"The people in Ellsworth, Kansas are lucky: it has a prison. That statement may seem a little odd, but for the good people of Ellsworth the jail is a lifesaver. In a region of dying small towns increasingly populated by the aged, the prison is a reliable source of valuable jobs.
Ellsworth was recently part of a scheme offering free plots of land to city dwellers willing to give up the hassles of urban life for small town Kansas, and as I watched a Little League baseball game on a sunny day at the local high school, it struck me as a pretty good deal.
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And it was the prison that made it possible. The jobs it provided meant Ellsworth was still viable. Ellsworth's Main Street did not have the boarded up windows that plagued other towns nearby. Its diner was busy with a lunch time crowd (and yes, everyone inside did know everyone else)."
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<snip>http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1782971,00.htmlThis writer missed that the prison populations spell institutional
racism of apartheid dimensios, missed that the prisons are used to
inflate legislative districts without affording voting rights, and
used to inflate minority population demographics in republican backwaters.
The massive prison population is the principal sign that the
US has become an evil empire, one that can't exist without
denying over .5% of its population freedom.... so when it
it gone too far?
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