China and USA Are World Inprisonment Leaders

The Prison Policy Institute has detailed statistics of those held in US Federal, State and local prisons. It seems to include the 14,000 to 18,000 detained immigrants.

The total numbers in US prisons seems to be higher than in any other country. The US prison population is listed at 2.3 million. China is listed at 1.65 million.

There is an estimate that China has 650,000 in Ministry of Public Security detention centers.

There are estimates of 120,000 to 1 million Uyghurs were in internment camps. The 1 million figure is from a UN human rights panel.

Countries Listed by Incarceration Rates and Total Prison Population

Brazil’s imprisonment rate has nearly tripled in the last 20 years. 233,000 were in prison in Brazil in 2000 but is now about 750,000.

China Leads in Executions

China has the most executions with about a thousand per year according to Amnesty International. Iran is number two with about 250 and Saudi Arabia is third with about 150. Iran and Saudi Arabia are ahead of China on per capita executions.

SOURCES – Prison Studies, Wikipedia, Amnesty International, Prison Policy
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

101 thoughts on “China and USA Are World Inprisonment Leaders”

  1. See my definition of insanity. 60 years of draconian laws and mass imprisonment have not had the desired results. I think it is time we try a different tact.

    Based on the test cases where countries have tried decriminalization and treatment, it seems that tact have shown good results.

    Singapore uses a technique call good education and good income. I agree we should try that too.

  2. We have a drug epidemic, a lot of people are turning into addicts. Their family and friends impacted. Your solution is to throw up your hands and say that something was tried way back in England, didn’t work, so we make drugs free and legal. We don’t need studies to know that if you legalize something 100x the addictive power of alcohol, over the long run, you will reap 100 or 1000x the destruction.

    We have other countries like Singapore that, while they may have drug use, have it far more under controlled than us. Their way is working. It is interesting that instead of seeing what they are doing right and maybe learning to do something similar, you just look the other way and throw up your hand and keep saying there is nothing we can do. I guess you can’t wake someone who pretends to sleep.

  3. So the English used to hang petty criminals like pickpockets. During these hangings the pickpockets use to work the crowds. Criminals by nature are risk takers. And the greater the rewards the more likely they will take the risk. The severity of the punishment is not the factor that stops crime. It is the certainty of being caught that stops the crime. The easiest and fastest way of stopping crime is to make it legal.

  4. It does not work in the U.S. currently because we are not willing to kill large number of dealers with death penalties. If, once caught, they face certain death, the number of mules will go down drastically. High prices will only deliver profit if they can do it in volumes.

  5. Very expensive is the same as very profitable. Doesn’t work. Never read of the billions that South American and Mexican drug lords have? Expensive also drives up the crime rate which isn’t good for anyone.

    Better for drugs to be legal and cheap. Think of it like cigarettes and alcohol. Yes, both cause damage to their users but neither causes the same level of criminality that narcotics does.

  6. I agree that once a person becomes an addict, punishment is less effective and treatment is needed. The goal is to make the drugs unavailable, if available, very expensive. This prevents people from trying them in the first place. The death penalty in Asian countries were reserved for having large quantities of drugs. This is to shut off the distribution channel. I think we should consider this. Instead, we are making it more available by legalizing the gateway drug that lead to other harder stuff. BTW, Marijuana today is not the same as it was a few decades ago. The much higher concentration makes it much more potent and more addictive.

  7. I would like to see an actual study on it. Cost of draconian drug laws versus legalization/decriminalization. When I look at the few countries that have tried treatment versus imprisonment like Portugal what I see is a lot less drug deaths and less users. Once a person is an addict the threat of punishment stops working. The only thing that will work is treatment.

    Leaving people alone isn’t what I call pandering. Telling people that life sentences or hanging will stop drug use is what I call pandering especially since it has never worked. Its been like 60 years of draconian drug laws and no change in drug use. Definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.

  8. The crime rate of immigrants is a lot higher.
    The US are all made of immigrants.
    You are the dregs of European society.:)

  9. I did not say East Asian countries don’t have a drug problem, but the magnitude is far smaller compared to the U.S.

    When you do something and not able to achieve your desired result, you have to look at the cost if you don’t do it. If you don’t do it, things could be ten times worse. Just because you can’t save the entire house does not mean you give up fighting fire. Successful enforcement causing the price to go through the roof. That means most people, especially kids that don’t have a job, won’t be able to afford the drug. That is a good thing. If we stop trying, and meth cost nothing, this nation will spiral down a even more destructive path. By the time enough people are hooked, the politicians will pander to the addicts and our nation changed permanently for the worse.

  10. We don’t fund support for mental illness, so a lot of unstable people don’t have safe places to live, and often can’t get or hold jobs to support themselves. This is just asking for trouble.

    Also, we criminalized drugs and lock up people for low-level offenses. Minorities in particular get hit for those – more likely to be arrested, those arrested are more likely to be given bail they can’t afford, more likely to go to trial, more likely to serve time for the same offense. A lot of people are in jail right now because of a couple joints of marijuana.

  11. Immigrant detentions are a drop in the bucket. There are more immigrants in the last year or so just like there were more guns purchased during Obama’s administration – people were worried that their opportunity to immigrate/buy guns would end soon, so anybody who was just thinking about it, is acting on it now before it’s too late.

  12. The large number of immigrant detentions are largely because it is so hard to send people back. Anyone coming here can claim refugee status and make whatever claim they want . . . it is very expensive, difficult and time consuming to to figure out and the burden of proof is on the feds, that is the US taxpayer.

    The simplest way to fix this would be to free these individuals – not only that but give them a free gift: a one way ticket to their country of origin

  13. Definition of insanity is to do the same thing and expect different results. Been doing the same thing from the 70s. It will be 50 years soon. We have it to college try and failed.

    By the way in East Asian countries its a death sentence for supplying drugs and they still have a drug problem. We have draconian sentences since the 80s, made no difference.

    You might not know this but the worse the punishment and the more effective the enforcement the greater the profit. Supply and Demand. The Demand is super great, so if supply is limited the price and the profit goes thru the roof.

    I not willing to sacrifice my money and my freedom to save people from themselves. They are adults let they feel the consequences of their choices.

  14. Has anyone here bothered to realize we aren’t incarcerating enough people? If we were over-arresting criminals then we wouldn’t have any rapes or murders going on at all and yet we are still flooded with rape and murder. If we had a magic machine that was omniscient and could spot all murder and rape attempts and then teleport them immediately to prison I would guess the prison population would expand to at least 5 times what it is now even after releasing all drug criminals. The simple truth is that the U.S. is merely wealthy enough and technically advanced enough to be able to incarcerate more people.

    China uses fear to control its people, everything is a severe penalty and you can’t use the ACLU and scream racism to avoid your fate. People are very polite when they fear the slightest misstep. Anyone who says severe penalties don’t reduce crime haven’t used severe penalties on a broad basis. I am not for this, I am just saying it works and China is the proof.

  15. You also have to take into account that when the stuff becomes legal,

    1. there is an industry lobby to expand the market and keep it going.
    2. Morality changes. Now someone at the dinner table will say to the parent: ” give him a snort, it is OK. What are you some kinds of prude? You might see someone celebrating his promotion with a meth party.

    Alcohol is a prime example, Even as a large number of people are destroyed from alcohol, it is such a big part of our social fabric that we see it as a normal part of being alive. Why introduce something that is 100x more destructive like meth to be part of our normal social fabric?

  16. Since Marijuana leads to many people trying the hard stuff, we should be just as harsh with possession to deter people from taking that first step. The benefit of medical Marijuana is quite dubious for vast majority of folks. I have heard of a few cases of cancer patients having better appetite by taking it. If there is little benefit to society, we should ban it and do our best to make it go away.

  17. That’s it, we throw up our hands and give up. How about not making drugs available? That is what some of the East Asian countries do. In China and Singapore, if you are caught with illegal drugs, you are sentenced to long prison terms. If the amount is bigger (not even that big by American standards), it is automatically death sentence. By that standard, most of the street dealers will be sent to die. Proportionally, there are probably just as many addictive Singapore people as there are Americans. For the vast majority of them, the drug is simply not available to try. You can always point to someone who were able to shake off some drug that they were in, but I will bet that the majority of the ones that tried the hard stuff won’t be able to extricate on their own. If the impact is so awful for so many people, why allow the stuff to be around? ’cause freedom? I say the collective good of society outweighs the individual’s right to possess the stuff. If some had to die to change the mindset, so be it.

  18. It the same for all drugs. Some people have addictive personality and some people don’t. I have a cousin who smoke cigarettes for 30 years. He decided to give it up and just did it. I have another friend who smoke cracked for about 6 months. Didn’t like what it was doing to him and just stopped. And yes, I have had friends and relatives that alcohol and drugs have destroyed. Not going to argue about that. What I will argue about is whether or not making drug illegal works and why I should be paying to so call save people from themselves. Arresting people and sending them to prison mess up their lives permanently and it doesn’t work as a deterrent.

  19. no one in the US gets sent to prison for simple drug possession

    You are probably exaggerating the situation but the overall point stands. A huge % of the people who, on paper, are in jail for possession were originally arrested for a multitude of different crimes, and plea bargained down to possession to save everyone the time and money required to convict on robbery or whatever.

    And everyone who has looked into the situation knows this. They just pretend not to because it makes a good sound bite.

  20. Modern criminals demand the goverment provide them with free food, clothes and medical care while in prison.

    Having to pay a professional caner for 5 minutes work and getting a jar of Tiger balm rubbed into a sore bottom is going to be much cheaper.

  21. But the crime wave of the 70s was thought to result from the significant fall in imprisonment in the 60s and 70s.

    I like the bistable equilibrium idea. I’m not an economist but it corresponds with what I know of system control.

    You can have a stable, low crime state where people trust each other and the general culture is law abiding.
    OR
    You can have a stable, high crime state where people don’t trust each other and the general culture sees criminals as “cool” and the best way to get ahead.

    And the baffling choice to ignore law enforcement for a decade or so in the 1960s USA meant that they flipped to the high crime state, and now it might take decades of hard enforcement to push it back to the low crime state.

    Compare it with the low inflation/high inflation states that resulted from poor decisions in the late 60s, early 70s and required 20+% interest rates for a few years in the early 1980s to push the economy back to the low inflation state.

    (Interest rates needed only a few years of harsh treatment to get under control. Once can speculate that this is because interest rates are something that is much easier to tune up and down compared to law enforcement, and bankers respond to mathematics better than drug addicts.)

    For more detailed treatment, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_Economics

  22. Even those who did not break the law are stuck at mom and dad’s basement for many unproductive years. We have enough idle hands as is.

  23. to take a thing like caning and turn it around as a bargaining tool for more free stuff from the state, that is the American spirit. The audacity of hope.

  24. alcohol is a drug, one that has been legalized for decades. Whatever we are seeing is just the tip of the iceberg for other drugs. Most people, myself included, will have a drink now and then. We can turn it off like a tap and go back to work the next day, most people, if they even try cocaine or meth once, will be hooked and an addict for life. their lives spiral downhill uncontrollably until they pass a few years down the road. Bringing with them destruction all around. Marijuana users, most might do fine, but a significant number will graduate into the harder stuff, which will be the start of the end for them and the destruction that ensue. We are so much a nation of politically correct people that we fail to see this simple connection. I guess no empire live for ever, we have been at the top of the ferris wheel.

  25. I believe a lot, maybe all, of the prison population rise can be traced to minimum setencing requirements put in place in the 80’s and 90’s in response to the crime wave of the 70’s. Longer sentences for all crimes, great and small, leads to more overlap in stays in prison. Also, criminalizing things which are only personally harmful, combined with minimum sentences, means people who might have benefited from medical or psychological help instead get sent to jail.

  26. Mindbreaker, you can blame lead, but in fact your society is built over different values to the European societies. What many Americans call socialism we in Europe call social capital. It is necessary for the rights of single citizens to be respected. In America rights of single person mean about the same as in China or Russia. It is of course packed in more colourful package, but eventually living in those big countries means the same, especially if you are not a wealthy person. Middle class is the weakest in those societies, the poor are vast majority. Everyday examples ? Look at your public police vehicles – they look like modern tanks. Compare it with European police cars. Go to Starbucks in Europe, this is exclusive please to have a sophisticated coffee – compere it too fast food format in US – poor cheap coffee. Examples are obvious and they do not come from lead, believe me.

  27. I see where it didn’t seem to stop two two term Presidents. BTW, I have seen alcohol destroy more people that marijuana will ever do. When I was a teen me and my friends use to go to Delancy Street to buy clothes. We use to see the old alcoholics laid out on the sidewalks.

  28. If I had to guess my guess is that 100 times more people drive and operate equipment under the influence of alcohol and prescription drugs than under marijuana. I don’t want to pay taxes to arrest, prosecute and imprison people for taking drugs. If people want to screw themselves by using drugs then let them.

  29. If people want to kill themselves I don’t want to pay taxes to stop them. I would rather my tax money going to health care, education, and infra-structure.

    On top of that our war on drugs drives the price of addiction so high that drug lords can buy governments. If drugs are legal then my chance of been killed in a shoot out between dealers go down significantly.

  30. Teens who smoke pot often care far less about homework, college, and career, damaging future productivity. While that is not criminal, it is certainly negative.

  31. Could you point at a study otherwise I would have to remain doubtful. I have a problem trying to understand how marijuana would increase the crime rate. It just isn’t that kind of drug.

  32. Assumption, not fact. Cigarette is legal, not everyone smokes. Alcohol is legal, not everyone drinks. I believe if you want to control something make it legal, then regulate it.

    I doubt there will be any increase in drug use. And right now we put a lot of people in prison for using drug and then we ban them from working for the rest of their lives.

    I doubt any of the illegal drugs are more destructive and addictive than cigarette and alcohol.

  33. Not actually true in all states, unless you consider a record of previous possessions “serious”. Repeated possessions will get you time.

  34. Singapore used a professional caner and provided free medical care. Stipulating it includes those two things I’m with you.

  35. We can’t cryogenicly freeze anyone yet…and revive them. And it is not the revival end that is the problem…it is the freezing part. The ice crystals rupture the cells. You might not notice it when you freeze meat, but if you looked at it under a microscope you would see the damage. Try freezing and thawing a watermelon. When those cells rupture and thaw, you just get pink water and a green skin as there is not much that holds the cells together.

    Their families may miss them and any skills they have could be out of date, that may leave them with no way to earn a living. So, no, everyone is not happy.

  36. Does not distinguish the severity of the crime. You don’t generally lock people up for failing to signal, spitting out their gum in the bushes, or putting an AA battery in the trash.
    In Japan kissing in public is a crime. In Virginia, cursing in public is a crime.
    On the other hand, there are 6 European countries where over a quarter of people cheat on their taxes. If that happened in the US, that would result in many millions of people in prison. At least those in the middle class. The rich just get their tax people to cheat for them (assuming the liability) or get loopholes put in they can slip through.

  37. Actually, it costs less in the US to just incarcerate for life rather than all the lawyer stuff associated with a death sentence.

    Sure you could speed it up, but you risk sending innocent people to their deaths. And it does happen. If you look like a thug, have a guilty looking face or have a name that is scary, you can be convicted by idiot juries quite easily: http://www.ncadp.org/pages/innocence
    DNA evidence has freed dozens of people on death row. How many other innocent people have been executed?

    Our whole criminal justice system does not hold up to scrutiny.

    fMRI combined with polygraph is far more accurate, fast and cost effective. Though, you still want to verify that there was a crime forensically as a proper safeguard.

  38. Get a TENS unit! They work wonders on sore muscles. This is the one I bought: https://www.amazon.com/TENS-7000-Digital-Unit-accessories/dp/B00NCRE4GO
    Much better than all that medication stuff…even if it is aspirin.
    And when the battery is used up, buy their brand. I bought a battery at a store and thought the machine was dead. Then I decided to order one of their batteries…worked just fine.
    You wouldn’t think something powered with a 9V battery could do much…it can.

    Bone ligaments and such, it probably can’t do much, but muscle it helps a lot.

    I bought a little heat pad for the other stuff. 10-15 minutes of that in bed before I go to sleep and it makes a difference. Not a cure exactly, but helpful. Not supposed to sleep with a heat pad on because it can burn you, so set an alarm or a timer in the thing has one. The pad can help muscles too. But not as much.

  39. Many scientists equally bright, just never stumble onto something important. There is a bit of lottery involved.
    Some discoveries become something that allows further discoveries others don’t, or only do so after the initial scientist dies when they would not be eligible for the prize.
    Scientists are just looking. They might find something they might not. Look at the wrong part of the sky and you don’t discover pulsars…someone else does.

  40. In the US around 95% of all state and federal criminal cases are plea bargained, and never go to trial. This means before trial the defendant agrees to plead guilty to a lesser charge in return for a reduced sentence. The truth is that no one in the US gets sent to prison for simple drug possession, unless they have a serious criminal record.

  41. If you are ruthless and unchristian, there are a number of such voluntary ways of trimming an “excess population” (should such a thing exist).

    A society with

    • easy access to dangerous drugs
    • cheap and available high performance motorcycles and other similar machines*
    • a culture that celebrates risk taking and self destructive behaviour
    • etc.

    It not only removes a measurable % of the population, but the cull is mostly limited to the rash, self destructive, badly behaved types.
    I can see how this appeals to some.

    *I speak as someone who woke up this morning in pain because I played volleyball yesterday and aggravated the shoulder injuries I keep getting in the 3 separate bike crashes I’ve had over the past half year.

  42. “while many of these recipients are brilliant, others were lucky discoverers. And much of what was done may not have required incredible brilliance.” – come on…

  43. You’re under and overthinking it at the same time. I wish it were that simple. It isn’t a binary abortion or adoption. The “alternative” is often social and other pressures to encourage unready parents to keep children they aren’t prepared to parent, which kids then end up in foster care at age 7 – 29% of which take 3 years or more to be adopted. And fucked up shit happens way too often to these kids in foster care.

  44. I second Mindbreaker’s view. decriminalize drugs will solve one problem, but we are trading that for a much bigger problem down the road. Take a look at the crime numbers from states that made the move for marijuana early to see what is already happening to those states. The problem will be bigger in the future and will be nationwide.

    I think we are too lax on crime of all types, but particularly drug usage.

  45. Mostly it is a problem around pregnant women and kids, but I would recommend bismuth instead. It is dense, nontoxic, and melts at a lower temperature. Or you can use copper, but that requires much more heat.
    Loosing lead in the lake is not good either.

  46. I am not saying that this is a bad thing, but each country must deal with its own issues their own way.

    I still remember that an American kid went to Singapore and spray painted a number of cars. He was caned against a lot of howling from the U.S. politicians and media saying that this is cruel. Maybe it was so, but Singapore has its own rule, when you are in town, you should respect them. By using such draconian measures, Lee Kwan Yew took a bunch of unruly third world people of Chinese, Malay and Indian stock, and made them some of the most law abiding citizens in the world. I feel that China is moving rapidly in that direction, with the help of lots of cameras and effective punishment.

    In the mean time, back in San Francisco, our politicians can’t even solve the simple problem of homeless defecating on the streets. In our culture, everyone wants to be a victim. A victim, however flawed, can do no wrong and are not held accountable by their actions.

  47. When comparing number of jailed, many made the implicit assumption that the different populations have the same crime rate, it is the regime that cause the difference in incarceration rate. That is simply not true. Among the different groups in the U.S., for example, African Americans have a much higher crime rate and multiple X the must violent crimes such as Murder rates compared to the general public.

    I recently took a trip back to China. Had not gone back since 2007. The change in behavior of people was quite remarkable in a short twelve years. People are much more orderly. There is no pick pockets. I left my umbrella at the bank for a couple of hours and it was still sitting at the same place. This would not have happened in 2007. The littering problem, still an issue in 2007 is largely gone. You can walk down the Bund in Shanghai with tons of people and not see anyone littering and the streets much cleaner compared to any major U.S. city.

    Now, China has a different dimension to their incarceration. Anyone who is perceived to oppose the government or wanted to break away from the country will be severely dealt with. That includes the Islamic fanatics in Xinjiang and Falong Gong. Actually, that is not different from the U.S. When a threat to our nation is perceived, we will ignore all the niceties of rule of law to remove the threat. The way Julian Assange was handled. We also did kill a number of U.S. citizens who are Jihadists without trial.

  48. I possess about a hundred pounds of old lead shielding in blocks and five different split molds for fishing weight casting.

  49. The damage that would be caused by legalization would greatly exceed this. Life expectancy would drop at least 10 years, industrial accidents would skyrocket, and productivity would be in the toilet.

  50. Not saying Obama’s regulations worked. Lead smelting moved literally right over the boarder in Mexico, and we are probably getting more lead in the air as a result. We have to ban the sale of replacement lead-acid starter batteries. That is over 70% of all lead use. With the bottom falling out of demand, most of the plants in Mexico will shut down.
    https://www.greatmining.com/lead.html

  51. https://scienceprogress.org/2008/10/a-brief-history-of-lead-regulation/

    There have been a few additions. They tightened up the plumbing lead limits. But now permit manufacturers to say “lead free” when it still has 0.25% lead calculated across the wetted surfaces of a pipe, pipe fitting, plumbing fitting, and fixture and 0.2% lead for solder and flux.

    And Obama stopped giving smelters a pass on full compliance of the Clean Air Act. He also shut down the biggest lead mine.

    Hopefully this list will grow with:

    1. Ban on lead added to AVEGAS (small/classic aircraft fuel).
    2. Ban on new/replacement lead-acid car/truck/motorcycle starter batteries and lead connectors for those batteries.
    3. Ban on lead ammunition
    4. Ban on lead hair dye
    5. Ban on lead in food. We have lead in our food…even baby food: https://www.parents.com/recipes/scoop-on-food/lead-in-baby-food-dont-panic-but-heres-what-you-need-to-know/)
    6. Survey all farm soil in the US and crops for lead. Restrict crops to varieties and species that do not absorb lead or to crops which are not eaten, smoked, or applied topically in soil with lead. Above some limit you just can’t grow. But that is probably very few farms.
    7. Require every batch of processed food to be tested for lead and be lead free or at truly low levels unlikely to cause harm.
    8. Require lead to be kept track of when used by industry, as radiation shielding, or in other applications similar to radioactive substances.
    9. Ban lead in imported products including electronics.
  52. Well, it’s obvious we have people that can never be returned to the general populace, We can’t cure them and it’s cruel to keep them in cage for the rest of their lives.

    We can’t cure them . . . yet. How about if we just have them cryonically frozen so future generations that can fix what is wrong in their heads can thaw them out and do so.

    No more death penalty and everyone is happy.

  53. They still use this additive in aviation fuel (AVEGAS) for smaller aircraft. The government had companies develop alternatives when Obama was in. They are all ready to go. But Trump has paralyzed virtually every governmental agency. So we pay for government and don’t get it.
    Some of these new alternative fuels are better, increasing range. They have been thoroughly tested and are ready to go into production. It just makes costs harder to recoup, and the prices higher by delaying this.
    We have a lot of aircraft in the US, so this is not exactly trivial. 19,622 airports. 25,212,000 flight hours. Most of those hours are small aircraft burning lead because there are a lot more of them.
    https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers/

    Still, I am extremely grateful that we stopped using it in the hundreds of millions of road vehicles.

    Some of that information is dated in that article, as the article is from 2000. It was thought back then that lead caused 5,000 deaths a year due to heart disease. But that number is now known to be 185,000 deaths a year from lead caused ischemic heart disease, and 256,000 premature deaths overall: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180312201739.htm
    That is about half the level caused by smoking: 480,000. For comparison.
    Not much can be done about it either. This is damage already done in those 44 and older due to that earlier exposure.
    DuPont, Exxon & GM are liable, in my opinion. You can’t argue ignorance. Lead was a well known toxin.

  54. Adoption is the alternative.

    He is making a genetic argument. I don’t accept that. And if we are talking lead exposure; just because the mother was exposed to lead as an infant and is now more prone to teen pregnancy, it does not follow that her child will also be exposed to elevated levels of lead.

    In my opinion, you have just 35 days to end a pregnancy before there are clear ethical issues. That may not be convenient, but biology is biology. Brain is working by day 40 and it could be early (hence the buffer).

    Things just move along very quickly.

    It is worse than dubious to go back to the old eugenics stuff…and encourage mothers to snuff out their children because you don’t value some aspect.

    You want to make modifications and improve? Go ahead. I highly doubt we know what genes acctually improve IQ or behavior beyond corecting damaged stuff. Environment just veries too much and has too large of an effect. You would have to sequence millions of people to come close to finding the more subtle genetic effects through all that noise.

  55. Most of the people in jail are for drugs. Legalize or decriminalize drugs. I once served on a grand jury and 95% of the cases we dealt with were buy and bust. That is insane. We waste most of police officers time on it, most of the court’s time on it, most of our prison space on it and a large portion of our state and local taxes on it.

  56. Dunno about MM, but I don’t think ethnicity has much to do with it. Blood type does.

    Organs are more available in the US now due to all the opiod deaths. Apparently the drugs don’t affect liver, kidney, heart and other organs much. I have a brother who needs both a kidney & pancreas so keep up with this stuff.

  57. Only Bezos in your list was born anywhere near the height of the lead, and he was born in Albuquerque which only had 50,000 people at the time which would reduce his exposure.

    Wozniak is very bright. The others?

    Many of the US Nobel Prize winners were born somewhere else. Out of the 243 I found who were born in the US, only 2 were born in the height of the lead exhaust. One was born in Missoula, Montana which had about 29,000 people. Don’t know where the other one was born…and i am not going through the whole dang list again. The Award recipients tend to be above 55 years old, so the people who will win who were born from mid 60’s to late 70’s just are not old enough, so we don’t know who these people are yet and where they were born.

    In any case, the Nobels are often political, and while many of these recipients are brilliant, others were lucky discoverers. And much of what was done may not have required incredible brilliance.

    The largest number of American Nobel Laureates were born in 1918 for some reason.

    Chess is more objective. There is a very effective rating system where people of various countries routinely play each other. Nobel prizes…there is some politics.

  58. Does ethnicity have any correlation with donor compatibility? Just wondering if Micky Mantle got a Chinese liver spare.

  59. Here’s a thought: If you want a smaller prison population, teach people not to commit crimes.

  60. No, China’s got us beat. They strip mine political prisoners for their organs, then sell them to wealthy foreigners. Also, the entire country is under surveillance that is similar to a prison.

  61. Politicised crime and introduction of the profit motive to incarceration is one (note one of) the core issues – decriminalise minor drug possession/use and diversion programs for non- violent crime as alternative to incarceration have worked well in some jurisdictions- but well capitalism baby show me an activity and there will be someone trying to make a profit – dictatorships tend to exile/execute dissidents the US has turned them into a for profit industry/slave economy – China/Russia/Africa/middle east tends to passively execute ie allows sickness/neglect to reduce the population- also its notoriously hard to get accurate numbers from authoritarian regimes – can we get a state by state breakdown ? Most empires in their decline incarcerate in increasing numbers so this fits the US model – assuming the predicted overt ‘republic to empire’ conversion happens by 2024 as predicted the US oligarchy should trend to more economic and political ‘crime’ ie starts with immigrants transitioning to locking up homeless/poor (usually enclave/ghettos) explained as – to make social services more ‘efficient’ – then mix career low level criminals (creating a gang/warlord dynamic) as more people fall out of the middle class this dynamic expands with government corruption poor health care and nutrition until the ‘nobility’ – in this case the oligarchs and super rich loose control Then systematic collapse- then we start off with redrawn maps and government and a much smaller population- again

  62. according to economic theory theUS is economically more efficient at imprisoning people than any other country….therefore China should yield to the US superior imprisioninf skills and export their prisoners As part of a trade deal… lol

  63. That’s the US “service economic” miracle in action….putting people in prison is a great employment and economic stimulus counterbalance for towns in US that lost their factories to chinese factory take over… the government pays People to watch the people who otherwise would have been too busy working in a factory doing stupid things like assembling broom stick or making shoes and have no time to cause trouble…but now find that it’s better to commit a crime because nobody wants them as a productive member of society because they have no skills.. therefore better to exhibit antisocial behavior so that other American can stay gainfully employee watching them do nothing in a prison cell…

  64. Actually this brings up an interesting point… how many people dues China really have… do they really have a billion people or do they keep miss counting all those people with the same name Wong and ping, etc. let’s look in the phone book Wong wong ping, Wong Wong ping, oh 1000 of them… next chatacter… I think they need to tattoo bar codes on Chinese people at birth to make sure…

  65. i think they should report per capita or normalize it like ((prison population / total population) * 10000). For each country… it would be more accurate …. China is Way below US… since they have 4 times US population… maybe they just lock chain them to factory machine and call it work release…

  66. How do you account for all the nobel prizes and the highly inventive intelligent people like Jobs, Zuckerberg, Gates, Bezos, Wozniak, etc… born in America?

  67. China’s police are unarmed, its streets are safe, everyone charged with a crime gets his day in court, incarceration rates are one-fourth of ours and reoffense rates are one-eighth ours.

    There is an estimate that China has 650,000 in Ministry of Public Security detention centers. There is an estimate??? We have 2,000,000 in jail, few of whom received a trial. All of theirs got their day in court.

    There are estimates of 120,000 to 1 million Uyghurs were in internment camps. The 1 million figure is from a UN human rights panel. The 1 million figure does NOT come from a UN human rights panel. It comes from an American agent, Ann Mc Dougall, who has never been to Xinjiang. The World Muslim Council sent inspectors from 12 muslim nations to Xinjiang. They gave the vocational schools thumbs up. You can read their report here: http://www.unz.com/article/uyghurs-political-islam-the-bri/

    China has the most executions with about a thousand per year according to Amnesty International. In China, those facing the death penalty are tried in court. In America we execute 1,100 people every year without trial. That’s a big difference. Justice Department report estimates nearly 2,000 “arrest-related deaths” annually in the US
     https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/12/19/poli-d19.html 

    P.S. Amnesty International is funded by Western governments.

  68. However, China throws political prisoners away in jail. They jail anyone for any reason without trial. Forced confessions etc. Typical dictatorial stuff. The U.S. justice system isn’t perfect, but I’d take my chances here vs. China. Falon Gong members are beaten and have their organs harvested by the Chinese government. Nothing even close to that in the U.S.

  69. Private for-profit prisons. That is a big reason that the incarcerated population has exploded in the past few decades.

    Even Fox News thinks so : This private prison cycle of lobbying, donating money to campaigns, and getting more prisoners with longer sentences in order to squeeze out as many taxpayer dollars as possible, is a perversion of our judicial system. And it doesn’t even take into account the cheap labor many of these American companies receive from prisoners for as little as 17 cents per hour.

    Link: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/the-cold-hard-facts-about-americas-private-prison-system

  70. Blaming the victim is not constructive. I guess you should never take a loan to buy a house…lot of “suckers” lost their homes in the economic crisis.

    Better to have good laws and regulations to prevent this stuff.

  71. You’re never going to believe this… the big DuPont TEL plant was about a mile from my house…. Great. That sucks!

    Wiki:
    “After TEL production at the Bayway Refinery was shut down, Deepwater was the only plant in the Western hemisphere producing TEL up to 1948, when it accounted for the bulk of the Dupont/Deepwater’s production.”

    Just learned this when you brought up leaded gasoline..

    https://www.thenation.com/article/secret-history-lead/

  72. The US had many more cars, vastly more highways that clog up twice a day, abysmal fuel millage, and we used much more of the lead fuel additive because the company that made the crud was American.

    Europeans after WW2 could not afford large guzzling cars, and European governments taxed engine displacement rather than just selling price. Fuel prices were high enough that efficiency was actually relevant to those purchasing cars. American full-sized pickup trucks use more fuel than all the cars put together. Europeans don’t have full-sized pickup trucks. There is also more diesel in Europe. Diesel has never had the lead additive.

    The Soviets did not use the lead additive. That is why they kicked our butts at chess for decades. Now that we have eliminated most of the lead in the air, our players born after lead have been doing great: https://2700chess.com/
    Fischer was born when there was a relative low in leaded fuel use. They only put 25,000 metric tons in the air back then. Mid 1960’s to late 1970’s it was over 150,000 metric tons…some years over 200,000 metric tons. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Lead-(Pb)-legacy-from-vehicle-traffic-in-eight-of-Mielke-Laidlaw/9aa7d152b516b70538b976896cede3179d34b252 (figure 2)

    We also have more exposure to lead from ammunition.

    And they have found this crime pattern in other countries just more muted as you would expect: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/02/lead-and-crime-it-happened-australia-too/

  73. Don’t do that! Do you want to go to timeout? That’s it, go to timeout! I’ll tell you when timeout is over!

  74. It works in Saudi Arabia and China all the time. They are “States”.

    Correct, not in the USA. We are even getting soft down here in Texas. That’s why you sometimes gotta invite the creep into your house before you can, “hold your ground”, if ya know what I mean.

  75. How is it fantasy? Dude is on death row for 15 years before execution or dude is executed after 12 months. Clearly, it would cost less to keep the miserable waste of flesh alive for 12 months instead of 15 years with 3 hots and a cot, a dentist, syrup for his scratchy throat, a library to keep his mind busy, etc..

  76. Looking at the pie graphs suggests only two possibilities in the U.S. One, we really do have a lot of criminal behavior or, two, a lot of people are being falsely convicted by a corrupt system of governments. I suspect both are in play here.

  77. Abortion also plays a big role, it is harder to get an abortion in the US than in most developed countries. It is still a contested issue for some reason.

  78. I cant help but think economics are at play, no money in a world that requires it for existence. Economies that have taxes and no jobs and even less support for the unlucky. I think that incarceration is a profit center,look at its cost born by the tax payers. Maybe a public works program would ease the problem there is a lot to do.

  79. Yup. If a criminal takes non-violent advantage of a sucker (i.e. theft, fraud), then the sucker needs to learn how not to be a sucker.

  80. I CAN show you that the DP reduces taxpayer expense, if carried out within a year of conviction and a single appeal.

    The murders show life is cheap and bluetarded states try their darndest to show the opposite.

  81. No. If that were true then our homicide rate would be comparable to these low incarceration first world countries. Nowhere is homicide legal. But our rate is not comparable. It is 4 or 5 times higher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

    There are places with higher rates mostly in the Americas and Africa. Very low iodine in Africa and a history of tribal warfare are mostly to blame. Though security is low too. Many people can’t afford effective locks and gates. In Latin America it is partly caused by lead and the inability for law enforcement to control organized crime partly due to corruption (police and government)…partly due to very large profits.

    Poverty is a factor in Africa and Latin America too.

  82. Our crime and thus incarceration levels are a result of brain damage from lead exposure in very early life.

    https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/

    https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/

    The lead damage has also made poor parents and role models which affects people today who have less lead exposure. Also, most families can’t afford to live in more modern construction without lead paint. Lead also remains in the soil that was emitted from tailpipes for decades.

    Europe was not hit as hard even though they had the lead additive in their fuel as well. That is mostly because they had more efficient cars. Lactose intolerance in many minority ethnic groups also contributes to lead brain damage, as calcium helps remove lead from the body.

    Processed food may also be an issue. Processed food tends to already have ample salt in it so people are less likely to add iodized salt to their food and likely get lower levels of iodine. Iodine increases IQ during gestation. Eggs, fish, fruit, minerals and B vitamins are important as well. KFC, McDonald’s, macaroni & cheese, frozen pizza and soda just does not cut it.

  83. All consistent with the quick progress away from village governance towards authoritarian mega-governance across the world.

    Do we accept that crime exists and take measures and expend personal resources to hold it at bay as individuals or do we run to Daddy State every time someone raises a hand to another? In the first world: the latter – more and more.

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