Amenta Worldbuilding Info

[lintamande]

Anitam worldbuilding notes:

'Ine' is now the job name for a district or regional governor. Anitam has 31 provinces, sized between 8 and 36 million people each; provinces have hundreds of districts, and getting appointed to run a district if you're blue is pretty easy (there are elections, but they're not usually competitive elections). There's lots of maneuvering about who gets to run for the provinces. Governing a big province is a high-prestige and legitimately powerful position; you can make most appointments within your region and get a lot of sway in national policy.

Anitam has the death penalty for most crimes for which the U.S. would jail you for a long time; it's just not worth it to them to pay for you to be in prison for that long. How long it is worth paying for you to be in prison varies by caste - purples maybe five Earth years, greens maybe twenty (greens and blues also traditionally pay the cost of their own incarceration, in the form of paying for house arrest guards). Which crimes are accordingly capital crimes are set by caste and not by individual within the caste even though obviously people vary in how much they are worth to their state. Rich purples can't really buy not-being-railroaded-by-the-system except insofar as they might know blues who can exert pressure or a blue might decide they want to be owed a favor. Rich purples are not in fact frequently prosecuted. (They used to be, by blues who felt threatened. Blues these days feel less threatened and international business magnates are people you want living in your country.)

They do not prohibit possession or recreational use of any drugs but have quality control and import laws that in effect prohibit dealing some. They have the death penalty for white collar crimes with damages sufficiently in excess of the capacity of the culprit to make restitution. There are no appeals per se but any judge can review another judge's decision, and if a lot of judges are inspired to review a decision or if a judge with particular unofficial seniority is then the decision will be released with a note that it's pending review and the sentence not carried out until the review is complete. Most districts have a separate court for people under four which does not hand down death sentences, but if your district doesn't have that there's no particular prohibition on executing kids. Crimes that require cooperation of the victim for investigation typically won't execute the convicted person without the victim's approval, in order to encourage reporting. That's approximately the only context in which you might see a prison sentence in excess of eight Earth years.

Execution is by hanging except for greens and blues, who can take poison. There are around forty thousand executions a year (scaling US stats for crimes that'd be capital crimes there, adjusting for fewer young men, no drug war, and fewer unsuitable childhood environments). The vast majority of those are murder or attempted murder. The conventional wisdom is that about 6% of defendants are sorta-innocent - they were there but maybe didn't actually hold the knife, they were there but there were relevant mitigating facts not introduced or considered before judgment - and that about 2% are properly 'they got the wrong person' innocent. This doesn't provoke particular outrage; justice is about finding the right balance of false positives and false negatives. They'll reopen a case if presented with evidence they got the wrong person.

Prisons are significantly nicer than U.S. prisons and low recidivism is a priority. Prisons usually have job training programs, counselors, internet access, and (as practical) jobs you can work at a normal wage while incarcerated. The exception is reds, of course. Anitam has a red prison but it houses very few people at any given time, they get no perks, the reds have to administer it themselves with random checks to make sure the prisoners haven't been released, and it's pretty rare for a case to go to trial if a red committed a crime that'd be prison-worthy; usually the arresting officers will just murder them.

I don't know how typical any of these things are of other Amentan societies, you'd have to ask Alicorn, they just all filled themselves in when I was being Shisali's coworkers.

[Moriwen]

Okay, I'm giving in to my persistent curiosity: is Amenta in fact inspired, at least in part, by Housman's "Oh Who Is That Young Sinner"?

[Alicorn]

Never heard of it (I'm mostly not a poetry person), but it's apt.

[Antares]

Was the inspiration the Burakumin of Japan, the Dalit of India or the Paraschites of ancient Egypt?
Also, how did the caste system develop? Were cave dwelling Amentans already separated into castes? How did the pollution hysteria came to be, since I doubt hunter-gatherer priorities rate cleanness terribly high.

[Alicorn]

The inspiration was the prathmuni of Tharios. Plus I vaguely knew about the Burakumin and that India had an untouchable caste.

I don't have a history all figured out but it was post civilizational development.

[Antares]

Oh, from Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic?

[Alicorn]

Yep.

[MaggieoftheOwls]

I am intensely delighted by this.

[Antares]

How come?

[Kappa]

Is there a family tree available of the Amentan Finweans and their Amentan love interests and offspring etc?