Comment by simbolit

> how a country ... like the USA could come up with arguably the worst prison system in the world

I will leave you with this quote by John Erlichman:

"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities, (...) We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Source: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman

And, because everything is complicated, the family denies it all:

The 1994 alleged ‘quote’ we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father. And collectively, that spans over 185 years of time with him,” the Ehrlichman family wrote. “We do not subscribe to the alleged racist point of view that this writer now implies 22 years following the so-called interview of John and 16 years following our father’s death, when dad can no longer respond. None of us have raised our kids that way, and that’s because we were not raised that way.”

Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...