@boomzilla said in The US: saving the world from itself:
@Gąska said in The US: saving the world from itself:
If only US was as good in fighting crime on their own turf...
TDEMSYR. How can we be bad at fighting crime if our prisons have so many criminals in them?
Because our politicians are very good at passing laws that criminalize behavior that's a civil infraction in other countries, and also very good at passing laws that mandate sentencing minimums. In other words, the US is very good at manufacturing excuses to put people into prisons for exceptionally long periods of time. Also, we're not particularly good at reforming our prisoners, and we're relatively punishing to ex-cons, so recidivism is pretty high. That's all reinforced by the fact that so many of our prisons are privately run, which leads to a conflict of interest where they are rewarded for failing to adequately reform convicts and simultaneously lobby for even longer sentences and stricter laws. We also have the general problem of strict liability laws outright replacing the ancient mens rea legal requirement. Futhermore, our system of plea bargaining combined with rewarding police and district attorneys for convictions means that the system is encouraged to bully and threaten accused criminals with ridiculously long charge lists and excessive prison term times simply to make them plead guilty to a lesser charge -- whether or not the state can prove any such crime has happened in the first place.
On top of that, we have police departments with the infamous "blue line" mentality and ridiculous protections offered thanks to police unions in spite of absolutely horrendous rates of police violence. You don't even have to look at the violence that started the Black Lives Matter campaign. You can look at the Schoolcraft quota scandal in New York, or the secret interrogation centers in Chicago.
Oh, and let's not forget that we live in an America with secret courts that issue secret warrants (FISA). Where the NSA and DHS want full, unrestricted access to any computer system or digital traffic without a warrant -- even when corporations in the US make it clear that these actions undermine the ability of our computer companies to do business worldwide. Where those same government entities are capturing data transmissions en masse between citizens with no repsect for the constitutional right of privacy. Our government can designate anyone they choose as being a "terrorist" -- a designation they themselves define -- and then lock them away with no writ of habeus corpus, no trial, no jury, no courtroom at all. They can do this outside a formal declaration of war by Congress.
I remember living in the 80s before the Berlin wall fell. I remember hearing about the secret police in the USSR or in East Germany. How they'd disappear people, and interrogate them. How they'd bug peoples' telephone calls and read their mail. About oppressive leaders that would manipulate the press to only tell the stories they wanted. "Not here," we always said. "Here, in the US, we believe in freedom and rule of law. We believe in the rights of the individual over the state. We will always know our enemies by the tactics they choose." When did we become the enemy?
The justice system in this country is a fucking joke.