"Laws do not stop crime; they merely make noise about crime. They say, 'Don't take anything that doesn't belong to you'." Well, that doesn't do anything." - Jacque Fresco
The Business of Incarceration
For about 60 years, the annual US prison population slowly grew to just under 500,000. Since the 1980s however, it has spiked to over 2.2 million. So how is it that the US, which claims to be the freest country in the world, also has the highest documented incarceration rate that is growing every year? It helps to understand when you think of prisons as giant crime factories. It is well understood that the people who usually end up in jail are already less fortunate to begin with. This is not surprising when you understand how much environment shapes behavior. It is the same principle behind the idea that if you want to learn French, the quickest way to do it is to go live in France. When you are surrounded by a culture, it becomes your world, and human beings are highly adaptable when given the proper tools and motivation. Imagine then when you combine every different kind of criminal in the same confined space with no freedom. Violence, rape, theft, drug abuse, and all manner of crime become commonplace. If you are lucky enough to leave such a hellish environment, you still have the same problems you had when you went in, only now you have even more of an inclination for crime because you’ve been surrounded by it.
It’s interesting to note that the cost of incarcerating someone for a year in the US is claimed to be on average about $47,000. That is a respectable salary for most people. Imagine for a moment the radical notion of paying those criminals that money every year to not commit crime. Which sounds crazy, until you realize that’s basically what we’re already paying for. The interesting difference is that in the current system, when people get out, it is a statistical probability that they will keep committing crimes; hence the crime rate continues to grow. The more people we lock up, the more criminals we create, meaning more money for the private prisons, and the more problems we have in society. Of course I’m not advocating paying criminals as a solution; that would encourage other people to commit crime in order to be paid not to. It’s just important to note how much money influences people to engage in aberrant behavior. If you want to make bad people do good things, that takes education; if you want to make good people do bad things, that takes money.
In either scenario, we are flushing our money down the toilet when it comes to solving the problem of crime. Clearly very little of that $47,000 is going toward the quality of prisoners’ basic needs like food, housing, and education. Most guards get very little pay, which in turn leads them to be highly corruptible as well. A majority of our public funds end up then in the hands of the contractors behind these privately owned prisons. Meaning the more prisoners they have, the more money they will make. Therefore prisons, like their prisoners, are also in the business of crime. It’s just like the infamous bank bail-out; we are giving money to the people who cause the problems. The world economy thrives on and creates problems because they are more profitable than solutions ("the money's in the treatment, not the cure"). This fact, combined with the rise in outsourcing, automation, and therefore unemployment, means that crime and incarceration will only get worse if we maintain the monetary system. When you understand how the economy is used against people, you will realize the sad truth that “criminal justice” simply means punishing and profiting from victims of this system. The only way to curb these results is to alleviate the source of the problem, which as I am attempting to make clear, is the controlled scarcity of resources and information.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/opinion/lessons-from-european-prisons.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0
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