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by hga
4019 days ago
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That is perhaps valid, though a counter argument is that in many police states such people are executed instead of imprisoned. Typically it means the police are an instrument of whomever is controlling the state to keep themselves in power, e.g. per Wikipedia "Police state is a term denoting government that exercises power arbitrarily through the police. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_state). I also like to define Japan as a police state, a polite one, granted, but policing was done for the convenience of the police, not for "justice" as we at least attempt. I.e. it's more important to close a case than get the real perpetrator, which was made easy by a "judicial" system with a combined "confession" and conviction rate exceeding 99.9% (really). Past tense because citizen jurors of some sort have recently been added to the mix, although I note that the history of that in England suggests it'll be a long time if ever before that becomes anything resembling the common law system. |
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Well, let's try a thought-experiment with some napkin-math, focusing on "man-hours dominated by the state per capita" and comparing incarceration to execution.
Assuming a stable incarceration rate of 1%, it follows that 1% of all "man-hours" in the nation is being taken, or about 88 man-hours per person per year.
Now, let's assume that another nation, the Bizarro States of America, achieves the same effect, but purely through less-frequent executions. The executed average a "lost remaining life" of 30,000 hours. (~35 years.)
That would require 0.29% of an execution per person per year. The BSA would have to execute 876 THOUSAND people every year to match the USA.