Another interesting TED talk: Bryan Stevenson shares some hard truths about America's justice system. Intellectuals who want to tell other countries how to be civilized while ignoring mass-incarceration of vast numbers of innocent in the US is a pet peeve of mine anyway, but the following touched me, a German, as a perhaps especially powerful comparison given that the charge of anti-Semitism is a dead-beat-argument that works so well that it hardly ever matters whether the accused is guilty at all either:
“What would it feel like to be living in a world where the nation state of Germany was executing people especially if they were disproportionately Jewish? ... And yet in this country [the United States of America] in the states of the old south, we execute people, we are 11 times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim is white than when the victim is black, 22 times more likely to get it if the defendant is black and the victim is white, in the very states where there are buried in the ground the bodies of those who were lynched.”
300 000 people in prison in 1972, 2.3 million today, 7 million on probation/parole, 13 year old children tried as adults and sent to die in Jail without parole; the US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, one out of three black males between 18 and 30 is in prison or on probation or parole, in urban areas like LA more than 50%; 34% in Alabama lost the right to vote permanently.
Don’t get me started on that most incarceration in the US is not even crime related but about issues like poor communities without proper healthcare turning to self-medication.
