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Comment by smileysteve | Hacker News Reader

You couldn't have made a better list of recent issues that have been in the news about U.S. prisons if you had tried.

Little and low quality food so that sheriffs could take the money https://www.al.com/opinion/2018/03/49_alabama_sheriffs_flout...

Widespread prison rape https://www.hrw.org/news/2007/12/15/us-federal-statistics-sh...

Prisons under staffed and over crowded https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2017-07-26/...

Widespread use of solitary confinement https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-usa/2019/04/20/solitary-co...

Chemical Castration in at least 8 states https://www.foxnews.com/politics/alabama-passes-bill-requiri...

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I don't understand why some people in US so desperately want to claim the first place in human right violations. Do you believe "Chemical castration for certain child molesters" is comparable to mass injections of huge number of people whose only guilt is having whatsapp on the phone, or not speaking Chinese, or having a beard, or not drinking alcohol? Is low quality food comparable with getting small piece of rice dough the whole day? The way US treated prisoners in Guantanamo is probably comparable to the situation in china, but normal prison are not.

I think it is important to keep the sense of proportion, things can be bad and require urgent action without being the worst. And saying things like: Trump is Hitler or human right violations in US are comparable to China do not help anyone. It just downplays the seriousness of the worst case and make the bad case look good.

to the contrary, it's wild that you keep grasping at straws to make China seem worse than the USA.

China isn't waging war all over the world, so America is the worst case scenario right now.

I replied to this thread to say that the U.S. has little high ground to sanction China on the way it treats its prisoners and population based on incarceration rates.

We aren't the worst for human rights violations. But, it's not acceptable that sexual assault is a legitimate threat to the extent that it's the butt of every prison joke.

We don't have to be the worst to realize we need to fix our problems; but there are clearly people in this thread that are unaware of the issues.

I agree with the parent that the issues you show are not comparable with what is happening in china. Of course US as a country did many wrong things, for instance the treatment of native Indian people in 1800s was directly comparable to what is happening in china now.

But the bad things a country did do not reduce its right of truthfully pointing out bad things other countries are doing.

The news articles I posted are from the last 2 years not 200 years ago. The Alabama chemical castration went on the books a few weeks ago.

And why are you going back 200 years? Internment camps happened in the 40s and forced sterilization + syphylis guided as experiments happened into the 1980s... To free people, citizens even.

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