Reuters scrubs those hard-to-reach places on the Land of the Free's human rights atrocity Elephant in the Bathtub

Go back a few posts to read the original Reuters story about the Land of the Free being, by far, the world's largest Gulag.

What do I think Reuters should be doing differently in its coverage of this human rights catastrophe?

Please note in all the presidential debates, Republican AND Democratic, this issue simply has never come up. No one has asked, and no candidate has had to answer:

Why does the USA have more children, women and men behind bars than China? Why does the USA have more human beings behind bars than Russia? If you are elected our next president, will you change that? How?

Reuters has certainly done nothing to make this a campaign issue. Someone will get to the White House in 2009 and be under no pressure whatsoever to make America the world's second-largest prison. Democrat or Republican, Hillary, Obama or McCain, Gulag America -- so heavily non-white, so filled with the mentally ill and street-level drug addicts -- will grow, and the Prison-Industrial Complex will continue to thrive as a certain profit-maker for investors on Wall Street.

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Question Reference #080301-000015
Summary: US prisoner population story (28 February 2008) by James Vicini Product Level 1: Editorial and News Product Level 2: Feedback Date Created: 01 03 2008 02:45 AM Last Updated: 01 03 2008 02:45 AM Status: Escalated Country: US
Discussion Thread
Customer	01 03 2008 02:45 AM
I suppose the Pew study is "news" of a sort ... but US Department of Justice stats have bluntly stated that the US has the world's largest prison population since February 2000, since we overtook Russia after Russia freed a large number of its Gulagniks. It's one thing for an ordinary American to take little notice of this Elephant in the Bathtub, but this Reuters story seems surprised -- but not particularly troubled -- by these statistics and incarceration trends. There was also no mention of the notorious racial/racist component of US incarceration patterns. Amnesty International is just one of many prestigious NGOs which have focused heavily on the US pattern of dramatically preferential felony incareration of non-whites in the USA. In all, I think Reuters took one of the world's leading human rights atrocities and played it for all the softball and ho-hum it could. You helped keep our American elephant in the bathtub, accepted, tolerated, and largely unnoticed -- when this story ranks fully with Darfur, Myanmar and human rights practices in the Peoples Republic of China. I am disappointed that Reuters seems so uninterested in this story and writes about it as if it's just business as usual in the Land of the Free.
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