WELCOME TO AMERICA, HOME TO 5% OF THE WORLD’S POPULATION AND 25% OF THE WORLD’S PRISON POPULATION
PIC is a term used to attribute the rapid expansion of the US inmate population to the political influence of private prison companies and businesses that supply goods and services to government prison agencies. Since the 1980s, our prison population rate has quadrupled. Have americans gotten that much more criminal, or is it our criminal justice system? Who makes money from people being incarcerated? Corporations that contract prison labor, construction companies, surveillance technology vendors, lawyers, and all of their respective lobbyists. Who pays for this? You, the tax payer.
The incentives are all wrong. Prisons are not incentivized to rehabilitate and punish, but rather, are purely profit motivated. Further, elected officials want to be appear ‘tough on crime’. Federal prosecutors, not defenders, become judges and elected officials more often, as no one wants to vote for the guy defending the crack dealer or the clinically insane bank robber. They want to vote for the prosecutor who worked hard to put the ‘bad guy’ away in a cage for as long as our legal system will allow. The prosecutor knows very well that sending the crack dealer to jail won’t rehabilitate him, and chances are high of recidivism (53% for arrested males, and 39% of arrested females will be re-incarcerated). If anything, he or she comes out of jail in a worse situation he was in before, and will probably sell crack again a.) because thats the only business he knows, and b.) he is still addicted c.) they go back to the same environment they were in before which promotes illegal behavior and d.) state criminal policies will not have changed.
