At 01:39 PM 7/18/2000, Issodhos @aol.com wrote:

>p.s. By the way, some would argue that in the counting of prisoners one
>should include all of the citizens of communist North Korea and communist
>China, as well as communist occupied Tibet.

This has got to be one of the more unintelligent things I've heard in a
while.  This would be exactly analogous to counting all
homeless/dispossessed people in Western countries as prisoners.  An
alternative analogy would be counting all the citizens of Puerto Rico as
prisoners of the US.  Vieques appears to be little more than a combination
prison/bombing range.  This doesn't count the countries that are kept
prisoner to US economic power, like many in South America (witness Chile in
the 70s or Nicaragua in the 80s) or that have US bases forced on them
(South Korea and Japan).

>By the way, my position is that
>a prison should for the most part hold only those people who have committed a
>violent crime or have threatened to do so.;-)

Whereas this is more civilised.  There are a few things outside of violence
that could lead a person to be separated from a community, but drug
use/abuse is certainly not one of them, nor are many crimes against property.

Regards,

Alister