Comment by seszett
2 years ago
> So apparently your definition of “western countries” includes sub-Saharan Africa but excludes most of Europe and all of Australia and New Zealand?
To be honest the text you are quoting doesn't talk about Western Europe at all, and I think if you exclude Western Europe, then "Northern America + Eastern Europe" is most of what remains of "western countries". Australia and New Zealand, while part of western countries, are so small that they are basically insignificant for statistics.
The data in the source[0], though, says the number of prisoners in Europe as a whole (as well as Northern America) has decreased (Figures 10, 12, and 13) confirming what GP said. Eastern Europe is quoted specifically because the decrease has been much more important (basically, the numbers are becoming similar to Western Europe).
There's no question that the trend in the West has been a decrease in incarceration rate, with Australia and New Zealand clear outliers.
[0]https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics...
If you exclude Western Europe and simply ignore Australia and New Zealand you’ve abandoned any reasonable conception of “the West” altogether.
Regardless, cherry-picking even such an incredibly gerrymandered “West” ignores the entire point of the source: the human population in prison has risen faster than the human population itself… pointing to minor improvements in the world’s largest prison state and what remains of the ex-Soviet gulag system states while ignoring considerably larger regressions in, for example, a nation colonized specifically to be a prison does nothing to contradict that fact.
The data (linked in my comment) shows that incarceration rates have decreased in all of Europe as well as all of Northern America and increased in Australia and New Zealand.
If you consider "the West" to be (as is commonly admitted) Europe, Northern America, Australia and New Zealand (with maybe Japan included) then incarceration rates have decreased in the West. Even if they have increased in minor countries (AU + NZ).
You're getting stuck on a sentence of the summary that talks about a subset of the data, but I'm not sure why. I also have no idea what you mean about a "nation colonized to be a prison", but honestly this looks to me as if you're just trying to push some idea without vocalizing it, which is a bit off-putting. If you're talking about the US, then yes it does have a much higher incarceration rate than anywhere else in the West, but it's a clear exception within the West and it is still decreasing.