If you exclude crimes which are lesser or are not offenses in other countries we'd have a far more comparative level of imprisonment. Additionally China has a higher fraction in prison, if you include 're-education camps' as prisons. I find it interesting that the three most powerful nations have the highest prison populations....
On the other hand, since most crime here is commited by criminals on other criminals, I can't say that you could call all of our prisoners 'oppressed'. As far as I know the only throught crimes here in the US are pornographic pedophilia, telling the President what you really think of him, looking at female co-workers the wrong way, and disliking the publicly protected ethnic groups.
mark@unicorn.com wrote:
> Billy Brown [bbrown@conemsco.com] wrote:
> >Modern America is less oppressed than the rest of the world, but it still
> >offers its citizens rather limited freedom.
>
> Uh, last I checked, America imprisoned a larger fraction of its population
> than any country other than Russia; that sounds a lot like oppression to
> me. There are various areas where America does beat the rest of the world
> in terms of freedom, but you can find plenty of exceptions.
>
> Mark