Crime pays for US prison companies
Business - Crime pays for US prison companies - INQUIRER.netThe United States leads the world in the number of people it incarcerates and government figures show the country’s prison population grew by three percent to a record 2.3 million inmates in 2006.
Harsher sentencing policies have put more criminals behind bars and prison management firms such as the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and The GEO Group are racing to build new jails or expand existing facilities to house more convicted felons.
CCA’s profits swelled to $35 million in the fourth quarter of last year, rising from 32 million in the same period of 2006, as revenues jumped to $382 million.
[GEO Group’s] profits rose 10 percent to $11.5 million during the fourth quarter of 2007.
The War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs is just the biggest federal jobs program in history. Rather than provide real employment for poor people in the cities, we only allow a violent criminal underground black market economy to support the least among us. That provides easy arrests for cops and easy cases for prosecutors, who can then cite statistics that make it seem like they’re fighting crime, even as the drug prohibition fosters more crime. It also provides business to the construction companies that build prisons, the suppliers that maintain prisons, and the companies that secure prisons, all funded by the taxpayers. Then we lock up the poor from the cities in those prisons and hire the poor from the rural areas to guard them. Politicians get to look tough on crime and corporations get the benefit of way-below-minimum-wage prison slave labor.
