How about that. Amnesty International recently released a report that is supposed to be some kind of smashing expose on North Korea's prison system. The New York Times reported on it with a sensational headline that seems to ignore the problem at home. The thing is, their imprisonment rate of about 0.8 percent is pretty close to ours of about 0.8 percent (3 percent if you count people on probation or on parole). They have a population of about 24 million, with 200,000 in prison. We have a population of about 309 million, with 2.4 million in prison. Ours is the highest incarceration rate, by far, in the "developed" world. It too, is growing. I guess theirs is maybe the highest in the world, but only slightly. North Korea is not a place to which you want to be comparable. In any way. But here we are.
I guess the big difference is that our prisons are supposed to be civilized institutions. We tell ourselves that everything is very orderly, efficient and coldly impartial. At least some of us do. North Korea supposedly has people eating rats and worms, witnessing other inmates' executions. Maybe that is true, maybe it's not, maybe it's overstated.
Regardless, American prisons are not places you want to be. They are overcrowded by about 60 percent (The Economist says so, no liberal rag for sure). People with inappropriately long, mandatory sentences for non-violent crimes fill them. Prison is a place that can teach many how to be better criminals. This is what happens when you throw people in cells and make little effort to reform them, or give them sentences so long that they don't care what happens when they get out. There is not even a mask of reform in American prisons. Some can go to school, but nothing is required of anyone. Drugs are rampant. Violence is routine. Guards are often nasty and brutal. Sadists seek such positions. These are thankless jobs, to be sure. There is no argument analogous to the one that people sometimes use to justify being a police officer - "I want to help the community." Ha. You are surely helping no one in that prison. You just maintain control by varying degrees of coercion. That is the kind of job that rots you from the inside out, presuming that there was anything to rot initially.
Prisons in this country are often referred to as the new plantation. They are disproportionately black and brown, to the extent of 60 percent of the national prison population. Here, people can be coerced to work for as low as 5 cents an hour where they produce an astonishing array of goods, from meat to furniture to dentures and lingerie. They even come with their version of the Klan. No, not just guards, but the even more crude Aryan gangs. Race war behind bars. Talk about divide and conquer.
As for inhumanity, about 25,000 inmates at any given time are doing their bids in solitary confinement. They stay in their cells (which always have lights on) 23 hours per day; they are allowed one hour of solitary "exercise" on a small fenced in on all sides concrete slab. Their visiting privileges are severely curtailed and they interact with no one except guards, through a hole in the door. This is medieval, at best. In fact, the United States has entire prisons devoted to such conditions. Google "supermax." In North Korean camps, people seem to be able to interact with one another. As you may imagine, long-term solitary confinement has a great potential to break you down. Unfortunately, it often does. Which brutality would you choose, the silent controlled one that tells you it is not brutal or the blatant version?
Finally, to address the contention that North Korea's prisons are packed with political offenders, I am sure that in such a fucked up place, people commit a good number of social crimes as well. Beyond that, America certainly has its political prisoners as well. Several of them are or have been high-profile over the years - Huey Newton, Assata Shakur, Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal - while many more languish in obscurity, cut off from friends and family, all but forgotten about. These are people like Herman Bell, Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa. Then there are the countless faceless individuals rounded up for peaceful mass protest at such events like national political conventions, World Bank meetings and antiwar demonstrations. No level of American government, local, state or national, will ever acknowledge this. The official American line is that we have no political prisoners here, only "bad guys." Though the $4.5 million that Los Angeles and the FBI had to pay out to Geronimo Pratt says otherwise.
I guess the big difference is that our prisons are supposed to be civilized institutions. We tell ourselves that everything is very orderly, efficient and coldly impartial. At least some of us do. North Korea supposedly has people eating rats and worms, witnessing other inmates' executions. Maybe that is true, maybe it's not, maybe it's overstated.
Regardless, American prisons are not places you want to be. They are overcrowded by about 60 percent (The Economist says so, no liberal rag for sure). People with inappropriately long, mandatory sentences for non-violent crimes fill them. Prison is a place that can teach many how to be better criminals. This is what happens when you throw people in cells and make little effort to reform them, or give them sentences so long that they don't care what happens when they get out. There is not even a mask of reform in American prisons. Some can go to school, but nothing is required of anyone. Drugs are rampant. Violence is routine. Guards are often nasty and brutal. Sadists seek such positions. These are thankless jobs, to be sure. There is no argument analogous to the one that people sometimes use to justify being a police officer - "I want to help the community." Ha. You are surely helping no one in that prison. You just maintain control by varying degrees of coercion. That is the kind of job that rots you from the inside out, presuming that there was anything to rot initially.
Prisons in this country are often referred to as the new plantation. They are disproportionately black and brown, to the extent of 60 percent of the national prison population. Here, people can be coerced to work for as low as 5 cents an hour where they produce an astonishing array of goods, from meat to furniture to dentures and lingerie. They even come with their version of the Klan. No, not just guards, but the even more crude Aryan gangs. Race war behind bars. Talk about divide and conquer.
As for inhumanity, about 25,000 inmates at any given time are doing their bids in solitary confinement. They stay in their cells (which always have lights on) 23 hours per day; they are allowed one hour of solitary "exercise" on a small fenced in on all sides concrete slab. Their visiting privileges are severely curtailed and they interact with no one except guards, through a hole in the door. This is medieval, at best. In fact, the United States has entire prisons devoted to such conditions. Google "supermax." In North Korean camps, people seem to be able to interact with one another. As you may imagine, long-term solitary confinement has a great potential to break you down. Unfortunately, it often does. Which brutality would you choose, the silent controlled one that tells you it is not brutal or the blatant version?
Finally, to address the contention that North Korea's prisons are packed with political offenders, I am sure that in such a fucked up place, people commit a good number of social crimes as well. Beyond that, America certainly has its political prisoners as well. Several of them are or have been high-profile over the years - Huey Newton, Assata Shakur, Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal - while many more languish in obscurity, cut off from friends and family, all but forgotten about. These are people like Herman Bell, Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa. Then there are the countless faceless individuals rounded up for peaceful mass protest at such events like national political conventions, World Bank meetings and antiwar demonstrations. No level of American government, local, state or national, will ever acknowledge this. The official American line is that we have no political prisoners here, only "bad guys." Though the $4.5 million that Los Angeles and the FBI had to pay out to Geronimo Pratt says otherwise.
