Reuters' Freeland: US Prisons An 'American Gulag Archipelago'
Chrystia Freeland has called the US prison system an "American Gulag Archipelago." The Global Editor-at-Large of Reuters made her comment during today's Dylan Ratigan show on MSNBC.
The context was a discussion of the recent WikiLeaks document dump about Gitmo, but Freeland was clearly speaking of the domestic US prison system, not our military prisons. Ratigan picked up on her theme, saying we could cut our prison costs in half if marijuana were legalized.
View video after the jump [with apologies for mediocre quality].
I'll be back with a transcript, but in the meantime watch Freeland flatly equate US prisons with the worst of the late, unlamented Soviet Union.
CHRYSTIA FREELAND: I would like to connect [the Gitmo discussion] to your favorite [inaudible], which is the budget debate. And what I thought of when we got this WikiLeaks dump, when we're talking about the budget, which is surely an issue, why aren't we talking about American prisons, and the whole American Gulag Archipelago, which is hugely expensive? Surely this is a moment for right and left to come together and say: we're spending so much money on jails. Clearly we're not getting a lot --
DYLAN RATIGAN: I just want to say, you legalize marijuana and you cut the bill in half.
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