Period.

and tell it like it is.

That says it all

Are you saying we aren't special?

and don't forget that demographically the USA has one of the largest ethnic minority populations in the world.

And a political climate where even the most liberal candidates have to continually tout their "tough on crime" credentials...

for prison guards
AND
a subsidy for companies using the slave labor

Did I mention profit?

And they demand a contract which guarantees a minimum 90% occupancy rate so judges are handing out prison sentences for things that used to be fines and/or community service. They are also handing out longer prison sentences.

Two factors at work here -
Increasing layoffs in the middle-working class and a shrinking amount of living wage jobs means we have a critical excess in the middle-class workforce, leading to an increase in depression and financial desperation as people's standards of living go down and they see themselves sliding downwards with no apparent way to climb back up. People in poverty or with few skills find themselves in an increasingly worse situation.
Excessive drinking and drug use and other risky personal behaviors borne of desperation tend to go up when people are stressed, resulting in more arrests for crimes related to the excessive use, petty theft, petty fraud, domestic abuse, etc.

Add that to the money-making possibilities leveraging massive amounts of low-risk taxpayer subsidies with private investment to operate a wide range of private business (from revenue per head of prisoner maintenance to the onsite subsidized manufacturing facilities using low-cost prison labor) in the prison industrial complex and add investments, you end up with a very, very profitable way of dealing with an "excess population" of fairly fungible workers in the prime of their lives. It's a throwback to the 19th cent. company towns, except now they're prison towns, and the workforce can't unionize to protect themselves. So the company bosses don't have to care how this prison workforce is treated - the law is on the boss's side because those prisoners "fucked up" (by not being the right color, the right "class", not enough friends in high places, or otherwise having enough money for a good lawyer or to pay off the local police force) and need to "take responsibility by taking their punishment". There are lots of lobbyists out there to ensure that communities would be willing to turn a blind eye for the perceived amount of money that these places can produce.

The majority of policy makers in this country are not interested in rehabilitation as due to "austerity" and trickle-down economics, there is really no place or jobs for the prisoners to go to after they are rehabilitated. And it's just so much easier just to keep them off the streets, lock them up and otherwise forget about them - just have them pay their "debt" to society working in some corporate prison complex.

Haele

We seem to have a strong punishment impulse. People are doing more time for drugs here than they do for murder elsewhere. People go to prison for years here for crimes that wouldn't warrant the inside of jail cell in other countries.

You even see that impulse at work here on DU; it's like a Pavlovian response.

And then there is the impulse to criminalize everything. We used to say "don't make a federal crime out of it," but we did.

It was also apparent on that thread about the woman who spray-painted the bigoted ad on the New York subway. One poster noted that she could (should?) be charged with vandalism, and maybe even assault for tussling with a woman trying to stop her.

So, what do we do to change things? How does America lose its position as the world's #1 jailer?

In which there is, in our national psyche, some remnant of the belief that illness is caused by sin.

At least temporarily, for writing checks to the power company that they had insufficient funds to cover. In most other countries, that wouldn't be a crime. No identity theft or stuff like that, just for being poor and wanting electricity.

The funny thing is, it would have been cheaper on society to have just paid the damn electric bill for them, but of course that would be communism and 47% moochers getting something for nothing, right?

but I think a big part of the problem is that people at the bottom don't have any dignity.

Don't get me wrong, it's hard to have dignity when you're shit poor anywhere in the world, but it seems like with poverty here, it's a short trip from being poor and on welfare (whether in the 'hood or in a trailer) to getting high and shooting someone just because they looked at you the wrong way.

There are various reasons for this lack of dignity, and among them are a dreadful educational system, lack of mobility out of the bottom of society, lack of living-wage jobs, and different cultures of depravity.

It's simplistic to just blame an unjust system for our high incarceration rate.

Of course many of our drug laws are ridiculous, poor people are often imprisoned when it isn't justified, and the worst criminals – by far – are unpunished: such as war-mongering politicians and highly corrupt money changers that destroy economies.

But still, there is a high rate of serious crime in the US. Most of this crime is committed by the poor. It is their fault. I've lived throughout much of the US in my life, and I see who is committing most of these serious crimes. It usually isn't the rich. It is clear that our criminal justice system isn't completely unjust.

Watching national news can piss one off about the criminal rich and powerful. Watching local news can piss one off about the criminal poor.

I decided that saying that poor people aren't allowed to have any dignity was taking away too much agency, but leaving that out sort of pointed the finger at the poor people themselves.

Neither one is right or wrong.

Perhaps an accurate way of putting it is saying that the culture at the very bottom is a sick culture, both in the sense of being depraved and in the sense of being diseased. Society at large feeds into and off of that sickness, but there is some culpability for the people at the bottom themselves.

I had these people living next door for a while. The grandmother had died, so her grandson, who we'll call Mitt, moved in. I would guess that Mitt was in his mid-40s. Along with Mitt was his oldest daughter (23), her boyfriend (23), their baby (1), Mitt's other two kids (16 and 13), Mitt's girlfriend (40), Mitt's girlfriend's daughter (18), and Mitt's girlfriend's daughter's boyfriend (18). If you're keeping track, this is nine people living in a three bedroom house.

Seven of these people were really nice people. Polite, helpful, courteous, good neighbors, and all that.

Mitt and his younger daughter, who we'll call Paulina, had issues. She was in middle school, and she was illiterate. She came by the house one day selling something, and I looked at her paper, and she didn't have the word "school" spelled properly. The schools here are actually ok, but she was not learning. She would cut school several times a week, and she was in danger of flunking out.

It's not like Mitt didn't care that his daughter wasn't going to school. He would get drunk on cheap beer every night and scream at her. He would also scream at everyone else in the house. Meanwhile, Mitt didn't have a job. He collected disability and lived off of the money that his girlfriend brought home and the profits from growing weed in the back yard.

The whole culture in the house was a culture of getting drunk, getting high, playing video games, getting shitty tattoos, and listening to shitty rap music. It's not cool for a middle-schooler to be ditching class every day, but that situation would never produce a scholar.

Mitt's not society's victim, he's just a douche, but it was less about being actively bad than it was about a sort of lowest-common-denominator immaturity. Meanwhile, all the younger people in the house aren't working or going to school, so they're all on a trajectory towards loserdom themselves, even though they're all essentially nice people. The whole situation was about a mentality that I don't have and I don't understand.

I don't think any of them were criminals, but all it would really take is for some dumb friend to say "Hey, let's do some meth and go steal a TV so we can go buy more meth" for the local jail to have a bunch more people in it.

I'm sure this exact story is unfolding in every single county in the US.

The question is how to break that cycle.

and we pass lots of laws. its hard not to break one every day - like i did today when i went 65 in a 60 zone. that's illegal.

prohibition and sodomy are about the only laws we've ever taken off the books.

We are stuck in Victorian England and Puritanical America.

I wish some men would just come right out and say "I believe women should be under our thumb, slavery should be reinstated, and only white landholders should be allowed to vote."

I think that might get through to the contingent of people that aren't white male landholders that their voting rights are always in peril as long as they let neanderthals get back in office, no matter how great or small the position.

For profit prisons and the "New Jim Crow"

is come right out and say only male landholders are allowed to vote (because that is what many of them believe), women need to submit to men, and slavery is a pretty good idea.

That's what they believe, after all, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

I think it's related to who settled this continent. All those religious nutballs.

American believe in some Deity in a much higher percentage than any other developed country.

Americans attend church in a much higher percentage than any other developed country.

Americans have the highest murder and violence rate of any developed country... rape, too.

Americans have the highest teen pregnancy rate of any developed country.

Americans have the highest incarceration rate of any developed country.

Americans are weird.

Seriously.

in elections.

There are bucks to be made here, and where there are bucks there is political access.

The for-profit thing is recent and a by-product of our sick society, not the cause of it.