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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of Slavery?
Human rights organizations, as well as political and social ones, are condemning what they are calling a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million mostly Black and Hispanic are working for various industries for a pittance. For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They dont have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they dont like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells."
*The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors.
*Ninety-seven percent of 125,000 federal inmates have been convicted of non-violent crimes. It is believed that more than half of the 623,000 inmates in municipal or county jails are innocent of the crimes they are accused of. Of these, the majority are awaiting trial. Two-thirds of the one million state prisoners have committed non-violent offenses. Sixteen percent of the countrys 2 million prisoners suffer from mental illness."
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery
arcane1
(38,613 posts)2naSalit
(86,794 posts)No "OR" about it.
blkmusclmachine
(16,149 posts)Snarkoleptic
(6,002 posts)Those who are considered to be of marginal utility as consumers or cannot have their labor fully exploited become profit centers when incarcerated (hence harsh sentencing laws).
The Independent Budget Office found that in 2012 it cost the city $167,731 to hold each of its daily average of 12,287 inmates, or about $460 per inmate per day.
Undergraduate tuition at Harvard University is $38,891 annually, or $155,564 for a four-year degree.
Of those inmates, more than 2,000 were being held for drug offenses, surpassing the number for murders or robberies.
The majority of inmates are African-American (57 percent), followed by Hispanics (33 percent), whites (7 percent) and Asians (1 percent), a New York City Department of Corrections report said. The majority of inmates come from less affluent areas of the city.
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/9/30/report-finds-nycinmatecostalmostasmuchasivyleaguetuition.html
Add to that the rise of for-profit prisons and you get an extremely perverse set of incentives. Since the objective is to maximize profitability, rehabilitation is a lower priority and for-profits (like CCA) lobby for harsh sentencing and strict immigration laws. Most definitely a "follow the money" scenario.
msongs
(67,443 posts)ananda
(28,876 posts)..