Hard to disagree with the headline. Our prisons are made for punishment. Everything from 2 meals a day to charging prisoner's families for basic crap like soap, basic health care, toothpaste, toilet paper, letters, phone calls, to decades of solitary confinement. And that's what's legal and on the books. Off the books is a whole new level of barbarism, not the least of which is the prison gang system, sexual assault, etc, and there's no denying that we ignore, enable, and allow that to exist. We know how to grind out bitter, desperate, and unemployable re-offenders like no other country can.

I welcome more public activism from countries in extradition decisions that raise awareness about our shit system. Voters in the US don't care so much about this issue, so the PR helps. We are so focused on eye for an eye that we forget the real outcomes of this set up.

Edit: An honest, non-sensationalist example regarding toilet paper and sanitary pads for female prisoners in New York. "no access to clean underwear, feminine products, and toilet paper, forcing some of them to 'bleed through their clothes'" https://www.attn.com/stories/4148/female-prisoners-toilet-pa... As a US citizen, I'm completely embarrassed about this kind of thing, and this example isn't the worst of it by a long shot.

"Voters in the US don't care so much about this issue"

Agreed. I'd even go so far as to say there is a certain segment of the population that is "happy" with it. I've seen many examples of lower-middle-class people that seem to need a lower class of people to exist. They hold a deranged view of "shadow justice" that exists in our prisons. So many times we hear "he/she will get what they have coming in prison".

I feel like the US system is focused on punishment of the criminals instead of protecting the public from these criminals. Locking them away should be a necessary evil since we have no better (more humane) solution, not an active punishment because it makes some people feel better or superior.

No better solution? I disagree.

Without getting creative, how about repeating the Australia experiment, for starters? That turned out pretty well for the world.

The US has a lot of land. Take some of it that few people want (Alaska, Rockies, Arizona, Dakotas, etc) and let convicts run their own society there in physical isolation.

One of the purposes of our justice system is to remove the offenders from amongst society. Separation does not require caging!

Sure it's easy a few hundred years later to look back and say that it was a great idea, but what amounts to a multi-generation exile was probably a bit overkill for many (not all) of the prisoners.

>Authorities have yet to spell out precisely what damage Love is accused of doing to American computer systems aside from saying that he stole the “personal information of users.”

Dollars to doughnuts this is another Gary McKinnon type situation - e.g. a trivial perl script that found embarassingly weak username/password combos. They haven't told us what he did because it reveal horrifyingly weak security and shift the conversation into "how was this even allowed to happen" instead of "bad man hacked us".

As always, no quarter is given by embarassed people in high places.

Do you think the accusations against McKinnon are rubbish?

Under alleged crime: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_McKinnon

With Brexit the UK will likely drop the human rights treaties currently enforced by Strassbourg.

This isn't just a US problem by the way. There have been court cases involving extradition to Belgium.

> “The way that mental health is dealt with in America is not in any way therapeutic,”

True.

Amen. The dismantaling of our US state run mental health institutions in the 80s and 90s (despite their warts) created many bad outcomes. Speaking as the son of a good nurse that worked these places prior to the purge.