Six Ways America Is Like a Third-World Country (Rolling Stone)

[adirondacker]

By Sean McElwee
March 5, 2014 12:00 PM ET

"Although the U.S. is one of the richest societies in history, it still lags behind other developed nations in many important indicators of human development – key factors like how we educate our children, how we treat our prisoners, how we take care of the sick and more. In some instances, the U.S.'s performance is downright abysmal, far below foreign countries that are snidely looked-down-upon as "third world." Here are six of the most egregious examples that show how far we still have to go:

1. Criminal Justice

We all know the U.S. criminal justice system is flawed, but few are likely aware of just how bad it is compared to the rest of the world. The International Center for Prison Studies estimates that America imprisons 716 people per 100,000 citizens (of any age). That's significantly worse than Russia (484 prisoners per 100,000 citizens), China (121) and Iran (284). The only country that incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than we do is North Korea. The U.S. is also the only developed country that executes prisoners – and our death penalty has a serious race problem: 42 percent of those on death row are black, compared to less than 15 percent of the overall population.

Over two and a half million American children have a parent behind bars. A whopping 60 percent of those incarcerated in U.S. prisons are non-violent offenders, many of them in prison for drug charges (overwhelmingly African-Americans). Even while our crime rate has fallen, our incarcerated population has climbed. As of 2011, an estimated 217,000 American prisoners were raped each year ­– that's 600 new victims every day, a truly horrifying number. In 2010, the Department of Justice released a report about abuse in juvenile detention centers. The report found that 12.1 percent of all youth held in juvenile detention reported sexual violence; youth held for between seven and 12 months had a victimization rate of 14.2 percent.


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4. Education

The U.S. is among only three nations in the world that does not guarantee paid maternal leave (the other two are Papua New Guinea and Swaziland). This means many poor American mothers must choose between raising their children and keeping their jobs. The U.S. education system is plagued with structural racial biases, like the fact that schools are funded at the local, rather than national level. That means that schools attended by poor black people get far less funding than the schools attended by wealthier students. The Department of Education has confirmed that schools with high concentrations of poor students have lower levels of funding. It's no wonder America has one of the highest achievement gaps between high income and low income students, as measured by the OECD. Schools today are actually more racially segregated than they were in the 1970s. Our higher education system is unique among developed nations in that is funded almost entirely privately, by debt. Students in the average OECD country can expect about 70 percent of their college tuition to be publicly funded; in the United States, only about 40 percent of the cost of education is publicly-funded. That's one reason the U.S. has the highest tuition costs of any OECD country."

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Healthcare, Gun Violence, Inequality and Infrastructure are included in the article that has linked factual content and is a great resource for those interested in figuring out the problems we have as a nation. (I know I'm writing to the choir here)

Highly Recommend reading and bookmarking.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/six-ways-america-is-like-a-third-world-country-20140305

[bvar22]

1. US like a 3rd World Country?

Watch this video from Jon Stewart's Daily Show:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-6-2014/third-world-health-care---knoxville--tennessee-edition


DURec.

[adirondacker]

3. That was disturbingly entertaining. Thanks ;) nt

[indepat]

2. That the U.S. is like a third-world country in so many ways stems from governance from the extreme

right assuring an inevitable outcome that should come as no surprise to any one.

[adirondacker]

5. An interesting observation I had growing up...I had a right wing uncle that thought that

having a somewhat 3rd world community was Good. It takes less of a fortune to "feel" superior. He was the resentful type that only showed dismay when any other family member actually achieved something. It's rather pathetic.

[blkmusclmachine]

4. ,

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