Louisiana has the largest incarceration rate in the entire world, 13 times that of China. This is a state where two car burglaries can be met with a 24 year prison sentence. Alarming as car burglary is (no pun intended), it pales in comparison to white collared Enron CEO's who at first, sentenced to 24 years, cut deals of appeals, and finally has his sentenced reduced because a federal appeals court thought the original sentencing was "too harsh". Even after the original ruling judge condemned the former CEO for "imposing" on "hundreds, if not thousands of people a lifetime of poverty". Louisiana is a big fish in the scheme of America's prison complex. Examining it can help to challenge and question a system that disproportionately affects and punishes blacks and latinos than any other demographic. But for all that is wrong and brow-raising in Louisiana, it dwarfs the size of America's incarceration rate in whole. Americans makes up 5% of the global population, yet accounts for 25% of the entire worlds incarcerated citizens.
There are more incarcerated persons locked up in America than the Gulags Joseph Stalin was internationally scorned for. And for some reason, this is ok. The only thing we're doing better than Stalin, ethically, is that we haven't exterminated millions of people...yet. Or have we?
Starting during the Reagan era of deregulation, reigning in with the "war on drugs", incarceration rates skyrocketed. Private companies like GEO and CCA stepped in during the 80's to offer a helping hand to the struggling federal prison systems that were afflicted with overcrowding prisons. These conglomerates today are behind lobbying, contributions to political campaigns, and allegedly have had their hands on the writing of U.S. domestic policies such as the "the three strikes" rule, which sentences anyone with a third criminal conviction to a 25 year sentence.
With these for-profit-prisons getting paid per prisoner per day by state and federal tax dollars, it becomes clear to the discerning person that these institutions benefit from harsher sentencing, highest possible frequencies of crime, and the most vague interpretations of criminal law. When you contrast that with the goal of a civilized and productive society, the goal of which is to proactively eliminate crime and its seeds of discord for a better tomorrow, it is readily apparent that for-profit-prisons and productive societies have goals that diametrically oppose one another. There is no value in a society that is crime free in the eyes of for-profit-prisons. Society profits from productive law abiding citizens. Private prisons, in a nutshell, do not.
With the skewed rate at which Americans are locked up to the rest of the world, you would imagine that Americans are innately savage and unlawful, born without civility. You would imagine that America, land of the free, is perhaps also land of the most insidious, dangerous people out of more than 200 other nations.
At the center of this discussion on America's prison system is how we frame the purpose of the prisons. Are they to rehabilitate criminals? To punish them and teach them never to behave unlawfully again? To separate them from society and keep citizens safer (inwhich case we are failing as over 50% of inmates are incarcerated for non-violent crimes)? Among all of these mentioned, one purpose that would seem far from possible is monetary profit. But research, statistics, and studies indicate that the privatization of prisons has been driven by just that.
This is the definition of government oversight. This is the conversation that is lacking during presidential debates. This is our democratic republic being sold to the highest bidder; when the interests of a governments citizens are culled to millionaire lobbyists and campaign contributors. When it comes to for-profit-prisons, this is a step towards that police-state we philosophize about in movies and novels.
Last year, the CCA offered to buy 48 state prisons in exchange that the states guarantee at least a 90% occupancy of inmates. How can a state guarantee such a figure without curbing the civil liberties and rights of citizens? I guess New York's stop-and-frisk policy figured out how to handle that loophole.
