Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> It is just one of the things many Europeans just don't get why you think it's acceptable.

I definitely agree with your comment. But for the sake of the discussion, I would like to point out that Europe also has prison problems, but at a way lower scale:

- UK's Belmarsh prison has been criticized extensively and regularly compared to Guantanamo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3714864.stm. As an aside, Julian Assange spent the past 1 year there.

- France and Norway prisons have very high suicide rate: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6066090/. Though no country is even close with the USA. Citations from the article: "We excluded the USA in one analysis (for incarceration rates) because it was an outlier, with an incarceration rate of more than eight times higher than the majority of other countries." and "Rates of prison suicide compared with rates of incarceration - Data are for men and women combined. USA was not included in this analysis because it is an outlier (appendix p 17)."

Neither is good - what exactly are you trying to raise for discussion here though?

The fact that there are issues in European prisons doesn't change the situation in US ones. You also also say no other country is close - which is just an indirect way of affirming the parent post (that Europeans find the American system hard to understand). They're hardly going to agree and understand with the American prison system if their own is equally as bad?

You're creating a dichotomy that doesn't exist. American prisons are terrible. European prisons also have issues. Both are true and are worth being discussed at large.

The discussion was about one of this those systems. Deflecting attention to criticism of other systems during that discussion is not constructive, and comes across as apologetics.

You're right, they're not a dichotomy - so why bring them up?

Animal rights aren't dichotomous to the problem of the American prison establishment either. They're also irrelevant to the discussion except as a diversionary tactic too

You seem to be reading something in my comment that isn't there. I'm not diverting anything. I explicitly stated that I'm in agreement with tda's comment. tda mentioned the European point of view. As a person from and living in a European country I find it important (or at minimum: interesting) to be aware of our own issues in the domain being discussed.

That's definitely not irrelevant to whatever discussion you feel the need to enforce, if people from the US want to improve fight against their prison system by promoting the European models, they should be aware of its shortcoming. In any case that's worth discussing.

Anyway, I'm not that interested in justifying my previous comments, I don't see why I should have to. So I will stop here. Have a good time for the rest of the day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com