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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_North_Korea says, "The total number of prisoners is estimated to be 150,000 to 200,000."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_the_United_States says, "According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 2,266,800 adults were incarcerated in U.S. federal and state prisons, and county jails at year-end 2010."

It seems like the United States is about an order of magnitude worse, even if you subtract the tiny fraction of US prisoners who are locked up to keep other people safe. And that's not even getting into how the countries' respective foreign policies violate human rights outside their borders, but I suggest reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War to start to get a handle on that.

It's not that the Korean rulers are more moral than the US rulers. It's just that they're less effective.

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Comparing the actual number of prisoners in two countries isn't very useful since the two countries have different populations. It would be a little like comparing the food consumed each day by everybody in China, compared to the same number in the US. China will consume more food, simply because they have more people! You can't conclude that Chinese people must be 2-3x fatter just from numbers that don't take the population into account. Instead, you want to use the per-capita food consumption; in your case, you would want to look at per-capita prisoner numbers.

The population of the US is around 315 million. The population of North Korea is around 24 million. [1]

If we divide the number of prisoners by the countries' populations, US incarcenates .69% if their people. Assuming NK incarcenates 175,000, that is .71% of their people. These numbers seem similar enough, so perhaps we should instead look at prison conditions. By all reports, North Korea has significantly worse conditions. It's incorrect to claim that North Korea rulers are "less effective".

1. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populati...

Karla Homolka raped and killed 50% of the people who fell into her power. Adolf Hitler tortured to death only some 10% of the people who fell into his power. Nevertheless, I think it is defensible to assert that Adolf Hitler was "a bigger domestic human rights violator" than Karla Homolka, since she only had three victims, while he had some eleven million.

North Korean rulers are less effective in that North Korea remains a small, poor, weak country; consequently North Korean rulers are only able to incarcerate 0.7% of a much smaller population. They would be much bigger human rights violators if they were able to establish control over a larger territory that included more people, as the US government has over the past century and a half.

You need to compute this per capita for this to be the slightest bit meaningful.

WTF are you talking about? You are aware that you are comparing a ~300m country with a ~20m one, right? "It seems like the United States is about an order of magnitude worse". your own numbers prove you otherwise. And that's not even counting the proportion of them that are political prisoners (for posing even the tiniest threat to the regime)...

How you could say that is an order of magnitude????? The US has an order of magnitude more people! Using your numbers and Google's population estimates, 8 per 1000 people in NK are prisoners, while 7 per 1000 people in the US are prisoners.

Furthermore, in NK prison camps execution--including child execution--is commonplace. Maybe that will give you a clue as to why their prison population isn't higher.

Grow a brain.

The wars that the US have been waging are fucked up, I agree, but we're talking about the way a country treats its own people.

I don't think the US is perfect, and I readily admit that it has a shameful level of police brutality, but NK is a completely different ballgame.

Non-police brutality in the US is still a much bigger problem than police brutality.

I'm disappointed at the level of your response.

Taking into account population:

200000/24,451,285 = 0.0081 2,266,800/313,914,040 = 0.0072

I'd say those are roughly the same - it certainly doesn't support a claim that the US is an order of magnitude worse.

Using your numbers

USA: 0.71% of the population NK: 0.63-0.83% of the population

That quote is out of context. 150,000 to 200,000 is an estimate of the number of political prisoners in North Korea.

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