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Comment by throwaway_tech | Hacker News Reader

>How could a country with the largest prison population in the world not fall into at least some definition of authoritarian?

Because the prison population isn't comprised of political prisoners at the will of the federal government.

The vast majority of prisoners are there as a result of violating state level crimes by State prosecutors...having nothing to do with political opinions.

Is there a actual reason you define the country with the largest prison population as necessarily authoritarian?

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How does one define a 'political prisoner'?

For example, if drug laws were pushed to target certain demographics who generally voted a certain way, even though there is two orders of correlation removed, could they still be considered a political prisoner? What about the act where a non-political law (ignoring for the moment how to decide such a label is justified) is passed and enforced, but the enforcement is based on political grounds. In that case, the people in prison are there for breaking the non-political law, but at the same time I think that they should be counted as political prisoners.

>Is there a actual reason you define the country with the largest prison population as necessarily authoritarian?

If we assume that lawbreaking is spread throughout the entire population, the places with higher prisoner populations are places with some combination of more laws and more enforcement of laws. Would those two factors not be justified as ranking a country are more authoritarian than a country which has less of those two factors?

> If we assume that lawbreaking is spread throughout the entire population

i think you are saying how people act is evenly distributed across the population but different areas have different laws about that action.

That is an assumption to further a point, I see no reason for that to be true because different states and suburbs are not homogeneous.

If what your assumption is correct we would have similar crime rates across suburbs within a state.

different suburbs do not have the same crime rates for say armed robbery and in a country different states would have different rates( where the laws are the same) Sometimes the rates are similar because of their lack of statistical significance I don’t know say suicide by toaster in the bath tub

>That is an assumption to further a point, I see no reason for that to be true because different states and suburbs are not homogeneous.

I think it does hold true when you average on the national level and look at a global scale. Not every nation is equal, but there should be many nations which are close enough. The idea is that behavior that is often viewed as criminal in the US isn't significantly higher than at least one other country such as Germany, France, UK, or Netherlands yet the rate of prisoners is.

That different areas within a country might have different crime rates don't matter as what we are concerned with is the national average.

You're wrong, all drug offenders are political prisoners. The violent one were just more willing defend their human rights. How do you square treatment of Sackler vs Guzman?

So prisoners in prison for breaking laws passed and continuously supported by a democratically elected government are now "political prisoners"? That makes every prisoner a political prisoner.

>You're wrong, all drug offenders are political prisoners.

Without any support for that statement, it comes of as...pretty authoritarian. As in you are right and everyone else is wrong.

It also doesn't explain why the country with the most prisons is by definition authoritarian...especially when its supported with an unrelated statement about drug offenders, which is applicable to every other country in the World. It seems you just want to call nations of laws, authoritarian governments, because you know...they have laws.

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

- John Ehrlichman, domestic advisor to President Nixon

https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

>You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

You do know that drug crimes existed pre-Nixon right? Were drug offenders before Nixon not political prisoners too and only after Nixon were drug offenders political prisoners? Since Nixon's administration admitted to using drug laws to break up specific groups from organizing...does that mean only blacks and hippies were political prisoners of the drug laws and all non-blacks and non-hippies just regular criminals or were the political prisoners too even though the Administration had no issue with their politics?

It pains me to no end to find both of you correct on some level. How does one reconsile one with the other in policy moving foreward?

when the US gets hold of Assange, would he be a political prisoner?

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