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On last night's Colbert Report, an amazing moment occurred when Stephen Colbert raised a major social issue that U.S. mainstream media assiduously ignore: the huge U.S. prison population. The issue quickly disappeared due to the apparent ignorance of Colbert's guest: Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner, in charge of "Democracy, Human Rights and Labor."

In a sometimes jokey interview with Posner discussing China's various human rights abuses (including prisoners), Colbert tried to steer the conversation to human rights problems in our own country.

COLBERT: We've actually got more people in prison than China does.

POSNER: Well I'm not sure that's true.

Colbert's assertion is indisputably true. Posner's denial is false. Does the State Department's man in charge of human rights not know the facts?

According to statistics gathered by the authoritative International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States has by far the largest prison population in the world: almost 2.3 million people behind bars. China's prison population is second in the world: roughly 1.6 million.

The United States is also number one in the world in its "prison population rate": 748 inmates per 100,000 citizens. Russia is third. China is tied for 114th.

This is a U.S. human rights problem of enormous proportions. Our bloated prison population has many causes including the "drug war," mandatory minimum sentencing, poverty, and racism. And there are corporate profits to be made from "The Prison-Industrial Complex" -- as independent journalists like Eric Schlosser began documenting a dozen years ago.

Wouldn't it be great to see this issue tackled by some mainstream TV voices . . . other than Stephen Colbert?





http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-cohe ... 71876.html

How does that relate to the matter of human rights?

We have more prisoners than China does, not nearly the same size population, and much of our defense department benefits from prison labor (slave labor). Much of our prison problem is a human rights issue than that we're exceptionally problematic.

I am not catching on here ...

Is someone suggesting our prison population is comparatively high because human rights are being violated?

Yes...did you read the rest of the article or check out any of the links? The link on the word documenting is a particularly informative one.

I have just now gone back and scanned those articles a bit, and I still do not see how violations of human rights are causing high populations in US prisons. People are in US prisons for committing crimes, and there is nothing wrong with requiring an able-bodied man in a US prison to work in order to eat.

Is someone suggesting people are being sentenced, incarcerated and "worked" unjustly?

More to the point, we do not imprison people in the US for holding the wrong political opinions, unless of course their political opinion is that they should be permitted to assassinate officeholders. We do not jail people for belonging to the wrong party, or for knowing the wrong people. We jail people for committing less subjective crimes, usually crimes against persons or property.

China, on the other hand, has people in jail for failing to adhere sufficiently to Revolutionary Doctrine. Freedom of thought is no more permissible under the Communist "utopia" than it was under the Emperors - possibly less so, as to the best of my knowledge even the emperors of the Ming Dynasty didn't employ a network of domestic spies to find and arrest their discontented citizens for the crime of voicing criticism of an official.

Of course, judging by the products we receive from China, it would appear that neither theft of intellectual property nor the sale of potentially-lethal food products are regarded as particularly heinous there, or even troublesome, unless they attract international attention - and child-labor laws don't seem to even exist there (nor does society seem to especially frown on slavery in any form).

When Chinese prisoners can demand eight-hour days, are legally defended from corporal punishment, and receive food of a quality and quantity considered acceptable in the Western world, we can begin to say that they might have some claim to the higher ground. Until then, mere numbers of persons imprisoned is not important to the debate on human rights.

Except for the drug laws.

I think I can sum and contrast the issue. This article gives an alternate view on criminal behavior and it carries a positive message. Please read it.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/fe ... 5839161667

Please do! I was not able to draw anything from the article you linked.

Much of our prison population can be attributed to two pervasive ills of society:
1. higher than normal levels of drug use
2. higher than normal levels of authoritarianism, wanting to get tough on crime vs. actually helping people overcome their ills. Treating people as animals. The prison industrial system obviously doesn't help either.

Look at the private prison system exploding in the last thirty years, and the related get tough on crime policies the government has held. Correlated? I think so. Locking people up for whatever offenses possible just to put people in prisons and increase profits for the private correctional companies - government and big business working together to benefit themselves at the expense of the common man.

But the US prison system is biased toward blacks. They are only 13% of the population and yet form 44% of the inmates. I have also gathered other statistics concerning imprisonment of black peope.

"The rate of incarceration of black Americans in 1989 had even surpassed that experienced by blacks who still lived under the apartheid regime of South Africa."

"The pattern of racial bias in these statistics is confirmed by the research of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which found that while African Americans today constitute only 14 percent of all drug users nationally, they are 35 percent of all drug arrests, 55 percent of all drug convictions, and 75 percent of all prison admissions for drug offenses."

"For those young people who have never been to prison before, African Americans are nine times more likely than whites to be sentenced to juvenile prisons. For youths charged with drug offenses, blacks are 48 times more likely than whites to be sentenced to juvenile prison. White youths charged with violent offenses are incarcerated on average for 193 days after trial; by contrast, African-American youths are held 254 days, and Latino youths are incarcerated 305 days."

Anyway in my opinion to have more prisoners per capita than the world´s worst dictatorships is not something to be proud of.

Not to mention some people who aren't necessarily harden criminals of any sorts end up coming out as hardened criminals because of their interaction with the worse elements/fall in with a bad crowd.

Oh yeah and let's not forget the whole racist aspect of it. More young black men are in prison than in college.

Does anyone know of anyone in the US presently incarcerated for anything other than having committed some kind of crime/harm against the life, liberty or property of another?

I do understand "government and big business" are corrupt and continually walking all over us mere citizens, but I have yet to ever see any evidence of actual human-rights violations increasing the US prison populations. As far as I know, even laws against mere vagrancy have been abolished and no longer land people in jail here.

Well, on top of drug offenders there's also the thousands of victims of prosecutor misconduct which is also becoming more and more prevalent which leads to the jailing of people who haven't even committed a crime but are just painted to look like they have.

There's also drunk driving laws which are done in the name of prevention but are still people who may not have hurt anyone or damaged anything but will be locked up for it and overly penalized for it.

[quote="skafather84"

There's also drunk driving laws which are done in the name of prevention but are still people who may not have hurt anyone or damaged anything but will be locked up for it and overly penalized for it.[/quote]

DWI where there is no injurious outcome is still wrong because it imposes an unreasonable danger upon others.

People who drive impaired should have their driving privilege suspended for life.

ruveyn