits from countries having too much money. Most countries, especially developing countries, diverting people to lockup people is not productive use of resources, at least not for assembling widgets. PRC doesn't have the incentives to spend resources to lock up as large % of the population as the US in both scale and timelines involved. They spent trillions upfront to process the region so long term securitization doesn't involve expensive internment. Meanwhile, in the US, mass internment has become profitable, so it should not be surprising that US ends up imprisoning disproportionately more.

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