Having actually worked for the penal system collecting and analyzing statistics on prisoner abuses and policy enforcement, I can easily tell you that you are wrong (assuming your confusing deconstructionist prose means what I think it means).
In general, Europe has some of the best prisons, and some of the worst prisons. France, Italy, Turkey, and Russia have horrendous prisons where in many cases prisoners don't survive their sentences. France's prisons are so historically bad that they've spawned whole revolutions numerous times, and are a common factor in their history. The EU was supposed to improve these conditions but it remains to be seen given they have very little data on how they're run, let alone anything publicly accessible.
In Asia only Japan has decent well run prisons, but their prisons are harsh while still having a high success rate. In the rest of Asia prisons are typically horrible, and even S.Korea has some awful conditions. Last thing I read said they don't feed prisoners and keep them in tiny huts, requiring their relatives to come and feed them. Burma is a massive police state with actual slaves by law.
In Africa, if you remove countries that just don't even have working governments, you find the prisons are also horrible, with the exception of maybe South Africa, but even they've had a history of nasty evil and torture (read about Steve Biko). It's improved a lot, but not nearly as much as it should.
The US is similar to Europe, with some of the worst and some of the best prisons in the world. Now, we're not talking about American legal policy on things like wrongful imprisonment by the LA Crash unit, idiotic "3-strikes your out" laws, or minimum sentencing laws. I'm talking the actual conditions of the prisons in the US as labeled by organizations like Amnesty International. In our case, prisons are generally alright, with a few standout offenses like Sheriff Joe Arpaio in AZ, and most prisons in the south and California. The worst state is definitely California, which makes sense given they've had more complete city wide riots than any other state in the nation and their huge gap between rich and poor.
But, a significant difference between our prison system and many others around the world (even those in Europe) are our laws about open records on how they're run and our recent trend of civilian oversight groups and recitivism prevention. Starting in about 2004 there's been a huge push to increase monitoring of prisons, offenses, guard abuses, and to help parolees stay out of jail. I personally worked on systems that tracked guard abuses at Riker's Island and the NYC DOC, as well as finger print systems for prisons that do early release programs and job release programs.
The biggest problem in American prisons is the advocacy by law enforcement of inmate-on-inmate rape as a sanctioned form of punishment. There's been numerous cases of countries refusing to extradite criminals based purely on our joke that a man will get ass raped in prison. If you wanted to focus your activism and hatred on any one thing to improve our system, it would definitely be eliminating rape.
In general, through my research and my own need to improve prisons, I found that prisons are horrible poorly managed hell holes everywhere. They generally reflect the cultural fear of the dominant members of a region against the "unclean" citizens, outsiders, and the low class. The difference between American prisons and this one in N.Korea is the size of it and the blatant attempt to keep it secret from the rest of the world. Very few countries in the world try to hide prisons, and when they do it's considered horrible, but none of them are hiding a prison that's the size of Manhattan:
"The difference between American prisons and this one in N.Korea is the size of it and the blatant attempt to keep it secret from the rest of the world."
Right. And the calorie counts, and the min / max temperatures. And the habeas corpus, and the due process prior to incarceration. And the press freedom to investigate. And the public election of legislators making the laws defining criminality, and executives running prisons. Otherwise, no difference.
See, in North Korea, when you start a "push to increase monitoring of prisons", you go _into_ the prison, do not see a judge, do not pass Go. And your family. And you don't come out. This alone strikes me as a really important difference.
Maybe people aren't sufficiently exercised about US prison conditions. But suggesting those are the same as North Korea only flips the "not credible" bit for every further comment you make.
It's so frustrating and terrible to see the situation in NK trivialized by comparing the US's prison systems unfavorably to it. No initiative, no activism, no outcry can be raised because its wind is immediately sucked out by foolish people screaming moral equivalence. How do you think refugees from these gulags would feel to hear you compare the average US prison inmate's experience to their own? Do you acknowledge that some concentration camps can be objectively and morally worse than others?
Are there bad prisons in the US? No doubt. Is the average US inmate experience anything like what is the RULE in these gulags? No. Does the scale between the two matter? Yes. Do the crimes (sometimes "crimes") and due process issues matter? Yes. Can we go on and on with specific, provable differences which make the NK citizen's experience far more horrifying? Yes.
Problems with the prison system in the US belong in their OWN THREAD, where they don't distract from THIS PROBLEM. The fact that some folks feel the overwhelming urge to bring them up here speaks a lot about what they think is important: Scoring points against the US. The US prison system is not relevant to the NK prison system. This isn't a game. NK doesn't get to pick out worst case practices from the US to justify its sweeping unchecked abuses. And it certainly doesn't deserve the aid of willing amateur PR people on random internet message boards.
NK is the same country that quietly let millions of its people starve while it spent a large fraction of its total wealth trying to build the tallest hotel in the world! That's the philosophy and those are the priorities of the organization behind these gulags. But you're telling me the REAL story here is the US prison system?
But this is why NK gets to go merrily about its way starving and torturing its citizens.
> But this is why NK gets to go merrily about its way starving and torturing its citizens.
No it's not. There are 3 foreign policy "sticks" that could be used to end this situation:
1. Invasion
2. Sanctions
3. Shaming
Aggregation of frustration is not one of them.
They have differing requirements in order to be effective:
1. Requires a weak enemy military and existent domestic political opposition to the regime. Internal dissonance exists and your forces are not over-leveraged on other fronts.
2. Requires the entity to already be integrated in the global economy. There is something real you can withhold that will not cause additional mass starvation.
3. Requires high social proof. Those doing the shaming can easily deflect accusations of hypocrisy to rapidly build a global and regional (Chinese) consensus.
Notice that no conditions necessary for 1 or 2 are present. This leaves 3 as one of the most obvious routes to discuss. As the US currently has the world's largest population of prisoners, it makes it hard for the USA to end the prisoner problem in North Korea as effectively as it could. Discourse will necessarily gravitate towards how the US can improve its social proof by striving for exemplary domestic policies. It's not a matter of "moral equivalence", but of being open to moral improvement when others remind us of our faults. Unless we can think of a new kind of stick, this may remain the best way to help those in North Korea.
Regarding #2) The North Korean regime continues it's existence and behavior in large part because of the assistance they receive from China. So while we may not be able to sanction NK directly in the world economy, we can very much influence them by proxy through our foreign policy with China.
You seem to have missed the way that so many stories about horrific things happening in other countries are supposed to make Americans feel superior.
Just spend some time listening to NPR. Constant propaganda telling the listener to respect our government, its institutions, its parties, etc. Why does anyone take American political parties seriously? There is a lot of energy spent propagandizing us about their greatness.
Why should any American care about any foreign prison when rape is used as an unofficial form of punishment in US prisons?
The only purpose of this sort of story is to feed Americans' appetite for feelings of superiority and to allow us to ignore the horrific conditions facing American prisoners.
So unless you think that conditions for North Koreans would be improved by American bombs, I suggest you spend your energy worrying about problems that you can actually make an impact on, such as US prisons, and stop being self-righteous about problems in other countries.
>The biggest problem in American prisons is the advocacy by law enforcement of inmate-on-inmate rape as a sanctioned form of punishment
Do you know if this is correlated with overcrowding of prisons (actual capacity vs. intended capacity)? You mentioned California prisons are some of the worst, to my knowledge they are also the most overcrowded?
What strikes me in a comparative analysis of the US penal system is not quality of treatment, but the perverse economic incentives promoting hoarding such a large percentage of the population in them. I would argue the biggest problem in the American penal system is public policy structuring unrehabilitated prisoners as assets:
1a. The standard contract for private prisons seems to be money per prisoner housed rather than money per prisoner rehabilitated.
1b. Each prisoner generates further revenue for the private prison as a labor source.
1c. Thus on a balance sheet, each additional unrehabilitated prisoner becomes an asset to be kept rather than a liability to be reduced.
2. Allowing drugs inside prisons becomes an efficiency gain, as prisoners failing drug tests results in assets being held longer.
3a. When prisoners are housed in prisons in rural districts, they count towards that districts population for purposes of calculating representation in state legislature. Even though prisoners cannot vote and are primarily from urban districts.
3b. Prisoners then also become an asset rather than liabilities for politicians in rural districts by giving them undue representative power. Politicians then are incentivized to increase this asset by supporting minimum sentencing laws.
Now there may be no direct agency or conscious intent to the above, but historically changing the underlying structure of economic incentives can have profound positive effects on individual behavior: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/09/09/129757852/pop-quiz... . I'd be interested to know if this perspective fits with your knowledge of the subject.
Anyone pondering Zed's comment on eliminating rape in prison should consider a donation to Just Detention International, formerly Stop Prisoner Rape: http://justdetention.org/
There are prisons in the United States where a significant percentage of the population are raped, and there are prisons in the United States where no inmates are raped. Prisoner sexual abuse isn't an inevitable consequence of incarceration, and we need to stop assuming it is.
Very interesting take. I think one of the most useful things to ask, in many situations, is "compared to what?" To those who say things like "we shouldn't point fingers, look how bad we are", I ask, "compared to what?"
Compared to utopia, sure, America is a shithole. But compared to just about any other real place, on just about any other metric, we're doing pretty well. To argue that we somehow don't have the right to call other nations or people out for their atrocities, because we don't compare well to utopia, is ridiculous. We have a duty to call other people out on their bullshit.
No, you're not. Compared to your first-world contemporaries, the US imprisons 5-10 times as many people per capita. Far from 'just about any other place', the US is an outlier when it comes to incarceration. First world nations are all pretty much bunched in the 50-150/100k range, while the US incarcerates 750/100k (that includes kids - for just adults it's up around 1% currently incarcerated. 1%!). It's not 'utopia', but 'contemporary nations'. And it's not like it's always been like this - the US's insane level of incarceration was always a little high, but it started going way off the deep end around 1990.
There's also the rape angle as discussed above. Here in Australia, there's no real mindset about rape in prisons, but when I see Americans discuss it, it's either joked about or implicitly/explicitly declared to be 'part of the prison experience' and that you somehow deserve it if you go to jail... and it seems no-one is interested in wondering if it really is justice for a person imprisoned due to carrying a small amount of personal drugs to be raped as part of their 'debt to society'.
Saying that we're better than most but not as great as we could be is a cop out. The implication of your comment appears to be "let's be upset about N.K., but you're holding the U.S. to too high a standard. The institutions of the U.S. are not nearly as deserving of public outrage as those of N.K."
It's been my experience that most of the wealthy/privileged in the U.S. are simply unaware of how horrible things are[1]; that it's nicer to believe convenient fictions than be faced with a moral/emotional imperative to "do something". For these and other[2] reasons, America's institutions are more deserving than N.K.'s of American/Western public attention and outrage, proportional to the degree that they violate American values.
The implication is absolutely that the institutions of the U.S. are not nearly as deserving of public outrage as those of NK. I simply don't understand how you could come to any other conclusion. Death camps and executions for those who speak out against leaders are aren't worse than three strikes laws? Come on.
I thoroughly agree with the first sentence of your second point. I would go further to say that, since almost all of America is wealthy and privileged (compared to the rest of the world), and add in the fact that only ~22% of our citizens have passports, most of us have no fucking clue how horrible things are in much of the world. That's why I think exposing this kind of stuff, and shaming those responsible, is worthwhile.
The gains to be had in America are, relatively, minor compared to the gains that could be achieved for hundreds of millions around the world. Look at the recent events in the middle east. How much of the was precipitated by worldwide outrage over human rights issues for the last 30 years? I don't know, but I can't imagine they didn't bolster the protestors' resolve to some degree.
That's not to say we should ignore the problems here, and obviously people aren't. There's a thousand different versions of the Innocence Project run by people trying to right the perceived wrongs in all segments of American society. But there's enough outrage to spread around. To say we don't, as individuals, have the time or energy to focus a miniscule amount of attention on the worst off of those around the world is ridiculous.
You're conflating the legal system with the penal system. It's a common mistake, but the "3-strikes laws" are part of the laws and how they're enforced, which is the legal system. The penal system is about carrying out sentences and imprisonment. In some case the penal system is actually an advocate for the prisoners against the legal system. For example, prisons force law enforcement to get warrants before they'll let them listen to prisoner phone calls if they haven't been convicted yet, or sometimes just in general.
That's not to say what you mention about the legal system isn't screwed up, it's just to fix the penal system you have to focus on things the penal system can change. They can't change the 3-strikes laws, but they can change early release programs, surveillance, oversight, IT budgets, conditions, training programs, guard training, etc.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm definitely concerned about the suffering that happens in foreign countries, and I think that people should be aware of it.
Say every American was upset at N.K.'s horrible treatment of prisoners. So what? What's going to happen -- the U.S. would need to go through China before it could touch N.K. And bombing a country on humanitarian grounds is a little absurd.
But if every American were upset about the penal system, or about "3 strikes laws", or prison rape, the problem would be solved almost right away (indeed, American complacency and populism caused some of these problems in the first place).
One additional piece of information seems important though. The US has a prison population of 756 per 100,000 inhabitants. France has 85 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants. (that's according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison#Population_statistics)
Of course that says nothing about how bad the prisons are. But it probably does say something about the quality of the justice system as a whole.
> The difference between American prisons and this one in N.Korea is the size of it and the blatant attempt to keep it secret from the rest of the world.
What really bothers me about those sites is that they don't seem to be monitored by local government at all. The US is many times accused of torturing the prisoners in countries which don't allow such practice.
>In Asia only Japan has decent well run prisons, but their prisons are harsh while still having a high success rate.
just to clarify for others. The high conviction success rate in japan has to do with at least two things:
1. Only cases which have high chances of success are pursued (so you get cases where "people fell down a staircase".
2. Detainees have little expectation of talking to an attorney any time soon. Confessions, co-erced or otherwise, are sought after with vigor by the police. From Wikipedia "Confessions are often obtained after long periods of questioning by police. This can, at times, take weeks or months during which time the suspect is in detention and can be prevented from contacting a lawyer or family.[2] Thus, since the suspect is put through prolonged strain, stress and pressure, the reliability of such confessions can be questioned. To Japanese citizens and police, however, the arrest itself already creates the presumption of guilt which needs only to be verified via a confession.[2] The interrogation reports prepared by police and prosecutors and submitted to the trial courts often constitute the central evidence considered when weighing the guilt or innocence of the suspect.[3]"
In Africa, if you remove countries that just don't even have working governments, you find the prisons are also horrible, with the exception of maybe South Africa, but even they've had a history of nasty evil and torture (read about Steve Biko). It's improved a lot, but not nearly as much as it should.
Rape seems to be very prevalent in South Africa's overcrowded prisons, and South African society seems to actively condone prison rape.
Regarding your Biko point, he was murdered before he was sentenced. Although political prisoners under Apartheid were kept under harsh conditions, after visiting Robben Island, I got the impression that conditions for them, overall, were better than those of general prisoners (especially by the mid-late 1980's).
Overall, I think that prison conditions, for general criminal suspects/convicts, have not gotten much better, although there is greater transparency, than in the past.
Despite what people think, AI isn't about any kind of "liberal agenda", they're just about wrongful imprisonment, torture, and basic human rights.
That'll get you started in statistics, and then you can start looking for the various Dept. of Correction websites in each state to see what initiatives they have, and you might even be able to get at their stats (although usually you have to ask or FOIA to get them).
"Human rights" is a liberal concept! Paine and Mill were liberals. Without liberalism, the idea of human rights never would have existed. Indeed, you can almost define liberalism as that political philosophy which exalts human rights as the highest good.
The Bureau of Justice collects statistics annually thanks to the Prison Rape Elimination Act. Here's a link to a relatively recent study based off of a survey of over 80,000 inmates:
Speaking as a South African, you do not want to go to prison there. People try to avoid it at all costs. Corruption is rife, and reports have surfaced of guards selling sexual access to prisoners amongst other unpleasant activities.
That depends entirely on whether you think prison is about "retribution" or about "rehabilitation". This is a very big debate in criminology, but I think rehabilitation is winning out.
Personally, I think that prisons need to be both retribution and rehabilitation at the same time, and base their mode of operation on the Military, but that's my personal opinion. Based on that I'd say the Japanese probably come the closest, with the actual Military being second. I say this not because I don't care about prisoners, but because I know first hand that the way bootcamp operates is a fast efficient way to retrain people who are unwilling to be trained. It also doesn't do this with violence (anymore) so it would be humane without being "soft".
If however you think prisons should be about rehabilitation then, I believe Denmark or Sweden have the best. They also have a highly homogeneous society with only one main race to deal with, so that's why that works for them. In other words, it's easier to retrain people to fit into society if everyone is already from that same society.
Canada has a fairly good prison system that has often been emulated abroad. However, our recently elected Federal government has plans to increase obligatory sentences, prison sizes and reduce costs - which all leads to a very bad mix. Zed, any comments on Canada?
Ten years and 1.5 billion Norwegian kroner ($252 million) in the making, Halden is spread over 75 acres (30 hectares) of gently sloping forest in southeastern Norway. The facility boasts amenities like a sound studio, jogging trails and a freestanding two-bedroom house where inmates can host their families during overnight visits.
Your comment below has been killed, either by a moderator or because it was downvoted. Because of how the current system works, it might be the case that every subsequent comment you post gets killed automatically. You can't see this, but to people who don't have the "showdead" option on, your comments will be invisible. If this is the case I hope you create a new account, instead of becoming another innocent victim of a broken system.
Thanks so much for taking the time to write this. Do you have recommended followup resources? Opinions on recent books such as New Jack or When Brute Force Fails?
In general, Europe has some of the best prisons, and some of the worst prisons. France, Italy, Turkey, and Russia have horrendous prisons where in many cases prisoners don't survive their sentences. France's prisons are so historically bad that they've spawned whole revolutions numerous times, and are a common factor in their history. The EU was supposed to improve these conditions but it remains to be seen given they have very little data on how they're run, let alone anything publicly accessible.
In Asia only Japan has decent well run prisons, but their prisons are harsh while still having a high success rate. In the rest of Asia prisons are typically horrible, and even S.Korea has some awful conditions. Last thing I read said they don't feed prisoners and keep them in tiny huts, requiring their relatives to come and feed them. Burma is a massive police state with actual slaves by law.
In Africa, if you remove countries that just don't even have working governments, you find the prisons are also horrible, with the exception of maybe South Africa, but even they've had a history of nasty evil and torture (read about Steve Biko). It's improved a lot, but not nearly as much as it should.
The US is similar to Europe, with some of the worst and some of the best prisons in the world. Now, we're not talking about American legal policy on things like wrongful imprisonment by the LA Crash unit, idiotic "3-strikes your out" laws, or minimum sentencing laws. I'm talking the actual conditions of the prisons in the US as labeled by organizations like Amnesty International. In our case, prisons are generally alright, with a few standout offenses like Sheriff Joe Arpaio in AZ, and most prisons in the south and California. The worst state is definitely California, which makes sense given they've had more complete city wide riots than any other state in the nation and their huge gap between rich and poor.
But, a significant difference between our prison system and many others around the world (even those in Europe) are our laws about open records on how they're run and our recent trend of civilian oversight groups and recitivism prevention. Starting in about 2004 there's been a huge push to increase monitoring of prisons, offenses, guard abuses, and to help parolees stay out of jail. I personally worked on systems that tracked guard abuses at Riker's Island and the NYC DOC, as well as finger print systems for prisons that do early release programs and job release programs.
The biggest problem in American prisons is the advocacy by law enforcement of inmate-on-inmate rape as a sanctioned form of punishment. There's been numerous cases of countries refusing to extradite criminals based purely on our joke that a man will get ass raped in prison. If you wanted to focus your activism and hatred on any one thing to improve our system, it would definitely be eliminating rape.
In general, through my research and my own need to improve prisons, I found that prisons are horrible poorly managed hell holes everywhere. They generally reflect the cultural fear of the dominant members of a region against the "unclean" citizens, outsiders, and the low class. The difference between American prisons and this one in N.Korea is the size of it and the blatant attempt to keep it secret from the rest of the world. Very few countries in the world try to hide prisons, and when they do it's considered horrible, but none of them are hiding a prison that's the size of Manhattan:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=90km+square