Prisoner Strikes

[Dill]

(08-21-2018, 10:18 PM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: How do you figure?

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China just makes whole families quietly vanish instead, and also just kill a lot of people openly, too. Much better, you're right.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-considers-scrapping-death-penalty-for-several-crimes/

So yes, hold up China as a beacon of inspiration as they murder all their smugglers, counterfeiters, rapists, burglars, drug dealers, embezzelers, and corrupt folk.

I imagine if you murdered all of them in the US and then all the future criminals got that message, our prison population would be much lower too.

Actually, Len, I was not holding up China as a "beacon of inspiration."  I was commenting on the outsized prison population in the U.S.

China "makes whole families vanish" because their authoritarian society embraces the death penalty.  I do not.  The U.S. does not have a larger prison population than China because they don't "murder all their smugglers, counterfeiters, rapists," etc.

The U.S. is the largest Western democracy, 4-5 times larger than the UK or France or Germany. But if we compare prison populations proportionally, the UK for example, with a population of  63,000,000, had about 80,000 in its prisons in 2014.  Texas alone, with a population of 28,000,000, less than half to total UK population, had 143,000 prisoners in 2016.  I could make comparisons between other states and countries as well, like Germany to Florida.

This difference in incarceration rates between the U.S. and other Western democracies does not arise because the other democracies "murder" down their prison populations to lower levels than the U.S. as you say China does.  So I'd like to suggest that there are other ways of reducing prison populations, starting with changes in law and education.