Sunday, July 10, 2011

USA. 25% of the world's prisoners. 5% of the world's people.

Note: This post has been updated since the original date of posting. 

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Total U.S. incarcerated population.

USA and territories. 2,424,279 inmates in 2008.
With less than 5% of world population the USA has over 2.4 million of 9.8 million world prisoners. The majority of U.S. inmates are in due to the drug war. The number of inmates in the USA has increased almost 5 times over since 1980. See table.



Chart info.
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"Welcome to America, home to 5% of the world's people & 25% of the world's prisoners."
Image info, template, stats. Most are incarcerated due to the drug war.
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While the rich get richer, the poor and the middle class are in crisis, or in jail, or paying for jail. Click chart to enlarge.

More  info, and larger chart.
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"War on Drugs" cost is killing and bankrupting us. Medicaid Benefits Dropping for Millions of Patients - New York Times. June 15, 2011.
45,000 uninsured Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance. Google search: "health insurance, Harvard study, 45,000 deaths".
Jimmie Carter: Call Off the Global Drug War, in June 16, 2011 New York Times. Excerpt: "Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pointed out that, in 1980, 10 percent of his state’s budget went to higher education and 3 percent to prisons; in 2010, almost 11 percent went to prisons and only 7.5 percent to higher education. Maybe the increased tax burden on wealthy citizens necessary to pay for the war on drugs will help to bring about a reform of America’s drug policies."
See more on the costs of the drug war, including the cost of police and courts. See also: Drug war charts and more.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Continuing torture in Iraq, U.S. drug war, U.S. client countries, Egypt


Al Jazeera English: Live Stream:
http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now
http://www.youtube.com/aljazeeraenglish

Continuing torture in Iraq, U.S. drug war, U.S. client countries, Egypt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse#Recent_developments
http://www.google.com/images?q=U.S.+torture - Google image search. U.S. torture.
http://www.google.com/images?q=Iraq+torture - Iraq torture photos.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Abu_Ghraib_prisoner_abuse - Photos.

Wikipedia:
In September 2010 Amnesty International warned in a report titled New Order, Same Abuses; Unlawful Detentions and Torture in Iraq that up to 30,000 prisoners, including many veterans of the US detention system, remain detained without rights in Iraq and are frequently tortured or abused. Furthermore, it describes a detention system that has not evolved since Saddam Hussein's regime, in which human rights abuses were endemic with arbitrary arrests and secret detention common and a lack of accountability throughout the security forces. Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa director, Malcolm Smart went on to say that "Iraq's security forces have been responsible for systematically violating detainees' rights and they have been permitted. US authorities, whose own record on detainees' rights has been so poor, have now handed over thousands of people detained by US forces to face this catalogue of illegality, violence and abuse, abdicating any responsibility for their human rights."[123]
On October 22, 2010 nearly 400,000 secret US army field reports and war logs, detailing torture, summary executions and war crimes, were passed on to the British paper, the Guardian and several other international media organisations through the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. Among others, the logs detail how US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers, whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished and that US troops abused prisoners for years even after the Abu Ghraib scandal.[124][125]
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse#Recent_developments

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Some of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib were ex-U.S. prison guards.

Torture, rape, and the Drug War

U.S. torture training in Mexico. See the video below.
"Torture By Mexican Government In Drug War Highlights U.S. Loss of Credibility On Human Rights".
"The Washington Post reports today [July 9, 2009] that the Mexican government has employed numerous torture techniques to extract confessions from suspected drug traffickers. The techniques included beatings, suffocation with plastic bags, electric shocks, the insertion of needles under suspects’ finger nails, water torture, and other abuses."

See this article: *"Torture in Mexico’s Drug War (Warning Graphic Video)". If the above embedded video does not work go to the YouTube page and try.

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Drug-suspect rape and torture by police in Indonesia. See the links to the media articles (and quotes) found in the 2010 and 2009 sections of this Cannabis Wiki article: Jakarta, Indonesia.

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Torture by U.S. police and guards.


Jury Selection Begins in Illinois Police Torture Trial. By Karen Hawkins, Associated Press Writer. May 23, 2010. ABC News

 

Juvenile inmates in the USA. Articles:

  • "Torture Kids Instead"."The US state is a horrible parent; 12% of its 'detained' kids are sexually abused each year, versus 4% of adult prisoners. 0.3% of US non-prisoners report rape each year, versus a world median of ~0.05%."
Video below. Deputy Shown Kicking Teen Girl. He hit her in the head while she was standing and while she was on the floor. He slammed her onto a concrete floor. He pulled her up by her hair. There is no audio. YouTube link.


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ACLU Asks U.N. To Intervene On Behalf Of Montana Juvenile Prisoner
"placed in solitary confinement in the Montana State Prison when he was 17 and has been subjected to abuse so traumatizing that he has twice attempted to kill himself by biting through his wrist to puncture a vein. ... has been forbidden phone calls or visits with his family. Fellow inmates were so concerned for his well-being that they reached out to the ACLU of Montana for help on his behalf."
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Wikipedia:

Matthew McDaniel


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_McDaniel#Drug_War


McDaniel accuses the "US Drug War" and the UN Office of Drugs and Crime for helping cause the arrest, forced dislocation, prosecution, starvation, death and extrajudicial killings of Akha people in Thailand and Laos.[17][18][19][20][21][22] McDaniel has filed reports with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights,[23] and the International Criminal Court.[24]
He documented extrajudicial killings during the anti-drugs push of Thailand's prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2003.[25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33]
For example, Matthew McDaniel and three of his associates (Itaru Furuta, Katharine Ricke, and Lisa Friedland) documented the June 20, 2003 killing of Leeh Huuh.[19][34] McDaniel reported:
"TODAY. Two days ago Leeh Huuh, other son of Ah Nah Burh Chay and Loh Pah Ah Sauh were called to the Phrao police station. The police left a notice with Loh Pah's wife which she had to sign. TODAY at 8am these two men left for the police station. They were ambushed on the road and shot to death. We saw the bodies which we photographed. Police at Phrao police station denied knowledge of the details of the case that we already knew."[35][36]
The first photo below is of Leeh Huuh and his wife in 2002. The next three photos are of Leeh Huuh's body on June 20, 2003. The last photo is of two Akha wives whose husbands had been killed earlier that day of June 20, 2003. Leeh Huuh's wife is on the right side. Matthew McDaniel took the photos.
Leehhuuh1.jpg
Leehhuuh.jpg
Leehhuuh1a.jpg
Leehhuuhbullet1.jpg
Wivesweep.jpg
Thailand's English-language newspaper The Nation reported on the drug war in November 2007:
Of 2,500 deaths in the government's war on drugs in 2003, a fact-finding panel has found that more than half were not involved in drugs at all. At a brainstorming session, a representative from the Office of Narcotics Control Board (ONCB) Tuesday disclosed that as many as 1,400 people were killed and labeled as drug suspects despite the fact that they had no link to drugs.
Prosecutor Kunlapon Ponlawan said "it was not difficult to investigate extra-judicial killings carried out by police officers as the trigger-pullers usually confessed."[31][37]
The January 24, 2008 edition of The Economist reported that "over half of those killed in 2003 had no links to the drugs trade. The panel blamed the violence on a government 'shoot-to-kill' policy based on flawed blacklists. But far from leading to the prosecutions of those involved, its findings have been buried. The outgoing interim prime minister, Surayud Chulanont, took office vowing to right Mr Thaksin's wrongs. Yet this week he said there was insufficient evidence to take legal action over the killings. It is easy to see why the tide has turned. Sunai Phasuk, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, a lobbying group, says that the panel's original report named the politicians who egged on the gunmen. But after the PPP won last month's elections, those names were omitted."[38]
The New York Times reported on April 8, 2003:
Since the death of 9-year-old Chakraphan, there have been frequent reports in the Thai press of summary executions and their innocent victims. There was the 16-month-old girl who was shot dead along with her mother, Raiwan Khwanthongyen. There was the pregnant woman, Daranee Tasanawadee, who was killed in front of her two young sons. There was the 8-year-old boy, Jirasak Unthong, who was the only witness to the killing of his parents as they headed home from a temple fair. There was Suwit Baison, 23, a cameraman for a local television station, who fell to his knees in tears in front of Mr. Thaksin and begged for an investigation into the killing of his parents. His stepfather had once been arrested for smoking marijuana, Mr. Suwit said. When the police offered to drop the charge if he would admit to using methamphetamines, he opted instead to pay the $100 fine for marijuana use. Both parents were shot dead as they returned home from the police station on a motorbike. Mr. Suwit said 10 other people in his neighborhood had also been killed after surrendering to the police.[25]
On March 4, 2008 the Asia Sentinel reported:
The first war on drugs, as it was known, pretty much evolved into a war on anybody the police decided to shoot. Under former premier Thaksin Shinawatra, more than 2,800 people were killed over a three-month period five years ago —about twice the normal murder rate of about 500 per month. Appointed Premier Surayud Chulanont half-heartedly set up a commission to investigate the drugs war nearly a year after the coup, but it had the effect of absolving the Thaksin administration. The committee found that about 1,370 of those deaths were related to drugs, while 878 were not. Another 571 people were killed for no apparent reason, according to the panel, and police investigated just 80 of those cases.[39]

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Egypt's army 'involved in detentions and torture'


Other torture ..
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