Americans Must Stop Calling Their Country "The Land of the Free"

One of the most absurd spectacles in routine American life is that of a bunch of Americans standing before a sporting event to sing a song about how free their country is. Americans are not the freest people on Earth. Not even close. We are locked up more than any people on the planet, and we are thrown in prison, oftentimes, for the most ridiculous reasons because one of the most powerful lobbies in America is the PRISON lobby. If there is a "land of the free" on this Earth, it is certainly not the United States of America.

The United States incarcerates more people than any other country on Earth. Think about that for a moment. India and China have roughly triple the number of people as the US, and China has an authoritarian government that jails people for political dissent. America has more prisoners than either of them. Not only does the US have more prisoners as an absolute figure, it has a higher incarceration rate than any other country on Earth. Over 1 in 100 Americans is in prison. That's stunning. It gets worse. About 1 in 31 Americans are either in prison, on probation, or on parole. Land of the free. What a joke.

The American prison population might be even higher if police didn't kill a fair number of people who might otherwise have gone to jail. In just the first two months of this year, over 170 civilians were killed by police. That's more killed in two months than German police are likely to kill in the next 50 years. Seriously. If a citizen tries to expose this brutality, what happens then? As you can probably guess, he gets arrested! Of course! The guy who taped Eric Garner being killed was arrested. The man who filmed Freddy Gray's arrest (the guy who was killed by Baltimore police recently when they severed his spinal cord) was arrested. But I'm sure it was just a coincidence that the people who filmed these controversial incidents also just happened to commit crimes immediately afterwards, and the police were just lucky enough to catch them.

The root of this problem is that 1) Americans are stupid and have no idea what is going on their country (except the black people who are disproportionately affected by this) and 2) jailing people has become a for-profit business. There are actually prison companies who have secured deals with governments to guarantee a 100% occupancy rate in their prisons. So you might ask: what happens if people stop committing so many crimes? Well, that's actually happened. Over the last thirty years, crime rates have dropped all across America, but we just keep putting more and more people in prison. That's where the War on Drugs comes in and mandatory sentences (which were heavily supported by liberal lions Bill and Hillary Clinton). Police unions and prison companies love the war on drugs, and the primary reason we are still locking people up for possessing marijuana and sending people to prison for 15 years for having sex on a beach is because there is tons of money to be made in doing so. It's disgusting.

You can see the evidence for yourself. America is not the "land of the free." Stop calling it that. And also, stop saying "for all intensive purposes." That's not a phrase with any meaning in the English language.