this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2025
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Today I Learned

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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. The only states w/o any are Wyoming and Oregon.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 hours ago

There are way more states without any death row inmates.

Source: the link you posted

[–] [email protected] 46 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Not surprising that they are also some of the most uneducated, the populations our prison industrial complex preys on the most.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 13 hours ago (6 children)

Alabama is still the home of a lot of US operations like NASA.

States like Ohio and West Virginia are worse

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

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.)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

So I was REALLY wrong. Lol

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 hours ago

A significant part of NASA may be in Alabama, but If bet that's not where most of those educated engineers are coming from.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

Worse.....for having NASA? I'm quite confused.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago

Because that makes members of Congress more likely to sign off on spending bills, not because Alabama is a great place for it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

Maybe it is isolated to a particular region but last time I checked there were a lit of smart people in Alabama. Everyone from farmers to aerospace engineers are really to innovate.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago

Oh, of course we have a lot of smart people in all of our states. But, unfortunately, Alabama has been consistently at the bottom overall in education.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

Alabama is the 49th dumbest state in the country.

If it weren't for Huntsville, Alabama would be a land of wild ape men

[–] [email protected] 12 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

The death penalty needs to end in America. Especially with people like Trump at the helm.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 14 hours ago

The shithole of the shithole.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 14 hours ago (3 children)

inmates per 10M inhabitants

Why per 10 million?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I mean, you can choose any denominator, as long as you're using the same one to compare statistics

[–] [email protected] 4 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Sure but using a non standard denominator makes off more difficult to compare to other metrics.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Sorry, what is the "standard denominator" for comparing executions?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 hour ago

Powers of a thousand; per thousand, per million, per billion, etc

[–] [email protected] 9 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Considering this is US, at least they're not using football fields

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago

x inmates per football stadium, where 1 football stadium equals 43,583 persons.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Right? Alabama doesn’t even have 10 million people.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 13 hours ago

We used covid money to build a new private prison named after our governor!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Once the appeals are exhausted, tap, tap. Problem solved. Cheaply. No more of our money spent to house and care for these outcast.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

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.