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Comment by BrokenPipe | Hacker News Reader

Increase ? Why does that look to me like a spike ? And are you denying either of these claims ? Because if not it seems like you are just nitpicking to me, the point of the parent is still fully correct regardless of the graph.

A. "The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population." B. "imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid"

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No, the point of the parent is not correct.

The parent is implying that the US manipulates things so that innocent people go to prison. This is not the case. There is also no spike, but rather an increase followed by leveling off.

The US does keep people in prison longer than other nations, there is no dispute there. But it does not imprison more people than other nations. This is a subtle but very important difference.

The US does imprison more people than other nations according to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat...

And whether the US keeps people in prison longer than other nations or not, doesn't really help you case IMHO.

Go back and read it again.

This list of not the number of different people who go to prison, it's the percentage at any given moment. So a longer sentence will inflate the numbers on this list.

Still, the US has more people in jail than any other country however you look at it. The fact that this is due to longer prison terms is relevant but doesn't change a thing does it ?

I wouldn't suppose that citizens of the US are more criminal than the avg citizen of the world.

It's just that you have the Prison Industry and legalized corruption (see lobbying)

The distinction is quite relevant to the narrative. If your narrative is that the laws and prosecutors unfairly put people in prison that don't belong there, then you want to compare the percentage of people who ever go to prison, not the percentage if people in prison at any given time. The latter fact is relevant to a narrative that our prison terms are too long, but that's a distinct problem.

Also, we do have higher rates of violent crime than our peers. You can't ignore that.

And while its phat to blame the lobbyists, I don't think that's the entirety if the distinction. Americans are simply more retributive than other people. Look at the death penalty. It's 2012 and half the country would be up in arms if the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. At the end of the day, prison terms are long because being "tough in crime" got a lot of votes in the 1970's and 1980's.

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