2,292,133 were in prisons in the United States in 2009 [from wikipedia]. Even though I guess conditions are better, 200 000 doesn't sound like that many after all.
I fail to see your point. Does the number of U.S. prisoners diminish the vileness of what goes on in North Korea? Are you saying/suggesting that the numbers of prisoners in the U.S. are so great that other countries are beyond criticism? That it's hypocritical for Americans or the American government to be shocked by the situation in North Korea? Can you clarify?
I'll answer for him, it's your last suggestion It's hypocritical for someone in the US to criticize other nations about their prison systems when we're leading the world in locking people up for crazy shit. That's not to say we can't have an opinion, just not a holier-than-thou attitude about it.
It may sound hypocritical for an American to oppose concentration camps in North Korea based on America's prison-happy justice system, but please keep two things in mind:
1. It is only hypocritical for the speaker if he supports America's prison-happy justice system. If he opposes it, or has misgivings, or is undecided, it is not hypocritical to oppose North Korea.
2. Even if it is hypocrisy, that doesn't diminish his words in any way, just your personal opinion of him. If his criticism is invalid, it can be disputed directly. If his criticism is valid, he could be as flawed and terrible a human being as we can imagine and his criticism would still be valid.
#2 is the key point. Arguing that his words are hypocritical is a kind of Ad Hominem Abuse, something generally discouraged on HN as a kind of intellectual laziness, a rhetorical appeal to emotion rather than an analysis of the argument being debated.
I don't think that, even in US prisons (which are rather inhumane compared to European standards, I think), prisoners are delighted when a companion dies because the extra food ration they get for burying the body allows them to keep starvation at bay.
When "Thou" is plain fucking evil, it's perfectly acceptable to be holier-than-thou.
Not arguing whether people should be locked up or not for certain crimes - there is obviously an issue with that - but when it comes down to numbers - are we really leading the world in that area:
North Koran Population: 23,906,070
Estimated "Prisoners": 200,000
Percentage in Custody: 0.83%
United States Population: 307,006,550
Estimated Prisoners: 2,292,133
Percentage in Custody: 0.74%
(Both numbers for US population and incarcerated people are from 2009)
My understanding is that North Koreans, by and large, have a very low quality of life, have limited rights, and are not free to leave. By that description, I'd have to say their percentage of prisoners is closer to 100%.
I believe North Korea is number 1 in terms of percentage of its population in (formal) prison. The U.S. is number 2.
The percentage of people in prison in the U.S. is grotesquely large. It's much larger than any other nation with comparable economic/religious/political freedoms. The U.S. judicial/prison system is quite bad in my opinion but the exact point that fijall was making was lost on me. Hence my request for a clarification.
I will add that the entire nation of North Korea should be viewed as a giant prison. This makes North Korea incomparable to other nations. It's unique in this respect.
The US with a functioning bureaucracy has access to options that NK doesn't have, such as probation and house arrest (even suspended sentences need paperwork) -- 3.1% of the US is "on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole" (Wikipedia - that's more than I expected, how does it afford that?)
No, the severity of the NK situation is not diminished in the least by US prisons. Neither is the severity of the problems of some people stuck in prison revolving doors in the US diminished by the greater injustice in NK. It is hypocritical of anyone to try and deflect justified criticism by pointing somewhere else. Other countries are not beyond criticism, but many people feel that they should be beyond the "lets invade them" policy.
Are you arguing that prisons in the US are akin to what is described as concentration camps in the article, or that what is described in the article is comparable to what you find in US prisons?
The juvenile prisons are even worse. Act up in school, smoke pot - wait, we need to straighten you out! How about instead of going to school and living at home, you go to a privately run prison where several guards sexually assault you ever day for two or three years. The rest of the time your peers will beat you up and demonstrate dangerous ways to use drugs. Customer acquired, now you're likely to be generating business for our Prison Corporation for the rest of your life.
Sorry, fijall, that the number of enslaved people (who are in many cases not guilty of crimes beyond disagreeing with a dictator) is not adequately horrific for you.
Perhaps if they were 200,000 people you knew... or even one you knew.
It makes me sick that a large percentage of the people in American jails are there for crimes that hurt no one but themselves but to compare this to the people in North Korea is just asinine.
In both cases, people are being denied their freedom and taken away from their families, for engaging in activities that hurt no one, not even themselves.
It's certainly true that American prisons are better. But given the OP's definition: "enduring starvation, torture, and rape while performing hard labor", we do hit a couple of checkboxes. My understanding is that prison rape, with guards just looking the other way, is still a real problem in America. And take a look down at Guantanamo for (an admittedly small number of) people who are imprisoned and tortured "without legal recourse", as the OP says.
So it's just a matter of degree. There's certainly a good deal of ground for comparison.
In this case the degree is fairly important though. If we ignore degree completely we have most of the liberal democracies in the world lumped in with NK, Libya and Zimbabwe. Obviously lines must be drawn.
That just begs the question. Where must the line be drawn? Those disagreeing with my point seem to feel that the line should be right between us and whoever is more ruthless than us.
But why do we automatically view ourselves on the correct side of that line? I've we're engaged, as a matter of policy, in activities that many or most Americans believe to be evil, doesn't that put the drawing of the line into question?
I'm not asserting that the US has a superior human rights record or that we don't engage in policy that could be seen as 'evil'. The argument being made here seems to be that we lack the moral high ground to criticize the NK regime. I've heard a similar argument used to counter the US criticisms of China's human rights record, and while I think it could be relevant in that case, we're talking about mass death camps here. This is a completely different animal. We don't need to be perfect citizens to condemn abhorrant policy like this.
I don't really care to judge where the line belongs, but if we were to draw the line to include just one country, it would be North Korea as far as my moral compass is concerned. If we drew the line so it included the US, then we would also be including Russia, China, Mexico, and the vast majority of world nations.
So yes, lets not go ranking countries by evilness - but North Korea is so beyond that that your equivocating is offensive.
If we drew the line so it included the US, then we would also be including Russia, China, Mexico, and the vast majority of world nations.
It's not nearly so simple. If we drew the line according to what portion of our population we imprison, then the USA would be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with North Korea, with the rest of the world nearly an order of magnitude lower.
The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, ...
China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. ...
The United States comes in first, too, ... in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)
The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England's rate is 151; Germany's is 88; and Japan's is 63.
The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.
The problem is that a lot of those people belong in prison. I mean release the pot dealer serving 25-to-life, fine...but you'll still be left with a lot of 'real' criminals out there. And sure there are a lot of unique systemic failures in America that led to this situation, but they can't all be fixed by a few shifts in gov't policy.
>It's not nearly so simple. If we drew the line according to what portion of our population we imprison
Yes, it's not simple. A single metric will not draw a meaningful line.
Compared to the average person in North Korea (imprisoned or not) American prisoners are very well treated. They have balanced diets, and can read anything they please. Even if everyone in America was imprisoned, I think America would still come out as a more humane dictatorship than North Korea if half of what I've read about that country is true.
While I agree that such a conversation is irrelevant to this post, I would say that in certain cases we are pretty close to locking people up en masse and forcing them to live in fairly abominable circumstances albeit not death camps.
I will literally buy you a ticket to move there if you really want to. I'm not even joking in the least bit. I do feel a twinge of guilt at the thought of your "reeducation" in NK but I'm still willing to help you find out on your own.
Both the conditions of incarceration and conditions of not-incarceration are dramatically better in the United States.
That so many people in this thread are trying to suggest that the United States is somehow worse than North Korea or that people from the United States can't criticize North Korea saddens me. The United States' prison system has obvious problems. All of North Korea is a totalitarian hellhole.
The remaining populous of North Korea that are outside of these camps aren't living a life of luxury - the day to day life there is still not comparable to the prison system.
