Another one of those myths of the Left.

So, in the past day or so I finished this:

The book that the series is based on and I have to say it‘s a highly entertaining read and worth the effort.

Now while Kerman paints the prison system as a totally shitty place to be (surprise), she talks at length about the prison-industrial complex as it is referred to and then trots out the stat that is often used about the United States having 5% of the World’s population but 20% of the World’s Prison population...

Now, if you do a quick search you can find a lot of ink given over to the subject. The chart above was pulled from a Washington Post article:

The United States population was 319 million as of July 4, 2014, according to the U.S. Census. That accounts for about 4.4 percent of the approximately 7.1 billion world population, which confirms the first part of this claim.

Politifact even chimed in on this:

A 2013 report by the International Centre for Prison Studies showed the U.S. had the world’s highest incarceration rate at 716 inmates per 100,000 people. Updated figures on the center’s website show the U.S. now has 707 prisoners per 100,000 population, ranking it second behind the island nation of the Seychelles (population 90,595), which has a prison population rate of 868 per 100,000 people.

The Times has written about this as well!

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

Wikipedia even has an article on it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate

So, according to all these sources we are one of the most repressive places to live on the planet! I mean we must be because when we look at those figures it just shows how out of whack things are. If we take the numbers at face value it is just a staggering validation of the liberal argument about the criminal justice system in the United States.

But wait a second...

First off if you read those articles, they talk about certain nations under reporting the figures of how many people they have in jails. When they start looking at those figures and factoring them in, the numbers for the United States drop to around 20%.

THAT’S STILL HORRIBLE YOU SAY!

Hold on... again, we are taking numbers for an equation that is really skewed to validate an argument and doesn’t take other factors into account.

What factors you say?

Okay, since you asked... let’s look at the top ten countries in terms of population size right off the bat. The list is as follows:

• China
• India
• United States
• Indonesia
• Brazil
• Pakistan
• Nigeria
• Bangladesh
• Russia
• Mexico

We’ve already talked about how China may massage their numbers in that article but look at some of the other nations on that list and ask yourself this question - just exactly how good is the criminal justice system in some of those other countries. How safe are the citizens in India, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Mexico?

We’re not even including places like Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Sudan or a host of other nations where there is no criminal justice system or penal system to speak of. If you’re a victim of a crime, you’re just shit out of luck.

The world’s safest countries are shown below:

Surprisingly, we don’t even make it onto the list of the fifty safest countries to visit!

Do you want to travel, but you’re afraid of putting yourself in harm’s way if you do?

Traveling the world, especially solo, is super rewarding but it can also be pretty intimidating, not to mention, your friends and family might be worried and trying to talk you out of it.

To make it easier to pick a stress-free spot, here’s a list of the 50 safest countries in the world. The list was compiled with information by independent think tank, Vision of Humanity, based on 23 different factors including political stability, violent crime, homicide, and many other measures of safety and security. The lower the score on this list, the more peaceful the nation.

See, the thing is there are a lot of places in the world where you’re just taking risks and there isn’t the kind of rule of law that there is here in the US. It means that when people trot out that figure of 5/25 it’s not taking into account a host of other factors to accurately portray the issue.

We are a hodgepodge nation, unlike any other nation on the planet in the sense that there is no single dominant ethnic group, our society is an amalgam of different sensibilities and attitudes and considering that things work a lot better than people give them credit for.

And again, while it has gotten better, safer in my lifetime, (maybe because they are putting more people in the clink) there is still a considerable amount of crime in our nation.

Let‘s face facts though, the 5% population - 25% prison population is just trying to make it seem like we live in a totally repressive culture and that’s not the case.