As somebody from Germany, that sounds all kinds of horrible. Is this actually codified in law or just something that's practiced without anybody stopping it?
I always thought these amendment rights are one of the most important pillars of what makes the US such an "amazing free democracy"? How can US Americans simply be deprived of those rights, doesn't that create a kind of "two-class" situation where some people are "more equal" than others?
It's in especially stark contrast to how Germany applies its version of a constitution, the Grundgesetz. Afaik most of them apply to everybody in Germany, even non-Germans who are just residing in Germany.
Not saying Germany always applies this perfectly but denying somebody their Grundrechte is, for obvious historical reasons, usually a very big deal in Germany resulting in a lot of press attention and public outrage.
American criminal justice system is in desperate need of reform. It's built around punishment and not rehabilitation making it wildly ineffective. It's totally inhumane. You take a bunch of people who don't know how to live in a society, then torture them instead of teaching them how, in a room full of other such people. Then they get out and shockingly over 76.6% of them do it again within 5 years as compared to the Norwegian system where people are treated like human beings and only 20% re-offend within 5 years [1]
I agree with you to a large extent about the US prison system because it is certainly flawed. However I get so tired of these blanket comparisons between two countries that have almost nothing in common.
There are a lot of Scandinavian transplants in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota. Perhaps you could compare Norway to just those three states, or just the white Lutherans in them, if those demographics data are available.
> Is this actually codified in law or just something that's practiced without anybody stopping it?
> I always thought these amendment rights are one of the most important pillars of what makes the US such an "amazing free democracy"?
You say this like the net political direction in the US is standing up for people's rights. Each political party does gather support with rhetoric about defending their constituents. But actually implementing those changes would upset some entrenched interest, so they then settle for attacking their political enemies. Then the media and the courts go to work justifying it.
The Bill of Rights itself was only meant to be a reference and legal backstop rather than a enumeration, yet even those test cases are horribly failing. For every ideal it references, the practicality is that said right been effectively nullified in every day life - it's technically possible for you to follow a narrow course of action that would preserve your right, but wholly impractical.
IMHO this came about because the desire of being able to choose is deeply ingrained in USian culture, but judging whether a choice is fallacious is not. So rather than viewing the concept of rights as qualitative assessments of actual behavior, rights are interpreted as a fundamental axiomatic base that complexity layers over. Witness how commonly it's said "A person gives up their right to X when they Y".
I'm not an expert, but I believe it is the result of the structure of the law itself.
The American constitution does not grant any rights to the people, because our rights result from the nature of human existence and logically precede any government authority. The law recognizes rights, not grant them--they are "inalienable". Without rights, we wouldn't have the authority to form a constitution in the first place--by what right would we enter into such an agreement? Instead, the American constitution is designed to constrain the government by enumerating a limited set of government powers and no others. The Bill of Rights amendments do not grant any rights, they simply further restrict government power--just look at their wording: "Congress shall make no law...".
The fourth amendment is a limit on government power, not a grant of rights: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..." The amendment doesn't say "We grant the people the right to be free from unreasonable searches", it says people already have this right and the government must not violate it. Convicted criminals have violated the rights of others, and so they lose their own rights. Since they don't have rights, no violation is possible.
This is a much stronger type of individual protection than any other body of law. If the government does something you don't like, the burden is on the government to show it has the authority to do that thing. It doesn't need special case applications for non-citizens, because the rights of every individual person on American soil precede the law itself. And there is an open question about the degree to which they apply globally to non-citizens--every individual has the right to life, liberty, and property, and the government can't just go seize it (except under a declaration of war).
> This is a much stronger type of individual protection than any other body of law.
In theory, but apparently not in practice? Because the practice seems to work out like this: You are protected from government overreach until you are not anymore, by, for example, being a convicted criminal or maybe even a "terrorist".
That criminal lost his protections, he's now suddenly something like a de-facto "lesser citizen".
Now you can argue he's to blame for that and thus it's totally okay. But at the same time, it shows that the US approach does not actually protect the individual that well, because those protections seem to be rather easy to be undermined, as in the end, it will always be the government that defines and decides who should be considered a criminal/unworthy of those protections?
The above scenario would be absolutely unthinkable in Germany. If the German government would attempt something like that, it would run into very clear boundaries set by the Grundgesetz, which also guarantees all the rights from the UDHR [0] and you can't simply deny somebody their human rights, they are after all still human, regardless of what crimes they committed.
Sure, the German government also regularly tries to find ways around that, but there is a deep understanding among the German society that a lot of "rights" and "protections" always apply naturally, without exceptions, because exceptions would hollow out their whole purpose of being "undeniable human rights" in the first place. Denying people these rights would be the equivalent of declaring them "not human anymore".
Sure, it just doesn't work, and for political reasons, nobody wants to put their neck out to actually fix it. I'm no fan of the Donald, and credit where due, he's passed the first meaningful criminal justice reform in years. The joke of course being that's where he sees himself after his term so he should make it as cushy as possible ;)
I always thought these amendment rights are one of the most important pillars of what makes the US such an "amazing free democracy"? How can US Americans simply be deprived of those rights, doesn't that create a kind of "two-class" situation where some people are "more equal" than others?
It's in especially stark contrast to how Germany applies its version of a constitution, the Grundgesetz. Afaik most of them apply to everybody in Germany, even non-Germans who are just residing in Germany.
Not saying Germany always applies this perfectly but denying somebody their Grundrechte is, for obvious historical reasons, usually a very big deal in Germany resulting in a lot of press attention and public outrage.