Silence
Recent suicides at Guantanamo have renewed calls from some Americans to demand the prison be closed, claiming conditions are poor and the detainees have no rights. Most of them come from countries where if they were in jail there, they'd have much worse conditions and fewer rights anyway.
According to a recent Dept. of Justice study, there were 314 jail suicides in the U.S. in 2002. Plus, from 2000-2002, Caucasian inmates were six times more likely to commit suicide than Afro-Americans and three times more likely than Hispanics. [Link to study]
I haven't see any demands to close any jails or prisons in the U.S. nor have I seen any charges about how a certain group's higher than normal suicide rate might be a result of discrimination or unfair treatment.
Like I've said numerous times, Americans seem more worried about how we treat others than we are about how we treat ourselves. We read in our local paper that someone picked up by local police killed himself in jail and we say "ho hum" but a foreign national with terrorist ties kills himself, we "say, close it down." It just makes no sense.

1 Comments:
The reason we don't care about ourselves is because we're all racists, sexists, homophobes, terrorists, music pirates, software pirates, spammers, and pedophiles! Ha ha ha ha!
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