When it comes to basic human rights, it is there in the gutter alongside some of the world's most toxic, tinpot dictatorships and authoritarian regimes.
I wondered how the U.S. could really describe itself as a civilized, mature democracy.
And if you doubt my judgment here are a few statistics to play with in a prison system where 70 percent of the inmates are non-whites.
The U.S. has a higher percentage of its citizenry in prison than any other country in history.
25 percent of the world's prison population -- around 2.3 million -- are caged in America.
More than a quarter of U.S. inmates are black males between the ages of 20 and 39 and over the course of a lifetime, 28 percent of all black American men will have spent some time behind bars in what can only be described as a racist-driven judicial system. cite
Sure you're more likely to go to prison for drugs if your black, despite white men actually be the ones who do more of it. Sure we leave people in jails for a long time while we search for justice, but this America... and we try to get it right, right? Or do we sweep what we don't want hear and see under the rug, while newspapers from foreign nations post columns suggesting that the way we see other countries is how they see us. Is it a concept of mutual propaganda, or is one of us right and one of us wrong? Is America prisons better than other western nations, or are we doing something drastically wrong, something horrific that we're too proud of ourselves for or too ashamed of to admit?
I begin to Google:
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.
Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes - from writing bad checks to using drugs - that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.
Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.
The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London. cite
Of course when you consider the prison for profit system is profiting from all this in our capitalistic state, it all starts to come together.
