The country claiming to have the most βfreedomβ of any country has the highest incarceration rate of any country.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
1 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
51663 readers
431 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
Not so fun fact: the constitution allows for slavery as long as it's a punishment for a crime.
Hmmm... Nah, those dots don't connect at all.
It's even worse. The original US Constitution does not prohibit slavery. It wasn't until the Thirteenth Amendment was passed seventy years later - after a Civil War tore apart the country - that slavery was abolished. With the express exception of punishment for a crime. No qualifications for the severity of the crime. And that exception gets frequent use to this day in the penal system
The original US Constitution is explicitly pro-slavery. Not only does it explicitly require non-slaveholding states to return fugitive slaves to their oppressors, but it has multiple mechanisms intended to ensure the dominance of slave states in the federal government.
The Constitution was never a unified idealist vision of liberty. It was a grungy political compromise between factions that did not agree on what the country should be. These included New England Puritans (religious cultists; but abolitionist), New York Dutch bankers (who wanted the money back they'd loaned to the states), Southern planters (patriarchal rapist tyrants), and Mid-Atlantic Quakers (pacifists willing to hold their noses and make peace with the Puritans and planters).