There's a bit of an ouroboros in the prison system. The root problem is that so many politicians responded to the (quite genuine) crime wave through the 1980s (which ended in 1993) with a long series of "tough on crime" laws culminating in the infamous 1994 Crime Bill (the authors of which, to be fair, would not yet have had the data to show that the crime rate was already dropping like a stone - that's always going to be hugely delayed). This mean that a huge number of people were locked up in the interest of public safety, even though a pretty huge percentage of them were things like simple possession and other broken-window crimes that really didn't hurt society all that much. So there was suddenly a massive prison population that cost the state a huge amount of money to house and feed, and which crowded the existing prison system to the breaking point.
So they turned to a pair of institutions that have long been around, but never on this scale. Private prisons have always been a thing in the US, dating back to the aftermath of the Revolution. In the past, however, this made up a relatively small portion of the incaration system, and most private prisons were gradually taken over by the public sector.
Prison labor became a major thing after the Civil War, when inmates were brought in to do some of the work that had previously been done by slaves. This iteration of the practice died out in the early 20th century, but use of convicts for jobs that were particularly dangerous or backbreaking (such as swamp clearing and road building) continued for a long time. In the middle of the century, prison labor was used as a formal part of the rehabilitation process - the theory was that the inmate would get useful skills for post-prison life, and spending time stamping out license plates or such would help him feel like a man rather than caged animal.
The huge rush toward mass incarceration post 1980 brought these systems into the forefront, because the state and federal governments desperately needed a way to cut costs, but relaxing crime policy had become political suicide. So the prison-industrial complex was assembled. Now, 40 years later, the issue has become that this complex doesn't want their profitable applecart overturned, and is thus putting a lot of lobbying effort into keeping the incarceration rate up.
The solution is a fundamentally simple one, but it is politically difficult. End broken-windows policing (and, more importantly, release previously arrested broken-windows offenders), treat drug addiction as a medical issue instead of a criminal one, and rebuild a functional mental-health system so people that are temporarily dangerous to themselves or others are given treatment instead of prison. Do that, and the problem vanishes. The prisons empty out, the private jailers go bankrupt, and prison labor ceases to be a part of the economy.
This is going to be difficult to do because it will attract hate from both sides. On one end, you'll have a lot of screaming about coddling criminals and letting the rapists and murderers (who would remain locked up, but that never gets in the way of rhetoric) run wild. On the other, you're going to have screaming about "uinless all prisons are destroyed today, there is no improvement! Reform is facism!".
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4229355 times)