From: matus (matus@matus1976.com)
Date: Wed Aug 20 2003 - 11:16:31 MDT
BN wrote:
>matus wrote:
>
>> I would genuinely be interested to know how
>> they determined the incarceration rate in other not so open
>societies,
>> like communist ones, or tyranical dictator ones, or oppresive
>> theocracies. E.g. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, North Korea, China, Cuba,
>> Iraq, Iran, etc.
>
>A quick Google finds,
>
>http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0818/p02s01-usju.html
>
>And here's the report with the 5.6 million figure,
>
>http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/piusp01.htm
>
>Oddly enough, while it has all the data from the body of the
>CSM article, it doesn't appear to have anything to say about
>US incarceration rates compared to the rest of the world.
I don't see why that is odd, it's the *US* department of Justice, not
the World Department of justice. They put the information together, its
up to others to compare it. Which is exactly what CS Monitor and the
'home office' does, or at least superficially did. Interestingly...
>
>Google suggests that a common citation for statistics on world
>incarceration rates is the Home Office's World Prison Population List,
>
>http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/r188.pdf
>
>In which the USA takes the top spot.
>
Interesting that on page 4, at the bottom, it says
"No information on; Iraq, Afghanastan, Bhutan, Laos, East Timor, and
North Korea"
And at the end of the paper
"The list has a number of weaknesses. Its lacks information on 17
independent countries"
So, in other words, the US has the highest prison population in the
world, not counting the notoriously worst countries in the world, which
wont bother telling anyone what their prison population is. Not
surprisingly, this is not mentioned once in the CS Monitor article.
In doing some googling trying to find info on where some of the
countries that were listed came from, for example vietnam, I came across
this
http://www.hrw.org/reports/pdfs/G/GENERAL/GENERAL293N.PDF
"But the fact remained that violations of political and civil rights,
for the most part, were most severe in the countries where domestic NGOs
were not allowed to operate: China, Vietnam, Burma, Bhutan, Brunei and
North Korea. Elsewhere, there were areas which were also effectively
closed to domestic and international human rights investigators,
including East Timor and parts of Irian Jaya, Tibet, and Khmer
Rouge-held zones of Cambodia."
So where did the prison population figure for Vietnam come from, did
they just ask the "Peoples Democratic Republic of Vietnam" for a figure,
and were provided the figure of 77 in 100,000! But who cares about
accuracy, as long as it makes the US look bad, right?
Of China, it says
"Wu Shishen, an editor in the domestic news department of Xinhua was
sentenced to life in prison for selling a Hongkong reporter an advance
copy of a speech by Party Secretary Jiang Zemin."
"The Chinese government continued to arrest, detain and torture peaceful
critics and to interfere with freedom of expression, association,
assembly and religion. Releases of dissidents were carefully timed for
political impact, as exemplified by the release days before the Olympic
decision in September of writer and editor Wei Jingsheng after over
fourteen years of solitary confinement."
Etc. etc. The stories go on and on, for vietnam, laos, Burma...
One wonders where they got the figures for Chinese imprisonment as well.
Michael Dickey
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