Question for Love-it-or-leave-it types

mim3 for the Maoist Internationalist Movement:

The United $tates is the world's imprisonment leader, so my
question to love-it-or-leave-it types: 1) Do you they love
Amerika because it is the most criminal nation on earth or
2) Do they love Amerika because the government treats its people as the most criminal on earth?

The facts about imprisonment in the United $tates are that the United
$tates has been the world's leading prison-state per capita for the last
25 years, with a brief exception during Boris Yeltsin's declaration of a
state of emergency.(1) That means that while Reagan was talking about a
Soviet "evil empire" he was the head of a state that imprisoned more
people per capita. In supposedly "hard-line" Bulgaria of the Soviet bloc
of the 1980s, the imprisonment rate was less than half that of the United
$tates.(2,3)
To find a comparison with U.$. imprisonment of Black people, there is no
statistic in any country that compares including apartheid South Africa of
the era before Mandela was president. The last situation remotely
comparable to the situation today was under Stalin during war time.

The majority of prisoners are non-violent offenders(4) and the U.S. Government
now holds about a half million more prisoners than China; even though China
is four times our population.(5)

The rednecks tell MIM that we live in a "free country." They live in an
Orwellian 1984 situation where freedom is imprisonment.



Notes:

1. Marc Mauer, "Americans Behind Bars: The International Use of
Incarceration 1993," The Prison Sentencing Project, 918 F. St. NW,
Suite 501, Washington, DC 20004 (202) 628-0871 Reference: SRI: R8965-2,
1994

2. Ibid., 1992 report.

3. United Nations Development Programme, "Human Development Report 1994,:"
Oxford University Press, p. 186.

4. Figure of 51.2 percent for state prisoners there for non-violent
offenses. Abstract of the United States 1993, p. 211. In 2000, 1.5% of U.$. male
convicts had rape convictions, the second highest percentage reported by 30 countries
reporting statistics, http://www.unece.org/stats/gender/web/database.htm

5. Atlantic Monthly December, 1998.

From:
http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/faq/freecoun.html

i have always laughed and joked with my friends about how so many people are put in prisons over the stupidest things here in the US, but truly, that piece of insight right there is extremely frightening. and eye opening.