How did the States become the prison capital? Doesn't it seem -- based on everything we hear about the USA -- that this glorious country would be the last country to pull a stunt like that? Doesn't one look at a country like, say, China, or Russia, and think they ought to have the biggest prison population? How did it end up the Americans, of all people?
Well , I have a few theories, and most of them ironically have to do with the exact excess of freedom that the Americans claim, obsessively, to offer their citizenry. Basically, it works something like this, and please be warned that the theory is confusing: Due to the fact that the Americans have such a conflicted relationship, historically speaking and even now, with an "over reaching" federal government, it has also wound up being the case that many areas of the States-- especially rural areas in the Deep South-- have, in some sense, never been totally modernized.
People from the "outside" are not allowed access into these places; they are cut off and left, so it would seem, to run themselves. They "ain't looking to be bothered". Therefore, what this means is that people in the Deep South, who are obsessed with their distaste for the federal government "prying into their lives", have, in a very real way, completely lost touch with the modern, international set up of the world outside. In some sense they are very much like the Amish: They are existing on the outskirts of the modern world. They aren't really a part of it. I personally do not see the Deep South, or even certain parts of the middle of this country, as being apart of the modern civilized first world. I have not seen it as a part of it since I first b egan to study it. It is too much of a disorganized, ruthless and violent--or just disconnected-- mess to be a part of that world. Plus there's the fact that, you know, it don't wanna be a part of it anyways. It objects to any and all outside interference. Sometimes this disconnection looks romantic. This is just an illusion, however. It is actually a very nasty thing....
For example, if you study the American prison problem, you are quickly going to find - rather shockingly - that, of all the people in the world, the Americans refuse to let the United Nations into their prisons, to do a "check up". The United Nations has obvious reasons for wanting to run a check on the prisons here: They want to see if they are up to what the civilized world now calls modern standards. This means they want to know if the Americans are, perhaps, torturing their own prisoners. And, in fact, by international United Nations guidelines, the obsession that the prisons here have with using solitary confinement is a violation of international law. The Americans of course give no damn for international law. The ones in the Deep South, especially. International law is, we are told, the work of dictators and tyrants. It is evil and no good. It is "over reaching". It is telling you how to live etcetc... won't let you mind your own business.
Minding ones own business sounds very fun and all, most naturally, and so it seems like an absolutely splendid argument to make and to agree with, until you realize all of this very frightening stuff about the dark part of just totally ignoring international laws and modern standards. In terms of the American history, it also helps you to quickly realize another startling fact: The slavery that the Americans practiced up to the 1800s was, in fact, a violation of an international law that was "sort of' in order back then (since all of Europe, for example, had outlawed slavery by that point for nearly a millenium) and this initial violation, I think the reader can imagine, has quite clearly led to our next big violation, which is our insanely enormous prison population, by far the worlds biggest. Thus the truth, my friends, seems to be that the real freedom of America, generaly just seems to mean that you can fuck other people out of their freedom, and not have to be worried about anyone coming to fuck you for doing it.
Slave traders, for instance, were absolutely enamored with the New World, for this precise reason that, in the New World, there existed the freedom to buy and sell slaves. This "freedom" did not, I again stress, exist in any European countries, for nearly a millenium, by the time the Americans started running with it. By that point in Old World history, all the old countries had simply become too civilized for slaves. They had big cities by the 1700s in Europe, cities that had been chuggin' along for thousands of years, and when you have big cities, you tend to have big laws, and a lot of red tape. Tons of it. An American, of course, would tell you, they had "too much" red tape.. The American of 1777 and of 1860 and of 2017, depending where he is from, would tell you that the Old World "was too civilized". He lived in a country that, in 1777, hardly had any real big city to rival Europe. The place didn't even really have a town! He was a backwoods boy. He did whatever he pleased, including buying and selling slaves that those suckers in Europe didn't have the freedom to do.....
In some sense he was right, laws and cities and red tape sure is annoying. But what about when you get enslaved yourself? And no one is able to come help you, because there is no law against slavery? What about when you get sent to prison for two life sentences, because of a drug law that only exists in your backwoods Alabama town? A drug law that, in New York City or London, would have only gotten you 6 months of time in a rehab clinic? What of this holy red white and blue freedom then?
This argument about the freedom the Americans claim to offer -- but are, in truth, lying about -- doesn't just stop at slavery, of course, it also extends to other, smaller things, something like the circumcision of baby boys being the perfect example. Jews and Muslims that live in America are as obsessed with circumcision as the boys in the Deep South are obsessed with guns, and both Jews and Muslims have repeatedly cried out that "...to make illegal the circumcision of baby boys would be to commit genocide on our Peoples". In Europe, nobody seems to have this bizarre idea: They are making circumcision illegal there, in a number of countries, first of all because it has never been a traidtion in Europe to cut up babys penises, and secondly because they see it as a violation of the childs inherent human rights and possession of their own body. Many men are justifiably angry that their parents were allowed to cut off the most important part of their genitalia the day they were born, before they had any say in the matter, and so they want to enact a LAW that would stop that from happening. Jews and Muslims, however, write repeatedly in the Times and other rags that this would be a violation of their freedom to practice their religion. The American Supreme Court apparently agrees,and so nothing happens. Nothing changes. We must not violate the freedom of the 50 year old Jew and Muslim; nevermind the freedom of the actual child. Just like it is nevermind the slave in America, and nevermind the prisoners, etcetc.
So you see, folks, the entire "mystery" about the current American prison population is not really that much of a "mystery" at all, assuming you know the ruthless history of this very mean, and typically uncivilized, country. Once you know the actual history of the USA, you come to understand very quickly why a state like Louisiana in particular, a Deep South state of course, is the prison capital of the entire world. No where, in the entire history of the world, for 12,000 years of recorded human history, has any place had more people in prison all at one time, than Louisiana. It is the end result of blatantly ignoring international law, and deciding that you know better, not "the United Nations". It is the end result of centuries upon centuries of not paying any attention whatsoever to what the outside world does, and just continuing on your own merry way, torturing, imprisoning, murdering, and essentially enslaving people the way you want to do it, your own special way, 'cause nobody can come fucking bother you. That is what Louisiana is and that is what our prison problem is. It's the most ironic example of all time, of America practicing the one thing it never shuts the hell up about in the first place: FREEDOM.
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