The US justice system is possibly the most cruel justice system in the West, and by quite a margin, too. It is one of a few aspects in which the US is far closer to today's developing and third world countries than to the Western average. Also over many decades many organizations have called out the conditions in parts of the US justice system as torture(-like).
Yeah, the "few aspects" like the prison system, healthcare, inequality, corruption, homelessness rates, freedom of the press, air pollution, crime rates, discrimination, police violence, homicide rates, unemployment benefits, social nets...
Seriously, if you all believe everywhere else in the world is so much better, why stay?
For context, I'm married to a person from a real developing country, as it's actually defined. I'm sending multiple family members to school there so they can get out.
Every single person in her family has done everything they can to get out. Every single person I know there has done everything they can to get out. Every single person they know has done everything they can to get out.
Getting out is the primary motivator for people in developing countries. Whining about the country being unfair is something that perhaps privileged children who know nothing about "developing countries" do -- other people get out.
Largely because people have roots here and it's a pain to move. What, you're supposed to quit your job, leave your extended family, sell your house and possessions, find a new job and place to live overseas, and potentially even learn an entire new language? Just to be sure you won't be tortured?
(assuming you can even find a place to take you - things are easier here for this crowd, tech skills are in-demand and usually open doors, but if you are highly skilled in working a register at K-Mart you're not going to find many countries open to you when you go to immigrate somewhere else.)
For a lot of people it's just easier to take the chance that you won't be one of the people who falls into the gears of justice. I won't even say "don't commit a crime" because (a) committing a crime is not even necessarily a requirement to end up in prison given how bad our judicial system is particularly surrounding plea deals/etc. Lots of innocent people end up in jail. And (b) virtually everyone regularly does things that are, by a strict enforcement of the US legal code, punishable by prison sentences. "3 felonies a day" is perhaps an exaggeration, but 3 felonies a month or a year is still a lot of potential legal exposure. The system relies heavily on prosecutorial discretion, which falls apart when you have prosecutors who are elected on the basis of high conviction rates instead of doing what is just.
To put it simply: 1% chance of being tortured, vs having to uproot your whole life. A lot of people will choose the 1% chance of being tortured.
It's not a 1% chance. Even if one accepts your definition of torture, people who aren't criminals are very rarely caught up in the system at all. So it's far less than 1% as long as you're simply not a criminal.
If the US were really so bad, people would leave. The people who do leave typically leave for tax purposes opposite to your belief.
I've had US police pull guns on me several times, thrown to the ground have been arrested and jailed overnight, despite not having committed a crime on any of the occasions. My transgression in each case was to have not learnt the submission rituals that American police expect, the whole stay in your car with you hands on the wheel, the yes sir, yes mam.
One of these times was on a late night Santa Cruz to SF drive, my friend and I got too tired to drive and slept on the beach near McNee Ranch state park, in the middle of being arrested, with five guns drawn, one officer said - this is verbatim 'That's a north face jacket, I don't think this guy is homeless. Are you Homeless?' and just like that I was restored to full white privileges and the arrest was off.
I don't think changing law enforcement is easy, I believe law enforcement reflects the power relationships of society - you won't change law enforcement with out changing the society in which it exists.
I love California, it broke my heart to leave, I'll never really know if I made the right decision, and I'm pretty sure if I didn't have four kids I'd be back there.
>My transgression in each case was to have not learnt the submission rituals that American police expect
Either you are a slow learner, or you make a point to be a smartass with cops.
Do you think it's specific to American cops? Maybe try that with Algerian or Brazilian cops and see how things turn out for you.
You use the phrase, “smart arse with cops”
My take is that not having been raised in the US, I treated them respectfully, but without subservience, and expected mutual respect. In Eastern Europe I’m fine, I accept that i’ve chosen to travel through a broken kleptocracy, and that the cops are gangsters. I’m not willing to accept the same in a democracy, I don’t pretend that any democracy meets the standards we would like them to, but I remain committed to holding ground on the advances we have made and hoping for more with each generation
This feels like conversation that could get personal and nasty quick. I don’t want that to happen, I get your point, if a problem is avoidable and you don’t avoid it, you’ve got to question why.
And do I really fail to submit out of democratic integrity or am I just stubborn? Honestly I don’t know.
Also I want to tell you about my friend, who when instructed to address Detroit police as ‘sir’ replied ‘I struggle to believe her majesty has granted you a knighthood’
He’s stubborn - he’s also ridiculously smart and charismatic, enough to talk his way out of a beatdown most of the time
Years ago while making a regular six mile hike home from a low paying job I was regularly harassed by law enforcement who would stop me and hold me for no reason while "running my ID"
I was asked if a bag of teriyaki beef jerky in its original packaging, the edge of which was sticking out of my pocket was drugs.
Eventually I was arrested for saying fuck off while walking away. I was charged, appealed eventually rejected because half of America does not actually have any rights at all unless you have thousands of dollars and if you need that money to buy medicine or pay rent you are fucked.
Then there is the time I was almost arrested by virtue of helping a black man move a couch from his own home because burglers always leave the electronics and jewelry and take the giant furniture.
I'd keep going but the other abuses are more personal.
Your perspective is based on being well off and white.
Around 5% of the US population go to jail at least once in their life. And 0.69% are currently jailed (0.075% in Germany).
Since it is harder to _simply not be a criminal_ and prisons there are proven not to fulfill their role,
maybe OP simply wishes that this aspect of the country would improve. I don't think he/she was whining, or even saying that everything in the country terrible.
Mobility is really restricted to the top half of people. Yeah, it's not so bad as to cause mass refugee exodus, but that's a very low bar to aim for. We can and should do better.
As someone who did (US citizen now resident in the UK), it's a very difficult and expensive process. Most countries require you to have a visa sponsorship which basically means you are highly skilled enough that a company there is willing to pay a lot of fees and demonstrate to the government that they tried but couldn't find a local with your skillset. Once you've got that, it's also a lot of money on your part to get a visa, pay immigration lawyers, accountants, etc. You need money for that, a good chunk of cash up front for an apartment (first, last, security deposit, brokers fees, we had to add in a few months of rent up front because we didn't have a credit score in the UK), and a million other things. All made way more complicated because you probably don't have a bank account in the country, so everything is happening via international wire transfers.
It also happens that I don't have children or family members that need me to care for them, etc. It would get significantly harder if I had to deal with that (though I did move a cat internationally, which was not trivial).
The irony of course is that having the privilege for all that (cash reserves, highly employable skillset, etc) means that most of the problems in the US don't actually affect you as much as others. The people who are getting screwed the worst by the terrible systems in the US are in no position to extract themselves.
I have never understood this viewpoint of, "If you find fault with country X, then leave!" Sometimes it's applied to companies, tools, etc., too: "If you find fault with Y, then stop using it!"
Can you explain this to me? It seems like an extreme way to live that would preclude anyone from living anywhere that's not perfect or using anything that's not perfect. (And nothing is perfect.)
Why not just address the criticisms individually, rather than arbitrarily bundling them into a person's decision on where to live and what to use?
All of your family is there. All your friends are there. All that you own is there. All that you've ever known is there. You may not know any other language than your native one.
You: "Why don't you just move?"
This really sounds like saying "Cheer up!" to a person suffering from depression.
No, it doesn't. I know people from developing countries. I'm married to one. Universally, every single one of them wants to get the fuck out, and they do everything in their power to get out.
That's reality in a developing country.
The US is not in any way like a developing country. Comparing it to one is an act of such entitled privileged whining it's absurd.
> No, it doesn't. I know people from developing countries. I'm married to one. Universally, every single one of them wants to get the fuck out, and they do everything in their power to get out.
> That's reality in a developing country.
> The US is not in any way like a developing country. Comparing it to one is an act of such entitled privileged whining it's absurd.
I think you just argued against your own point?
1) You're saying that people from developing countries are desperate to get out. (I have no issue with this claim.)
2) Then you say: the US is not like a developing country.
The post of yours that I responded to effectively says to US citizens "why don't you just move?".
I'll note that: Point 2 (as stated by you!) means that the entirety of point 1 is completely irrelevant if you want to argue against what I said.
I didn't say that it was a developing country, I listed, as the parent commenter said, "aspects in which the US is far closer to today's developing and third world countries than to the Western average".
> Comparing it to one is an act of such entitled privileged whining it's absurd.
But apart from the holier than though putdowns, are the comparisons valid?
Because you’d make a much better comment chain with “the comparisons are invalid because XYZ” than “you’re entitled and whiny and I know people who suffer more”
The US is a big place. Not all of it is paradise. I've heard foreign exchange students from countries like Russia, placed in rural communities like Wyoming or Nebraska, describe the conditions back home as better than where they are placed in the US. I've read books describing the Chicago projects at the height of their badness and then visiting some of the poorest cities in Latin America and seeing parallels.
The US is rich, sure, but that wealth is very heavily concentrated along coastal and border states. Saying the US is "nothing" like a developing country would be a false statement as it doesn't take into account the sheer contrast of livelihoods that we have here.
I live in New Zealand with family in the UK. I have spent the last 10 years flying the other way around the planet instead of via LA because the airports are worse than places like Malaysia.
I can't speak to living in the USA but I have lived in Milawe and Fiji, and honestly being poor is definitely bad but some of the stuff happening in the US is a whole other kind of dystopian terrifying.
Is LAX really that bad? I haven't been there in years, but this seems a bit egregious. What terrifies you? The long lines at the bathroom? The food court selection? The lack of charging ports?
How about having to check out your luggage, go through security, and check it back in, even when you are just transiting on the way to Europe.
Fly through a big Asian hub and you have none of that BS, modern clean efficient airports with working toilets that can actually flush and better food.
What really put us off was arriving after a long haul to a queue that filled the immigration hall, then proceeding to wait for two hours while the three desks (out of about 12) tried to process about three flights worth of people. That and the shoes thing, most other places don't have that.
It all may have changed, but until I hear otherwise (or that the TSA have decided to calm down) I'm happy with my choice.
Edit: As the other comment mentioned, this was also all just for a flight transfer.
Somewhere around the twin cities a guy from the TSA is wearing my boots. Try buying shoes at 06:30 in the morning... Last time I ever flew to/through the USA.
The experience of entering the US is pretty embarrassing compared to most modern countries. From what I've seen, it's significantly more ridiculous for non-citizens.
In most of Europe, one scans their passport, has their photo taken, and may need to tell a border guard why they're visiting. It takes less than five minutes, even for the former Soviet Union country I visited earlier this year.
If one is traveling to the US from Dublin, there's a sort of franchise of the USA wing of the airport that's quarantined off from everything else, where one has to go through another slow baggage inspection/body scan, even though the Irish Airport staff have already conducted identical inspection/scanning on every passenger there. Then there's a ~1-hour line (looked about twice as long for non-citizens) to wait to be grilled by customs and immigration. Total overhead for me was ~3 hours once I got to the airport there.
When flying in to Seatac, the CBP staff (the first representatives of the US that one talks to, in order to discuss anything being brought along) are all super-muscular giants dressed in full body armour, for maximum intimidation.
As A US citizen, it's embarrassing that our country treats visitors this way. I wouldn't visit if I were from outside the country either, which is almost certainly one of the goals - discourage foreigners from visiting, and discourage citizens from seeing what it's like anywhere else.
Airports and customs are the face of a nation to most of the travelers that visit, the first point of contact and as such they leave a lasting impression. Think of them as ambassadors. If that first experience is a bad one that will reflect on what people think about the rest of the country.
Well, not quite. I also spent some time in LA on a different trip. It was a while ago (so not an adult perspective) but mostly I remember walking through carparks and hundreds of channels with nothing to watch. Seattle was a bit nicer as a place.
I would like to go back some time, just not right now.
Because I’m able to survive just fine in America, and I was born here and I am committed to doing my best to help.
American is a combination of a first world country and a third world country under one government. Which one you are born into is a roll of the dice. People travel between the two, but one of them is not shrinking as fast as it should.
The fact that I can point at that doesn’t make me want to move to Sweden, it makes me want to work harder to take care of my neighbors and to change our political climate.
>Seriously, if you all believe everywhere else in the world is so much better, why stay?
Right, because should an American decide that they like country X more, they can just move to country X, which is waiting for them with open arms.
Like, anyone could be Swedish, right?
Immigration is an easy-peasy thing; who can possibly find it difficult to get a job overseas, learn a language, leave family and friends behind, get an entire new social and support network, lose a ton of money and/or most of your possessions in an overseas move (re-purchasing is often cheaper, but costs a ton either way), jump through a thousand bureaucratic hoops, all with no guarantee of actually having long-term prospects in the country paper-wise.
That's, of course, assuming that no American has crippling debt that would effectively prevent them from going somewhere where people can comfortably live on a smaller salary (since their education and healthcare are free).
No sirree, not a problem at all. Love it or leave it, and when you do, don't come back, just get another citizenship somewhere. Somehow. Should be easy, right?
Also, nobody in their right mind would think to criticize some aspects of a country (healthcare, justice system, etc), while enjoying some others (opportunities as a software developer) that make it worth it to be here. Not even immigrants.
Tell you what, even in 90-s Ukraine, one wouldn't think much about calling an ambulance if someone was real sick. And I wasn't afraid of the cops there. They were corrupt, but predictable; worst case, you have to bribe them. Police shooting unarmed civilians was unheard of. I don't think I've even seen a gun before I moved to the US.
People from actual developing countries leave all the time. They put in the effort to learn the language, they do what they have to do. They don't have any significant amount of possessions -- that's one of the hallmarks of a real developing country.
You're speaking from a position of such great privilege that you don't even have a frame of reference to accurately talk about a developing country. They're leaving because they would rather make 500 dollars a month working 20 hours a day at three jobs in Dubai than make 2-5 dollars a month working 20 hours a day at subsistence farming or worse, and they're often doing it so they can support those back home who don't have the skills to find sponsorship to work abroad.
They learn a skill that will let them leave, or they find an agency that is hiring people to work abroad. I know plenty of people who have left their country to find jobs elsewhere -- many of them in the US, many in Japan. Any good nurse from southeast Asia who wants a job can usually get sponsored to come to the US -- there are other professions as well, some in the US and some elsewhere.
Dude. I come from Ukraine, it is literally a developing country[1][2], look up the meaning of the word. It does not mean "shithole". The list includes Turkey and Brazil, for that matter.
And sure, the conditions you describe are unimaginable there. But there's more to the world than the Glorious USA and subsistence farming at $5/month.
You are setting the bar waaaaaay too low. There are many shades out there. There are plenty of countries where the opportunities are much more scarce than in the US, but which nevertheless got a lot of things right that the US got wrong.
And you can make your own "real developing country" definition, just don't expect others to know it. Probably for the best to just name the country you have in mind.
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means[1]. Maybe that's why a lot of people are confused about what you are trying to say.
Perhaps you mean "least developed countries"[2]? That's beside the point, however.
The point is, making up definitions and using the equivalent of "love it or leave it" when it comes to talking about the US won't get you far in terms of getting any point across.
I do not care one whit what Wikipedia has to say about anything. It's not a useful source of information.
And I didn't say "love it or leave it", I asked a question. People who hate where they are, complain about it incessantly, compare it to things they've never experienced in order to denigrate it absurdly, cons the fuck out of me with why they stay.
If your car gets a flat every other day, the driver's seat is stuck in the reclined position, it's constantly trying to steer you off the road, and the heater doesn't work, then maybe it's time to give up on fixing it and buy a new car.
It's pushing the analogy, but there are a finite amount of car materials in the world, and at some point you will have to start to recycle even the rusted out junkers if you want to drive. People fixing their country is something that's going to have to start happening eventually.
Cars are already made of recycled materials, especially steel and aluminum. But metals in old cars are melted down in foundries and reconstituted to the proper alloys before being used in new cars; they're just used-as is.
To go back to this analogy, that's basically like completely eliminating the government and creating an all-new one from a blank slate. I don't think you were thinking of doing anything that extreme.
And historically speaking, the only time this happens is usually after a major war when a country loses and becomes occupied by another power (Germany & Japan, WWII), or after a bloody revolution (Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, French Revolution in France). #1 is pretty much impossible here, and #2 is not something I want to be around to witness. The most likely outcome is something much more like #3: the fall of Rome, but on a much shorter timescale. That isn't something I want to witness either.
I'd rather work on making my home country better—especially since I have the means to not be personally affected by so many of the injustices that can make it shitty for others.
Because whatever other faults the US has, there is still a high degree of free speech protection here. And any citizen of America is still free to promote their thoughts of what would make our nation a better union. If they desire, through criticism of what makes us an imperfect union.
Some people might even consider that act patriotic or a duty of a citizen to do so.
The US respects the rights people have, and the US gives tremendous opportunity. Is it perfect? Of course not. Are there issues that need to be addressed? Of course there are.
But to compare the US to a developing country is simply profoundly ignorant and a display of such privilege that it shows one simply can't even fathom what a developing country actually is.
I've been there. I've been all over the US, I've volunteered in homeless shelters in the US, I've travelled extensively in southeast Asia. The homeless in the US would be considered extravagantly wealthy in many places in southeast Asia. Southwest Asia too, I've been deployed there more than once.
The US is not a developing country or anything near it. We're the premiere first world country, and we provide opportunity beyond the wildest dreams many people worldwide can ever imagine. That's why the people in real developing countries generally want to come here.
> The US justice system is possibly the most cruel justice system in the West, and by quite a margin, too.
Many of the world's most dangerous countries and most brutal justice systems are in Latin America. The US looks bad from a northern European perspective, but it's far from the worst in the West.
Off-hand I wouldn't consider Latin America in general a part of the West, not in the same way the US or Europe are. Not-so-off-hand it seems like whether Latin America is part of the Western world or something else, that "just happens" to be strongly influenced by it, is pretty open for debate.
That's not what s/he said. The quote is "most cruel justice system in the West, and by quite a margin, too. It is one of a few aspects in which the US is far closer to today's developing and third world countries than to the Western average."
So it says that it is the worst in the west (a term that usually does not include south/central america, even though they are west on a map), and that it is closer to a third world country than many in the west.
From my casual reading that seems pretty much on point.
The justice system does not just mean the prison system, it encompasses laws, police, courts, correctional facilities, some portions of mental health treatment.
If we are bringing up the freedoms enjoyed by citizens in different countries I'd also point out that how the constitution is interpreted seems pretty arbitrary over time depending on who is in the supreme court and what the political climate is. As an example I'm not even sure how solitary confinement can not be considered a "cruel and unusual punishment" under the eighth amendment. I don't get how NSA data collection is not a impacting the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" of Fourth Amendment. The second amendment seems pretty cut-and-dry in the text that any American should be allowed to have a rocket launcher and that background checks are illegal. I'd hate for that to come true, but if you are following the principle that the constitution supersedes all lower law then it seems logical.
Most western democracies seem to have similar freedoms and similar guarantees that the government will follow similarly given that they are also enshrined in law.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but when I hear americans talk about their freedoms they seem to talk in absolutes, but in practice it's no more free or secure than similar freedoms given by laws in many other western countries.
Amendment 1: Why is "In God We Trust" on our money?
Amendment 3: The only time it ever was litigated (in Engblom v. Carey) the government won because a bureaucrat cannot be faulted for not knowing such an obscure law.
Amendment 4: Have you seen what the NSA is doing? Also "unreasonable search and seizure" is, under the doctrine of civil forfeiture, perfectly permissible as long as it is your assets being sued and not you.
Amendment 6: Our out of control plea bargaining system makes a joke out of "fair trial".
Amendment 7: The point of a jury trial is that the jury can choose not to enforce a bad law. The legal system misinforms jurors about this to keep jury trial from being meaningful.
Amendment 8: The overuse of solitary confinement, recognized the world over as a form of torture, certainly qualifies as "cruel and unusual punishment". I don't see that the USA has kept the spirit of this one!
Amendment 10: I'm guessing that you are not familiar with the massive growth of power of the government due to the systemic misinterpretation of the Commerce Clause starting in the 1930s. But the ability of the federal government to regulate local workplaces was not intended by anyone.
It is easy to wave a phrase like "our Constitutionally protected rights" around and believe that things are OK. But if you actually pay attention, you'll find that that Constitution has been a lot less protection than most Americans believe it has.
> Amendment 7: The point of a jury trial is that the jury can choose not to enforce a bad law. The legal system misinforms jurors about this to keep jury trial from being meaningful.
I lean in favor of the practice of jury nullification, but I can't see how you can make the argument that juries exist expressly to judge good vs bad laws.
I say it because the historical debate on the 7th amendment centered on jury nullification. People from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Jefferson cited the fact that juries could refuse to convict under bad laws as a final defense against unjust government.
You're straining pretty hard for several of these examples, and/or hitting far wide of the mark.
Relative to religious oppression in numerous countries (Uighurs in China, current news, any apostasy (alternate religions, atheism) in several countries, religiously-linked laws again in numerous jurisdictions), a phrase on currency, whilst strictly clearly in conflict with the amendment, is fairly low stakes. The de facto religious tests for officeholders in much of the US would be a better example.
Amendment 3 is tested so infrequently largely on account that the practices it defends against simply are not practiced except by very remote, very rare parallels. (There was a more recent case in Nevada several years ago, though ultimately the principle wasn't tested.)
I'd disagree on the 10th / commerce clause in that the effects of commerce are highly externalised. There's little way to reconcile the conflict here.
I'd be more willing to go with your 4th, 6th, 7th, and 8th examples, though even in the case of the 8th, what's now considered "cruel and unusual" differs widely from what was seen as such in the 1780s.
More generally, circumstances have changed (and judicial interpretation is so conservative) that many of the concerns of the late 18th century translate poorly to the early 21st.
I'd also argue that it's a distributed set of concerns, and capacity to act on account of those, which almost certainly matters more than words on paper (or velum), no matter how revered.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances"
Stop preaching fake constitutionalism. You don't understand what you're talking about. Congress isn't establishing a federal religion by putting "In God We Trust" on money. This edgy internet atheism is getting old.
It's illogical to call a hundred year old concern, one taken up by no less than President Theodore Roosevelt, "Internet".
Let's be clear:
The judicial interpretation is that "In God We Trust" is acceptable only because it is meaningless, despite the fact that it was clearly meaningful to the people who decided to use it, and despite that fact that this supposedly meaningless motto is used in thousands of little ways to mistreat atheists across the country.
It's not as clear-cut as you think. Venezuela was the first country to abolish the death penalty, and it's still gone. The United States still willingly, and gleefully in some cases, executes citizens. For non-citizens, whether you get justice or not is a toss-up.
We have three types of penal systems here in the United States: the actual court system, the unconstitutional-yet-protected-in-court 100-miles-from-the-border Constitution-exemption zone that contains two thirds of the US population (and a large portion of the country's non-citizens),[1-2] and the unconstitutional-yet-barred-from-being-contested-in-court intelligence agencies.[3-5] It's hard to claim that you're doing that much better when you're only so far from Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, or one of the other hundreds of black sites. Worst is when these systems mix, but it happens more and more often now.[6]
[1-2 I realized this is a weird claim, but it's true, and here are two of the outlets furthest from one another politically claiming it's true to give evidence that it is]
Are you seriously confused about what they meant by "worst in the West"?
What do you expect, a pat on the back for not being as bad as those?
Prisons are meant as a way to take people's freedom away for some amount of time, not to sneak in extra corporeal punishment by making them as shitty as possible. What is happening in the US is definitely the latter, and what's worse, many people seem to cheer for it.
> The US justice system is possibly the most cruel justice system in the West ...
This suggests a terminology issue -- we have the same problem here in Australia.
If you assume the system is intended to mete out justice, little of it will make sense.
If you think of it as a legal system, and consider it's working precisely as its benefactors & maintainers want, the arrangement makes much more sense.
