The U.S. imprisons a higher percentage of it's population than countries like Russia, China or Iran.
Michael Criswell/Getty Images
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.
2. Gun Violence
The U.S.
leads the developed world in firearm-related murders, and the difference isn't a slight gap – more like a chasm. According to United Nations
data, the U.S. has
20 times more
murders than the developed world average. Our murder rate also dwarfs
many developing nations, like Iraq, which has a murder rate less than
half ours. More than half of the most deadly mass shootings documented
in the past 50 years around the world
occurred in the United States, and 73 percent of the killers in the U.S.
obtained their weapons legally. Another
study
finds that the U.S. has one of the highest proportion of suicides
committed with a gun.
Gun violence varies across the U.S., but some
cities like New Orleans and Detroit
rival the most violent Latin American countries, where gun violence is highest in the world.
3. Healthcare
A study last year
found that in many American counties, especially in the deep South,
life expectancy is lower than in Algeria, Nicaragua or Bangladesh. The
U.S. is the only developed country that does not guarantee health care
to its citizens; even after the Affordable Care Act,
millions of poor Americans will remain uninsured
because governors, mainly Republicans, have refused to expand Medicaid,
which provides health insurance for low-income Americans.
Although the
federal government will pay for the expansion, many governors cited
cost,
even though the expansion would actually save money. America is unique among developed countries in that tens of thousands of poor Americans die
because they lack health insurance,
even while we spend more than twice as much of our GDP on healthcare
than the average for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD), a collection of rich world countries.
The U.S. has
an infant mortality rate
that dwarfs comparable nations, as well as the highest
teenage-pregnancy rate in the developed world, largely because of the
politically-motivated unavailability of contraception in many areas.
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.
5. Inequality
By
almost every measure,
the U.S. tops out OECD countries in terms of income inequality, largely
because America has the stingiest welfare state of any developed
country. This inequality has deep and profound effects on American
society. For instance, although the U.S. justifies its rampant
inequality on the premise of upward mobility, many parts of the United
States have abysmal levels of social mobility, where children born in
the poorest quintile have a less than 3 percent chance of
reaching the top quintile.
Inequality harms our democracy, because the wealthy exert an outsized political influence. Sheldon Adelson, for instance,
spent more to influence the 2012 election than the residents of 12 states combined. Inequality also tears at the social fabric,
with a large body of research showing that inequality correlates with low levels of social trust. In their book
The Spirit Level,
Richard Pickett and Kate Wilkinson show that a wide variety of social
indicators, including health and well-being are intimately tied to
inequality.
6. Infrastructure
The United States infrastructure is slowly crumbling apart and is in desperate need for repair. One
study estimates
that our infrastructure system needs a $3.6 trillion investment over
the next six years. In New York City, the development of Second Avenue
subway line was first delayed by
the outbreak of World War II; it's still not finished. In South Dakota, Alaska and Pennsylvania, water
is still transported via century-old wooden pipes. Some 45 percent of Americans
lack access to public transit.
Large portions of U.S. waste-water capacity are more than half a century old and in Detroit, some of the sewer lines
date back to the mid-19th century. One in nine U.S. bridges (or 66,405 bridges) are considered "structurally deficient,"
according to the National Bridge Inventory. All of this means that the U.S. has fallen rapidly in
international rankings of infrastructure.
America is a great country, and it does many things well. But it has
vast blind spots. The fact that nearly 6 million Americans,
or 2.5 percent of the voting-age population,
cannot vote because they have a felony on record means that politicians
can lock up more and more citizens without fear of losing their seat.
Our ideas of meritocracy and upward mobility blind us to the realities
of class and inequality.
Our healthcare system provides good care to
some, but it comes at a cost – millions of people without health
insurance. If we don't critically examine these flaws, how can we ever
hope to progress as a society?
