Yes, the US’s prison system is an abomination, including atrocious conditions, corruption, maltreatment and death, not to mention any of the injustices baked into the system of car registration / credit checks / felony convictions / education and all the rest of it that effectively create an invisible apartheid system where about 35% of the country are barred, permanently, from ever being able to live a first-world-existence life.
That’s different than setting up mass detention camps and promising to put innocent people and political opponents into them, setting up a secretive law enforcement agency tasked with doing that, and then getting to work at a massive scale. It just is. The fact that the system has been rigged in general since the 80s doesn’t mean what’s happening right now is not a 10-alarm, 20-alarm, fire.
And Americans were by-the-by fine when secretive government agencies were putting proven innocent people and political opponents in Guantanamo Bay alongside terrorists, as long as they weren’t Americans.
A lot of people weren’t fine with that. Pretty much the same people who are alarmed and horrified by the current developments were alarmed and horrified about Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, the war, and all the rest of it. The issue is just that we haven’t really done anything about it.
The US has been running a concentration camp since 2001. People are just miffed that they’re the ones being put in there this time.
We also ran concentration camps before 2001, we just called them “internment” camps.
This kind of weird hyperbole helps no one.
Yes, the US’s prison system is an abomination, including atrocious conditions, corruption, maltreatment and death, not to mention any of the injustices baked into the system of car registration / credit checks / felony convictions / education and all the rest of it that effectively create an invisible apartheid system where about 35% of the country are barred, permanently, from ever being able to live a first-world-existence life.
That’s different than setting up mass detention camps and promising to put innocent people and political opponents into them, setting up a secretive law enforcement agency tasked with doing that, and then getting to work at a massive scale. It just is. The fact that the system has been rigged in general since the 80s doesn’t mean what’s happening right now is not a 10-alarm, 20-alarm, fire.
And Americans were by-the-by fine when secretive government agencies were putting proven innocent people and political opponents in Guantanamo Bay alongside terrorists, as long as they weren’t Americans.
A lot of people weren’t fine with that. Pretty much the same people who are alarmed and horrified by the current developments were alarmed and horrified about Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, the war, and all the rest of it. The issue is just that we haven’t really done anything about it.