Once you’ve got a whole industry built around private prisons, taxpayer cash, and turning inmates into pure profit, it’s basically very hard not to send poor people to jail .
There’s a saying:
If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Or: If you have a military-industrial complex oligarch, you crave war.
This’s the late-stage capitalism for you.
– The US is like 4% of the world’s population but has 25% of the world’s prisoners
– In California, locking up one person costs $87,000 a year. That’s more than going to Harvard.
band-of-horses on
To be fair we’re #5 overall, maybe #6 because I suspect North Korea has us beat too.
overzealous_dentist on
Interestingly the US rate is falling off a cliff and will be extremely low soon
Oh wow, I had no idea incarceration rates were so high in the US. Thank you for posting this!
I looked at the source data. Only four countries have higher rates than the US: Cuba, Rwanda, Turkmenistan and El Salvador, in a list of 224 countries.
The_Great_Man_Potato on
America is literally number 1 in everything yall can’t stop us 🇺🇸🦅💪
Error_404_403 on
Selection “by GDP” is misleading. Where is China?? Is Russia GDP smaller than that of Brazil?
6 Comments
Once you’ve got a whole industry built around private prisons, taxpayer cash, and turning inmates into pure profit, it’s basically very hard not to send poor people to jail .
There’s a saying:
If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Or: If you have a military-industrial complex oligarch, you crave war.
This’s the late-stage capitalism for you.
– The US is like 4% of the world’s population but has 25% of the world’s prisoners
– In California, locking up one person costs $87,000 a year. That’s more than going to Harvard.
To be fair we’re #5 overall, maybe #6 because I suspect North Korea has us beat too.
Interestingly the US rate is falling off a cliff and will be extremely low soon
America’s Incarceration Rate Is About to Fall Off a Cliff – The Atlantic https://share.google/hx939Jfb6q3Fv6VS7
Oh wow, I had no idea incarceration rates were so high in the US. Thank you for posting this!
I looked at the source data. Only four countries have higher rates than the US: Cuba, Rwanda, Turkmenistan and El Salvador, in a list of 224 countries.
America is literally number 1 in everything yall can’t stop us 🇺🇸🦅💪
Selection “by GDP” is misleading. Where is China?? Is Russia GDP smaller than that of Brazil?