This PolitiFact (Georgia) ruling brings to mind all the stories I’ve heard about North Korea: how there are no birds (because they’ve all been captured and eaten) and how the South Koreans “look down” on the North Koreans, not just figuratively, but literally, due to poor nutrition:
If you look at older Koreans, we now see a situation where the average South Korean woman is approaching the height of the average North Korean man.
This is to my knowledge a unique situation, where women become taller than men.
PolitiFact Georgia rated this statement by Hank Johnson about the United States being Number One in locking up people as “Half True” because Cuba and North Korea “may jail more.” Cuba…North Korea? How many there are political prisoners? Is it appropriate or fair to include these outlying nations who criminalize dissent, and where the actual rate is undocumented? The context of Johnson’s speech referred to the United States as the greatest country in the world—i.e., it's because we are a FREE country—shouldn’t we be compared to other other FREE countries in terms of incarceration (as contradictory as that sounds)?
For example, there are people in North Korea that are imprisoned for reasons they never would be in the United States:
In North Korea, entire families are jailed in large political prison camps if one family member is suspected of anti-government sentiments
And in America’s Caribbean neighbor Cuba you can be imprisoned for being a journalist and connecting to the internet, which means the whole PolitiFact Havana crew would be in jail ("lol") among other things:
The Cuban government has been accused of numerous human rights abuses including torture, arbitrary imprisonment, unfair trials, and extrajudicial executions (also known as "El Paredón").[94][95] The Human Rights Watch alleges the government "represses nearly all forms of political dissent" and that "Cubans are systematically denied basic rights to free expression, association, assembly, privacy, movement, and due process of law".[96]
Cuba had the second-highest number of imprisoned journalists of any nation in 2008 (the People's Republic of China had the highest) according to various sources, including the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an international NGO, and Human Rights Watch.[97][98] As a result of ownership restrictions, computer ownership rates are among the world's lowest.[99] The right to use the Internet is granted only to selected locations and they may be monitored.[99][100] Connecting to the Internet illegally can lead to a five-year prison sentence.[citation needed]
Let’s say we could estimate what kind of rates Cuba and North Korea would have if they did not criminalize dissent, who could we compare them to? If North Korea was a democracy it would probably have incarceration rates similar to South Korea. South Korea’s rate of incarceration is Number 151 out of 218 countries, at 94 prisoners per 100,000 population (compared to 730 per 100,000 in the United States). Cuba could be considered the “Caribbean.” Almost half of the countries in the top twenty in the world for incarceration rates are Caribbean, the top country being Caribbean islands St. Kitts and Nevis which rank just below the United States at 649, going all the way down to Haiti at 55. Puerto Rico might be the fairest comparison to Cuba because of its size, and it is Number 35 at 303 per 100,000. It appears from the rates, however, in terms of the Caribbean nations, that they sort of follow the United States as far as incarceration….which would mean that Cuba would probably have a rate similar to the United States or other Caribbean countries. It would be high, but not as high as it is with the criminalization of dissent.
In general discussions of incarceration, the countries of North Korea and Cuba are not included since their rates cannot be documented (and they are not democracies). In a May 23 prison expose on the costs of the California system and alternatives to incarceration by Jennifer Granholm on her Current TV political talk show “The War Room” she began with the same statistic as Johnson about the United States being Numero Uno in rate of “lock up.”
So, I could contest this with insisting on a knee-jerk Rachel Maddow “True” , but it would seem to me that on balance, Mostly True was more in line considering North Korea and Cuba. Hank Johnson did not say “documented” but it’s reasonable to assume he was going by that type of measure for incarceration rates. His statement was accurate but needed additional clarification or information.
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