Reuters: United $tates "has largest prison and 
jail population in the world"

A major bourgeois newspaper has finally admitted 
the truth about the supposedly "free" United 
$tates in a lead front-page article. The Boston 
Metro running a Reuters article as its front-page 
headline admitted that 1 in 32 adults in the 
United $tates is in jail, on probation or parole.
 
The "Bureau of Justice Statistics" of the U.S. 
Government released figures showing that another 
117, 400 people joined the "correctional 
community" in 2000. 

MIM's position is that the 
"freedom" of a society can be measured and that 
U.$. imperialism and its defenders are extremely 
hypocritical for using their "free country" 
rhetoric. 

Whatever the different societies call 
their crimes, the fact is that other societies can 
manage with fewer prisoners per capita. They 
deserve credit and the United $tates deserves the 
ultimate in criticism. 

Our critics would say that 
prisoners committed crimes and deserve their 
punishment. Yet since we are talking about very 
high murder rates and other crime rates, it should 
be a crime to defend the U.$. system as it is. 
People who defend the status quo are guilty for 
the high crime rates in the United $tates. 

MIM intends to imprison "enemies of the people" and 
use a language of justice much different than seen 
today in the United $tates, but what counts is not 
the rhetoric people use to defend their use of 
prisons but the results. Imprisonment rates such 
as those in the United $tates can only be 
justified for transitional periods of progress. 

When it comes to the overall freedom of the 
people, what matters is the overall statistic. 
During World War II, Stalin imprisoned people at 
the rate Blacks are imprisoned in the United 
$tates today; hence, MIM is not going to say there 
are never circumstances in which high imprisonment 
is not justified. World War II when the Soviet 
Union fought Nazis certainly justified harsh 
repression. Nonetheless, the United $tates of 
today is not under invasion, is not ending slavery 
and is not even making a dent in the "war on 
drugs." 

There has been nothing to justify the 
wasteful imprisonment of the last few decades that 
has grinded on and on. The "drug war" cannot be 
won in a for-profit system. The more imprisonment 
in connection to drugs, the lower the supply is 
and thus the higher the profits for supplying 
drugs. While MIM could defend a very brief surge 
in imprisonment in connection to drugs, there is 
no justification for failure to handle the 
underlying problem decade after decade as in the 
United $tates; however, capitalism cannot 
eradicate the reasons that people supply and use 
drugs. 

Even more important than the internal 
imprisonment of people at record rates is the 
contribution of U.$. military aid and direct 
military intervention to support repression of 
peoples in the Third World. So to say the United 
$tates is a "free" country is doubly wrong, first 
internally and secondly because the United $tates 
is the main prop of repression internationally.

Note: Boston Metro 27August2001, p. 1.