FYI -
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2008/04/usa-is-fundamentally-uncivilized.html
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2008/03/meet-american-gulag.html
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2007/09/ahmadinejad-us-big-prison.html
I won't even go into the issues of torture, extraordinary renditions, Guantanamo, Bagram, secret CIA jails worldwide, clearly racist laws, clearly racist sentencing practices, ICE raids, police brutality, deportations, etc. etc. etc.
But the readers who actually live in the USA are more than welcome to add their own anecdotes and observations (as always, please feel free to post anonymously).
The Saker
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12 comments:
Thanks for "reposting" these articles, Saker, I hadn't read them (in fact, I began following your blog during the South Ossetian war). The picture of the court, law and prison systems in the US is much worse than I thought. I knew that the US has the biggest "jail population" in the world, but I didn't know the courts and laws were so biased, the prisons overcrownded and so violent. In fact, the picture is not so different from Latin America, where poor and dark skinned people are the also great majority in jails. In some aspects the US is even worse: at least in Brazil or Argentina people can't be arrested for possessing illegal drugs for personal use (of course, the amount considered for "personal use" is quite small, but anyway it is better than US' laws), so this decreases the imprisonment of non-violent offenders.
@Carlo: of course, not all is that bleak in the USA either. There are some rather decent cops here, most don't take bribes, and your chances of getting beat up are not very high if you are white. More relevantly, there are plenty of horror stories from other developed countries which prove that if the US legal and prison is hell, the others are far from being heaven.
But quantitative differences do eventually yield qualitative differences. For example, prison rape is THE issue in the USA and it is mostly a NON issue in any European jail. I have found that US cops are more polite than most European cops, though being white and clearly not destitute person myself, I only see that from my priviledged sitation. I also know of stories of how local coppers let their dogs mawl a white guy for "resisting arrest" which, translated from cop-speak, means protesting his arrest. They also just love to use Tasers aroun here. Think of it, a portable "picana electrica" - what a wet dream for some Cabo Primero Anastaio Lopez from the Policia de la Provincia de Buenos Aires... LOL!
Basically, being white with some money and obeying the law is ok. Being white with plenty of money means you are practically above the law unless you are really stupid. Being black means avoiding *any* contacts with the law at any cost. That is why, if I remember correctly, 1/3 of all Black adults in the USA are either in jail, on parole or on probation...
...For which one can, of coure, blame the 'niggers' or the System. I choose the latter.
VS
Hear hear, VS!
A.
There is so much that could be said here.
An example. There is a new website for instance for the medical neglect, corruption etc in Nevada: makethewallstransparent.org. These are all true stories, no one would think up such medical neglect. This is one of the many many websites dedicated to getting human rights and justice for people in prisons in the US. The topic is often seen as unpopular though, because “these people are bad” and it is apparently not good/weak/leftist or uncool or so to also want human rights for those incarcerated, regardless of their crimes.
Having run a supportgroup for a few years for a foreign (European) national incarcerated now exactly 24 years in Michigan, I can testify he has been subjected to isolation, medical neglect, etc. whilst not having done anythign violent. He has a wrongful conviction claim, and I could explain in a book how just one person was crushed by the law.
Another example, what for instance African Americans in Wisconsin in the supermax have to endure, like the racist remarks on a daily basis, among other human right abuses, with no end in sight for any correction/redemption/healing/growth/forgiveness, is only one of many examples of abuse of power, needlessly long sentences, etc.
Thanks VS.
Hey Saker.
My experiences at a "safety checkpoint" here in Daley land
http://americangoy.blogspot.com/2009/02/you-have-no-rights-citizen.html
@American Goy: thanks a lot for the link to your stories. I am quite delighted that you posted this as your experience at the checkpoint is super-typical of stuff which every person living in the USA knows very well: coppers can do *anything* to you. If not, you are 'resisting arrest', 'creating a disturbance' or otherwise engaging in 'disorderly conduct'. You can get beat up, Tasered, thrown to the grown with a boot on your neck, etc.
They can also stick you in the single worst and most dangerous kind of detention facility in the USA: a county jail. Sure, you will eventually post bail, but by then....
Of course, if you are abjectly submissive and White, you might be ok. After all, the American decocracy is the best democracy money can buy...
I am one of the few people who can offer a comparison based on experience. I was in prison in both Denmark and Germany, back in the day. Since then, I've been a counselor in a halfway house for parolees, helped to start a meditation program for inmates in U.S. Prisons, and have visited a number of them.
I can tell you unequivocally that American prisons are far worse than anything in Europe, but for reasons too varied and complex to go into in a blog comment, they are probably the worst in the world.
Reagan's former Treasury Secretary, Paul Craig Roberts, has written extensively about the abuses of the criminal justice system and the collapse of rule of law in his book "The Tyranny of Good Inentions".
If you do some googling you can even find a few columns about this matter as well. Here is one such column:
http://www.creators.com/opinion/paul-craig-roberts/criminals-with-badges-how-the-police-create-crimes.html
-AA
Sorry, the link didn't post. Google for "Criminals With Badges -- How the Police Create Crimes" + Paul Craig Roberts:
Take heed, ye red-blooded American males. The police are operating a new sting designed to destroy your life.
The police are planting attractive women half-naked in parks. They entice passing males, engage them in conversation, lay back, spread their legs and rest their feet on the men's shoulders.
After being as friendly and suggestive as possible, they ask to see your penis.
Don't show it to them. You are being filmed by police. If you show your penis, you will be arrested as a pervert.
Only American police, judges and juries could think that responding to a seductress's invitation is proof of perversion. But, hey, you live in America, where Christians believe that killing as many Muslims as possible for Israel is God's work. Don't expect a dumb Amerikan jury, or a self-righteous Republican judge, or a mindless law professor to understand entrapment.
No, this is not a joke. It is actually happening. Last May in Berliner Park in Columbus, Ohio, Robin Garrison, a 42-year-old firefighter, was lured into arrest by a half-naked woman under a tree.
In reporting the story, the idiot — possibly some male-hating feminist — who wrote the headline for ABC News describes the above: "Topless Woman Lured Perverts in Police Sting."
Get that, red-blooded American males? You are a pervert if you show your penis to a woman who is seducing you.
The reporter, Marcus Baram, is not indignant about the sting. Neither is Gabriel Chin, a University of Arizona law professor who says, "It's not entrapment to give somebody an opportunity to commit a crime."
It was Anglo-Saxons who made laws against entrapment. Thanks to law professors like Chin, gullible reporters and jurors, and corrupt police, prosecutors and judges, Americans no longer have the protection of law. In the Orwellian world in which we now live, a male who succumbs to female seduction is a pervert.
The American police have never prevented crimes.
In olden days, the police solved crimes by finding the guilty party. No more. In our time, the police create crimes. And that is why the U.S. prison population is twice the size of China's, an authoritarian country with a population four to five times larger than America's.
And not only in Columbus are crimes created by police. The corrupt New York Police Department ensnared 300 innocents during 2007 via "Operation Lucky Bag." Police place iPods, cell phones, wallets and shopping bags containing items in New York subway stations. The items appear to be dropped, lost or abandoned. Anyone who picks up one of the planted items is arrested for "subway grand larceny."
This particular police atrocity is in conflict with New York law, which allows someone who finds property 10 days to turn it in to the police or find the owner.
The corrupt NYPD says that the property left as bait has not been abandoned, but is the property actively left by an officer who is still in the vicinity.
There you have it. The American police — "support your local Gestapo" — spend their time engineering false crimes and not investigating real crimes. Americans are more at risk from the police than they are from criminals.
On Dec. 29, I received yet another email from a law-abiding American family harassed by police. The family refused to sell a $75,000 piece of property to a deputy sheriff for $4,000. Farm operations were obstructed. The mother was stopped every time she went out in the car. The son was framed and sent to prison.
Never make the mistake of calling the police, and never get stopped by a traffic cop. You run the risk that he will drop a bag of drugs into you car and arrest you on a drug offense. Most police charges are false charges. Americans need to wake up to this fact, or the American prison population will outstrip the rest of the world combined.
To find out more about Paul Craig Roberts, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
@Rojelio: first, thanks for your testimony. I immensely appreciate it. Then,
Could you please email me vineyardsaker@gmail.com and send me your email address.
Thanks a lot!
The Saker
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