Today I Learned @lemmy.world HylicManoeuvre @mander.xyz 7d ago

TIL that Alabama has by far the highest amount of death row inmates by capita of any US state

en.wikipedia.org List of death row inmates in the United States - Wikipedia

There are just over 2,000 DRIs in the entire US, 46 of which are women. Alabama is leading the list with >300 inmates per 10M inhabitants.

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Not surprising that they are also some of the most uneducated, the populations our prison industrial complex preys on the most.
- Alabama is still the home of a lot of US operations like NASA.
  
  States like Ohio and West Virginia are worse
  
  A significant part of NASA may be in Alabama, but If bet that's not where most of those educated engineers are coming from.
  
  I mean not as much anymore since the end of the shuttle program. Huntsville is where a lot of vehicle production but a lot of that is private companies like ULA, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, etc. with govt contracts and subsidies. There’s only about 7k direct nasa employees at Marshall.
  
  Because that makes members of Congress more likely to sign off on spending bills, not because Alabama is a great place for it.
  
  Correct me if I'm wrong as I'm an Australian but isnt Alabama the only state that doesnt have a NHL, NFL, NBA or MLB franchise?
  
  (Contiguous states that is, Alaska and Hawaii dont count.)
  
  Worse.....for having NASA? I'm quite confused.
  
  Hey, we have NASA in Cleveland too (GRC)! but, I agree, we also largely suck. There are also some very good people there too (Alabama). It’s all a bad system.
The death penalty needs to end in America. Especially with people like Trump at the helm.
- I remember when I was younger, I didn't know if I agreed or disagreed with the death penalty.
  
  My young brain was thinking "Well, if this guy killed someone, why SHOULDN'T he die?"
  
  But as I got older I realized that the justice system is nonexistant. It's a myth. It doesn't exist. We don't have a justice system. We have a punishment system. And it doesn't care who gets punished, just as long as some politician can say he killed X amount of "criminals".
  
  But our legal system is so dysfunctional that we hardly ever get a "not guilty" plea. They'll convince innocent people that they're about to roll the dice. Plea not guilty, and lose? You're looking at 60 years. But......plea no contest in a plea deal? You're looking at 2-5 years. Most people take the deal, even if they've done nothing wrong.
  
  So why would I trust THAT system to make a permanent decision to KILL them?
  
  Trump was already wrong about the central park 5. But if we'd have killed them back in the 80s when it happened, you can't go back and undo it. They served time for something they didn't do, and are the perfect example of what I'm talking about. We can't give them back the time they spent wrongfully convicted, but at least they're not dead.
  
  Not that I'm defending the system.
  
  Any state that needs to be able to kill its own citizens to survive should not survive. Any state that doesn't need to but wants to kill its own citizens should be destroyed.
- Unfortunately, Captain Dipshit has already mandated the death penalty for anyone who kills a cop, and he's been super keen in recent history on applying it to drug dealers.
There are way more states without any death row inmates.

Source: the link you posted
- Fair enough. The data is presented very weirdly. I changed the post
  
  Yeah the list on the wiki doesn't make the data very clear. Oregon and Wyoming are the only states where there's still a death penalty AND have 0 death row inmates. Took me a few minutes to realize as well.
The shithole of the shithole.
Wow, that's crazy. Alabama you say? Wow, that's crazy. I wonder how many are POC.
We used covid money to build a new private prison named after our governor!
inmates per 10M inhabitants

Why per 10 million?
- I mean, you can choose any denominator, as long as you're using the same one to compare statistics
  
  Sure but using a non standard denominator makes off more difficult to compare to other metrics.
- Right? Alabama doesn’t even have 10 million people.
  
  100k seems ubiquitous, but I guess they use 1M for state numbers. 10M truly is silly. My only guess is that most other states are around <10/10M and they wanted something to compare that even a politician could understand.
- Because it makes the numerator whole numbers for all data for easy comparisons by human minds. Comparing 300 to 5 is easier for people than comparing 30 to 0.5. It's the same reason machinists use inches per minute over inches per second. It's so values are between 1 and 600 and not between 0.0176 and 10. It's easier to reason about whole numbers than decimals.
  
  I guess this is a US cultural thing. I grew up in a metric country and decimals are much easier for me to compare than fractions.
Clearly a lawless hellhole. Alabama should be seized and cleaned up.

Edit: It may be unclear, but this is a riff on poor quality studies that indicate increased lawlessness among certain populations.

But also, Alabama sucks.
Once the appeals are exhausted, tap, tap. Problem solved. Cheaply. No more of our money spent to house and care for these outcast.
- You specify "cheaply". Because you KNOW in reality, it costs more to execute a prisoner than to house and care for them. So implied by this is the existence of a fucking MAGIC WAND so that you can live in the world that best fits your ideological views. I hope you will share your fucking MAGIC WAND when you have finished reshaping society.
  
  $4.00 now vs $40,000+ per year. Damn! Math is hard.

45 comments