If, on their first visit to Earth, extraterrestrial beings wanted some quick and easy way to determine which human social groups were dominant and subordinate, they would merely need to determine which groups were over- and underrepresented in societies' jails, prison cells, dungeons, and chambers of execution. As we look around the world and across human history, we consistently see that subordinates are prosecuted and imprisoned at substantially higher rates than dominants. The disproportionate imprisonment of subordinates can be seen across a wide variety of cultures and nations, including the Maori of New Zealand, the Aborigines of Australia, Native Americans in the United States and Canada, native Algerians under the French occupation, Caribbean immigrants in England, foreign immigrants in the Netherlands and Sweden, the Lapps of Finland, the Burakumin and Koreans of Japan, the Tutsi of Rwanda and Zaire, and the Arabs of Israel, just to name a few.

Recent data from Australia and the United States show what can only be regarded as an extreme overrepresentation of subordinates as targets of the criminal justice system. For example, the indigenous people of Australia are imprisoned at a rate more than 15 times that of nonindigenous people. According to a recent U.S. State Department human rights report, more than 45% of the Aboriginal men between the ages of 20 and 30 have been arrested at some time in their lives. Furthermore, the incarceration rate for Aboriginal young people is 21 times greater than that for non-Aboriginal young people.