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Prison System is Big Business

The private prisons are big business but the state run prisons are just poorly run institutions with big buildings to hold prisoners with very low paying jobs and  no rehab.  The criminals coming in go out meaner and less motivated than they came in which is a waste but nobody wants to think about the system they just want the criminal thrown in jail.  It is low on the radar unless you happen to have a family member working in the prison system nobody wants to hear bad news.  If I was in charge, I would not be putting drug users in prison without rehab.

I've read about the prison systems all over the country

makes me cringe. It's just a big business. I've read that part of the reason behind the three strikes laws like we have here is that private companies, big Republican contributors, are getting huge amounts of money out of running the various states' prison systems. No rehab that would cost money, no medical care that's worth a damn, just the most cut rate possible warehousing. Not that the taxpayers are saving any money, the savings
all go to profits for the private companies.

Of course, prisons have always been a big business.  I read "Kind and Usual Punishment" by Jessica Mitford in the early 70s...long before the privatization thing got started...and prisons were a big profit-making enterprise even then. Of course, no matter who's running them, the guards' pay is peanuts for the worst job in law enforcement.

The taxpayer gets conned into thinking all this is good for fighting crime, but it's bull...when those prisoners get released, with no job skills, no drug treatment, no rehabilitation of any sort, they're worse menaces to society than they were when they went in. And the thing is, any attempts at reform are seen as being "soft on crime, soft on
criminals"...it's not soft...it's just sense.

But nobody wants to think about what's going on in prisons.

What’s amazing to me is that they think they can treat prisoners that way and not have to pay the piper when they come out.

What the "Kind and Usual Punishment" book said (remember, this was in the early 70s) was that state prison systems used prison labor to work on prison farms or contract with companies to do work for them and the state would get a lot of money from it but it would not be put back into the prison system.  I read somewhere that my disposable contact lenses are cut in factories set up in prisons by the company that makes Acuvue.  So it sounds like it's still going on. Somebody's making money, but it's at the state level, not at the prison level.

What they pay guards is horrible. It really came back to bite them here in Florida, where the guards at a juvenile facility were caught doing all sorts of terrible things, were people whose own criminal background should have prevented them from being hired to start with, but they were so desperate for guards they hired whoever they could get.