Under Mao, social and political compliance were enforced through self-criticism sessions: A petty criminal or simply a non-conforming individual was "invited" to publicly confess anti-social behavior. I don’t know if that was what was happening here in 1982, a few years after Mao’s death, but I doubt the men surrounding this downcast boy were congratulating him on a job well done.
This prisoner is one of almost 2 million adults and children in US correctional facilities. More than a half million who have never been convicted or sentenced, or who have fulfilled their sentences, remain incarcerated for the crime of poverty: They cannot make bail or meet probation requirements.
Blacks and Latinos make up about 30 percent of the US population, but almost 60 percent of inmates. Human Rights Watch documented “abusive, degrading, and dangerous” conditions within local, state, and federal facilities.
These conditions and incarceration itself drove millions of Covid cases among inmates and guards who cycled in and out of jails and prisons carrying infections in both directions.
The nationwide prison death toll is generally uncounted, but Vermont boasted that not one of its prisoners died of Covid infection. Technically correct, it discounted the suicides that followed lock downs with weeks of solitary confinement that fit the definition of torture under international law.