According to the Freedom House Project-America's oldest organization defending democracy in the world- we are living in the midst of a growing global trend of democratic decline and rising authoritarianism. " Fewer than a fifth of the world's population now live in fully free countries (source)."
This data science project seeks to draw parallels in the trends of incarceration, by age and gender, across Brazil, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico and the United States as they relate to the State of governance.
We have chosen these countries for our analysis because of the deep connections they have with United States historic political trends and/or political cultural parallels that have become apparent in recent years. Most notably:
-The attacks on the presidential palace in Brasilia on January 8th, 2023 by supporters of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, which were directly inspired by the January, 6th 2021 U.S Capitol attacks . Leaders of this movement have effectively sown doubt of the legitimacy of the electoral process (source).
-The deeply rooted and devastating effects of the "War on Drugs," first declared by Richard Nixon in 1973 and which was swiftly adopted by Latin American authorities with the political and economic influence of the U.S. As a results of this conflict organized crime (Drug Cartels) have evolved to become as sophisticated as the most advanced military operations ever designed against them by U.S. Military/Intelligence agencies. (source)
-El Salvador, Honduras & Mexico are home to some of the most violent cities in the world. Drug Cartels in these regions have evolved to mimic sate behaviors controlling territory public/private institutions, imposing taxes, redlining and forcing civic loyalty through terror and intimidation.According to the Latin American Public Opinion Project, approval for national military control was at an all time high as of the end of 2021 (source). Fear of becoming a homicide victim was found to be the number one variable correlated to these approval ratings:
"Imprisonment is fundamentally an exercise of power," it is a measure of class/racial struggles, political trends, policy choices, public sentiment and media interpretation (source)." This is why we believe it to be one the strongest indicators on the State of Governance for any nation; and we have chosen it as the main focus for our analysis.
Global incarceration rates continue to grow, 93% of persons detained are men, but the number of women in prison has been increasing at a faster rate. The American continent has the highest incarceration rate of all other global regions, with an average of 379 persons per 100,000 habitants as of the beginning of 2022 (source).
To test our theory we have chosen to train various machine learning algorithms to predict the Democracy Index of multiple nations based on incarceration rates and compared their performance to a robust model which includes multiple governance and economic indicators. Most notable among these indicators are the Freedom House Project's Political Rights and Civil Liberties scores.
- NumPY - Pandas - Matplotlib.pyplot
- Seaborn - Plotly - Streamlit - ScikitLearn - ImbalancedLearn
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