President Obama believes we need to revamp our criminal justice system. The first step should be removing the profit incentive, i.e. privatization, from the prison business model.
Saw a post on facebook. One of those clever display cards that read, "I've got a crazy budget idea. What if we fully funded schools and made prisons make up their budget deficit with box tops and money from Target."
There were many comments, the great majority about educators, salaries, pensions, tenure, etc. and the great injustices therein. Some of the commenters were obviously right wingers who believe teachers have fast-food-worker value; others were progressives who decry how little respect, appreciation and support we give to those who are shaping our children's lives.
But no one mentioned the Private Prison Industrial Complex.
America is home to 5 percent of the world's population but 25% of the world's prisoners.
Our incarceration rate is six times higher than China's. Only one country has a higher incarceration rate: an archipelago of 155 islands of East Africa in the Indian Ocean called Seychelles, with a total population of about 90,000.
There are many reasons why the United States throws so many of it citizens and/or guests into the pokey. History shows Nixon's War on Drugs started the practice, subsequently expanded with Reagan's Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and mandatory minimum sentences. Then there was Clinton's Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 with the three-strikes law, followed by a dozen more congressionally passed creations, increases or expansions of minimum sentences since.
Yet more than reasons our history of enacting harsher sentencing laws represents an immoral rationale or excuse for supporting an industry that generates revenue, in all its many forms, by treating humans as dangerous prey/sub-human business inventory.
We lock people up as an excuse for supporting private businesses. We ruin their lives, take away their hope and dignity and TRAIN THEM to be better criminals so ACME Prisons can increase their stockholder dividends.
This post wasn't written to address how many of today's law enforcement officers behave as wholly advantaged and armed hunter/combatants against those they are supposed to serve and protect. We know about that problem. The perverse acceptance of human incarceration, as administered by the public's state and federal criminal justice systems as a free market, incorporated-for profit industry is the real issue.
The privatization of the military was bad enough. Private contracting companies that provide everything from soldiers, 'advisors' and ground support to construction, infrastructure, weaponry, transportation, food, beverage, entertainment and more have successfully made money for the few at the expense of better value for the many. The Military Industrial Complex, as warned about by President Eisenhower in 1960, represents corruption and waste at the highest level.
Thanks, Congress.
The attempt to get rid of the Post Office is just as shameful. The Postal Clause was added to the United States Constitution (Aricle 1, Section 8, Clause 7) to facilitate interstate communication as well as to create a source of revenue for the early United States. It benefits the commons. It shouldn't be strangled to death by laws that are passed to benefit free-market companies that don't want competition from the people's government.
Lawmakers who support eliminating the United States Postal Service are beholden to capitalism, not patriotism. Again, thanks Congress.
Yet profiteering from defense and delivery services don't involve the incarceration of human beings.
There needs to be a line drawn.
Arresting, convicting and then housing humans for profit is incorrigible. There should be a special place in hell for American citizens who hide behind their corporate directives (or their oath) in their quests to constantly increase revenue from the indiscriminate caging of humans, at minimum costs for maximum profits. Locking up more humans, to increase revenue, has become a directive no different than selling more hamburgers, cars, beer, cigarettes, shipping services or cable TV.
That's disgusting.
Education, defense, the post office, environmental protections, union rights, they're all being trampled by privatization. Maximum profits first, the welfare and best interests of the commons an afterthought -- if it's considered at all.
But no business sector deserves being drowned in a bathtub more than the Private Prison Industrial Complex.