As far as I can tell US prisons (in generally, not necessary all but I think most) are basically a heap of human right violations.
In that context I think extraditing anyone to the US should be treated as a human right violation and as such should not be done.
And even if we ignore their prisons from a German Law POV a lot of their law is fundamentally in conflict with the values represented by the constitution and might also be in conflict with the human right charter, which at least for Germany (and potentially other countries, too) is another reason why extradition to the US should not be allowed.
If a country does not obey human rights charters I don't think we'll send you to one of our good prisons really works, because that a prison is good is just a happenstance and there is no legal reason why it should continue to be good.
I'm not sure that UK prisons are a huge amount higher in quality having read news reports about them. Though state controlled they're far from being the nordic model of rehabilitation.
That said, a similar argument does prevent the UK from extraditing anyone accused of a capital crime due to the death penalty being banned in the UK.
He’s not going to those kinds of prisons no matter what, if anything, he is convicted of.
White collar crimes done by rich people go to white collar prisons. If you or I did this on a smaller scale we would probably go to regular prison but not a billionaire.
The kind of prison he goes to will depend on the length of his sentence. Federal prisons have a reputation for being relatively tame, but this is only true at the minimum security level. Inmates with more than 10 years on their sentences cannot be placed at minimum security facilities, however.
The remainder of the security levels - low, medium, and high - are the the kinds of places you see in movies with all of the attending violence, sexual assaults, and generally nightmarish life.
In the federal system, sentences for fraud are based on amount of loss. For an $11 billion fraud, he would be sentenced to either life, or hundreds of years in prison - and there is no parole in the federal system. That length of sentence would require him to be kept at a high or medium security facility until his death - natural or otherwise - even though his crime was technically white collar.
Basically, if he is extradited to the US, he will never see the light of day, and will regularly experience every horror that the US prison system is rumored to have everyday for the rest of his life until he dies. So deciding to extradite him is a really big decision. It’s not just a slap on the wrist - it’s torture until he dies.
> For an $11 billion fraud, he would be sentenced to either life, or hundreds of years in prison
Well, none of the charges has a life sentence available, so that option is not possible. It does look like the statutory maximum for the offenses at issue combined is 280 years, but I haven't bothered to pull out the sentencing guidelines and see if, even, with $11 billion in frauds, that's likely without factors not obvious from the charges.
> and will regularly experience every horror that the US prison system is rumored to have everyday for the rest of his life until he dies.
Well, no, every rumored problem isn't real, and every real problem isn't experienced by every prisoner at all (much less daily.)
It does look like the statutory maximum for the offenses at issue combined is 280 years
Is that not effectively a life sentence without the possibility of parole? So the point of your response is to point out that he will not get life, but rather, up to 280 years?
Well, no, every rumored problem isn't real, and every real problem isn't experienced by every prisoner at all (much less daily.)
You're trying to argue that he might not experience every horror every day - just some of them, depending on the day? Rapes occur daily in prisons. He might not get raped every day, but he almost certainly will over 280 years in a high security prison (since you claim that is not a life sentence). The rape problem in US prisons is so bad that there is actually a law called PREA - the Prison Rape Elimination Act [1].
I see that pedantry is still alive and well among some on HN.
> Is that not effectively a life sentence without the possibility of parole?
The claim was that he would be sentenced to life or hundreds od years based on the charges and the amount in controversy. I was pointing out that while the second option may be at least theoretically possible, the first was not.
(Are the two practically equivalent? Sure, but the claim was that the charges would support either sentence, not that it would support a sentence materially ewut to life in prison.)
> You're trying to argue that he might not experience every horror every day - just some of them, depending on the day?
I’m pointing out that depending on which rumored horrors you consider, they might never occur in reality at all (rumor and fact arr different things), and even the ones that are factual horrors might never occur to the vast majority of prisoners, and even ones that are more common might never impact a particular prisoner and, yes, even the ones that happen to impact a particular prisoner often don’t do so daily, so the claim that he would be subjected to every rumored horror of US prisons every day of his sentence relies on so many levels of hyberbole as to be beyond absurd.
People harp on China or North Korea being police states but the United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation by a significant margin. The US justice system is rife with discrimination and the prison conditions are dire (as you point out). People should absolutely not be extradited to the USA until this changes.
You need to drop North Korea from that to make any sense at all. Not only do they incarcerate far more people per capita than the US, but the conditions make US prison seem like paradise. No exaggeration.
Prison in North Korea is much closer in spirit and implementation to Nazi concentration camps during the second World War, or the Soviet gulags. Many people die within months of being sent there.
>Many people die within months of being sent there.
I take your overall point, but here in the US police just execute people on the streets and then face no consequences for doing so. I continue to think the comparison fits.
No. Trying to say they're somehow equivalent is whataboutism, it's insulting to the US and demeaning to survivors of North Korea. I know the US is not perfect, but you can't just go saying it's like North Korea.
No. It's another name for tu quoque, a logical fallacy by attempting to deflect criticism through pointing out hypocrisy. The Soviets used it as their go-to defense for their hideous system by pointing to racism, prisons, lynching, etc in the US. As if that made their shortcomings acceptable.
You can criticize some party or entity all you want, just make a logical argument free of fallacies. I don't abide using whataboutism to make false equivalencies. The US is nothing like North Korea. To compare the two, unless done extremely carefully, is insulting to people in the US, and demeaning the experience of people in North Korea.
To think of it another way, if you compare working in McDonald's to slavery, you're insulting the people that work for McDonald's and demeaning the experience of survivors of actual slavery.
TFA does not mention DPRK, and this is the only subthread on this page that does. So, bringing this totally different nation into the discussion is itself fallacious.
We do incarcerate a lot, however, keep in mind some of it has to do with the dismantling of the equally problematic mental health institutions beginning in the late sixties.
Lots of people who would better be served in psychiatric units are housed in regular prisons.
There are historical factors which contribute to higher incarceration rates (poor, lack of opportunity, unemployment benefits structures (unreported income does not affect eligibility), etc which contribute to higher probability of running afoul of criminal law.
Moreover, you can see a marked increase from the '80s on. That strongly implies economic factors (in conjunction with Clinton's tough on crime agenda).
What precipitates this is the hollowing out of American jobs overseas. No longer could a high school graduate live on the income afforded by a HS graduate. As people's in the lower socio-economic rungs saw decreasing purchasing power, few alternatives were available to them. Steel Mills closed down, Shoe factories, Clothing, the FT cleaning crew was replaced by low wage imported labor, etc.
Some of the same reasons are seen in countries with populations of poor people. Belarus, Thailand, Bahamas, etc.
Looks like UK has a similar over-incarceration disparity though.
> People from BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) backgrounds constitute only 14% of the general population in England and Wales, but make up 25% of its prison population
>Lots of people who would better be served in psychiatric units are housed in regular prisons.
You know, people always say this, but they never think of things from the point of view of all the people in mental wards who are not criminals and are defenseless.
Also, modern mental wards do not house anyone for very long. So they just aren't applicable for long term housing.
People who are arrested do sometimes end up in psychiatric units temporarily, and once they are "stabilized" then they get back into the legal system.
Yea - but dismantling them was the wrong answer. It was the easy guiltless answer where everyone could pat themselves on the back, but mental health treatment is a service that society needs and trying to solve it with prisons is just a terrible idea.
The right answer was admitting and addressing those terrible abuses and fixing the system.
Prisons are NOT meant to take away your human rights, they will take away some of your rights temporary but that's not the same.
The main point of prisons is to temporary take away your freedom (which is often perceived as on of the most valuable rights) as a form of punishment for you crime, but that's where it stops.
You are sentenced to 10 years of prison not 10 years of torture, and potential random death.
If your arbitrary put people in solitary confinement, expose them to unnecessary risk from other inmates or risk of health due to absurd temperatures you are effectively arbitrary non lawfully adding additional punishments on top of the prison sentence a person has. Which is in direct conflict with what a state of law is supposed to be.
I mean lets say you committed a minor crime with a small prison sentence of but now you are forced to stay in a room which massively increases your chance of dying in the next few hours (heat+ heart disease), this means instead of being sentenced to 2 weeks of prison you are now sentenced to 2 weeks of prison + torture + a high chance to it arbitrary getting a death sentence.
Furthermore the worse the prison is the harder it gets to proper rehabilitate the person afterwards, which gets worse in the US due to treatments of ex-convicts. But again your sentence was 2 years in prison not 2 years in prison and hardly any chance to life a normal life afterwards even if you try.
The last point is even worse because it's not just bad for the convinced, it's especially bad for the rest of society which now has to coop with a increased crime rate as direct consequence of how prisons are handled. Which in turn will cause more people to be dragged into situations where they will commit crimes leading to a vicious crime increasing cycle.
There are more then just a few studies which relatively clearly show that treating prisoners as imprisoned but still human and help with rehabilitation will decrease effective crime rates and will in total benefit society, even if it might sometimes seem unfair in specific cases.
EDIT: To be clear the temperature is just one easy to understand example, but not the only problem and not applicable to all prisons. For people not aware of it, during very hot days some prisons get so hot that using ventilators or water vapor makes the situations worse, e.g. the are blown over by the ventilator is so hot that instead of giving your body a chance to cool it heats it up further.
Ok, I'll remember from now on that a comfortable temperature is an "inalienable right" whereas just general freedom is simply a "right of a citizen" or something.
The hoops people are jumping through to not acknowledge that prison is an explicit, intended violation of human rights are wild.
In that context I think extraditing anyone to the US should be treated as a human right violation and as such should not be done.
And even if we ignore their prisons from a German Law POV a lot of their law is fundamentally in conflict with the values represented by the constitution and might also be in conflict with the human right charter, which at least for Germany (and potentially other countries, too) is another reason why extradition to the US should not be allowed.