South Africa has just celebrated 10 years of democracy. It seems like just yesterday that I first heard about this atrocity that was taking place on the other side of the world.
Coincidentally, I ran across a couple of interesting chilling numbers a few days ago:
| Incarceration rates in George W. Bush's America and Stalin's U.S.S.R. | |
| U.S.S.R. (1950) | 1,423 per 100,000 |
| U.S.A. (2002) | 2,298 per 100,000 |
| Incarceration rate of black men in South Africa before ANC rule and in contemporary America | |
| South Africa (1993) | 851 per 100,000 |
| U.S.A. (2002) | 7,150 per 100,000 |
How very, very sad. America is the new South Africa; the new U.S.S.R.
Sources: US Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prison Policy Initiative, "The International Use of Incarceration" by Marc Mauer, The Sentencing Project, via This magazine, via Utne magazine.