Other countries with stable democracies have universal health care, don't incarcerate almost 1% of the population, have never landed people on the moon, don't spend 5% of their GDP on the military, aren't the home of Apple, Microsoft, and IBM, and so on. America has always been (and will probably always be) an edge case.
I seriously doubt that. What goes around comes around.
Actually, they don't.
And that's another way in which America is different than most other nations.
Please do not take this the wrong way. I kind of admire your patriotism... although I think it might prevent you from seeing (and fixing) bad things.
American patriotism is the most public, but every country's citizens take some measure of pride in their country. We're the most public about everything (the home of myspace/facebook/twitter/instagram/the internet generally) so it makes sense to me that we're really public about patriotism.
I tend to think that those with the most outward expressions of that pride don't want things fixed.
Shouldn't or doesn't? Shouldn't, sure. Doesn't ... the evidence doesn't bear this out.
What seems to be problematic to me is that the bad ones seem to be on different abstraction level than the good ones. Other countries might not have Apple, Microsoft, and IBM but they certainly have huge globally successful companies. They never landed on the moon but they have explored space and achieved important things related to science or technology.
Which could negate the idea of being an outlier in bad things is somehow related to being an outlier in good things... if anyone would be making such claim.
Similarly, the argument that "we have high highs, therefore it's reasonable to have low lows" really doesn't do the complexity of human nature any justice, instead treating it as a simple see-saw.
There are some exceptions to this like being able to visit another prisoner for one hour every day or use the kitchen for one hour every few days, etc. (Or if you are really lucky you can get a job inside the prison.)
I'd say being imprisoned is inhumane in every country on this planet. I hope future generations come up with alternatives to this medieval practice.
Given what they'd do if you were found guilty...
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/feb/25/norwegian-pris...
See e.g. http://www.internationalpenalandpenitentiaryfoundation.org/S... Germany.pdf. An excerpt from the section on Prison regime(s):
The common core of regime activities is a Monday to Friday work week.
Work hours follow those of the civil service. In addition there is the one hour
of daily exercise in the open air. Prisoners are walked to their work places af‐
ter breakfast, they are returned to their cells for lunch and at the end of their
work hours. Here the uniformity ends. Regulations with respect to night‐
time lockup differ widely. In pretrial prisons, where most prisoners do not
work, prisoners may be locked up for 23 hours a day. Many prisons have
adopted a policy of open cell doors between the end of work and lockup
time. After lockup, leisure‐time activities outside the cell rooms may still be
possible. But this depends on the prisoner’s enrolment in one of the organ‐
ized activities offered by prison staff or (more likely) by some external group
(from Alcoholics Anonymus to political parties, religious groups et cetera).
But all of this may not apply to all prisoners and it definitely does not apply
to all prisons.Finding work in most prisons can also be pretty hard. There are certain jobs that are always in demand (welder, carpenter, etc.) but if you're a simple academic and not a craftsman you can only hope to get one of the lower level jobs like librarian, kitchen help, etc. That paired with prison overpopulation can make getting a job pretty hard.
The problem is that the prison system in Germany is heavily underfunded and that a good portion of the prison buildings are very old (a few date even back to the late 19th century). Germany would need many new prison buildings with humane sanitary standards but you don't get points in the election for spending tax money on the well being of prisoners.