The US now has about 2.2 million prisoners, about 25 per cent of all the prisoners in the entire world

The US now has about 2.2 million prisoners, about 25 per cent of all the prisoners in the entire world. In Belgium, where I now live as a political refugee, about 1 out of every 1000 people is in prison. In the US, it is about 1 out of every 140 people in jail - a dramatically higher percentage than anywhere else in the world. Even in absolute numbers, many more people are in US prisons than in the prisons of China, even though China has 1.3 billion people, versus 300 million for the US. If you don't count children and the elderly, you realize that about 1 out of 80 US adults is currently behind bars, in jail or prison. If you count adults who have been criminally convicted and include those still on parole or probation as well as in prison, you are down to about 1 out of 30.

These are, simply, terrifying figures. Yet the US has huge amounts of crime - so they obviously didn't arrest all the criminals. This is because, in fact, many of those people in US jails are innocent. Even the close "allies" of the US, like European governments, can not get their own citizens out of US prisons despite massive proof of the victims' innocence. Many of these 2.2 million US prisoners are essentially slave labour for US corporations, working for wages below those paid in very poor countries in Africa or Asia. And these victims in the US prisons, all had "lawyers" to help shove them into jail. But such lawyers are NOT defenders of the poor. Many of them are court-appointed arm-twisters who tell their poor victims to "take a plea bargain" for a few years in jail, or else face a longer term if they risk a trial. These government-paid "lawyers" in the US get put out of work, and become jobless or worse, if they don't play along to help jail innocent victims. Foreigners are treated very badly by US police and court procedures. The US has been repeatedly convicted of violating treaties, and of never even notifying foreign governments that their citizens have been arrested. As many Mexicans have found out, the US even sentences foreign people to death, while not allowing the victims any chance to have their own government help them. Bribery and the Praetorian Guard Now, as regards business, foreign companies, and the US bribery culture: The basic model of the US courts - well understood by large US corporations, but much less understood by foreign companies - is that the US judges, federal and local, all run their cases and courtrooms in a generally pro-business, pro-corporation fashion, PROVIDED that the businesses who find themselves in court, pay the appropriate financial tributes and bribes to the US governmental powers, and that their governments are politically supportive of the US. Thus, there is great danger in the US, for companies that are associated with ownership in Venezuela, China, or any one of a hundred other countries that are potentially critical of the US and its policies. Even if the near neighbours of the US, Canada or Mexico, started rocking the US boat too severely, their companies would quickly find themselves punished via politically-motivated legal proceedings.