Comment by k1ns
3 years ago
Prisons in the USA are for-profit enterprises that rely on a consistent population. They have no incentive to rehabilitate, in fact it's the opposite. What I don't understand is how a country with so many advantages like the USA could come up with arguably the worst prison system in the world. As a citizen, it's embarrassing that this is accepted by those in power as a good solution.
> how a country ... like the USA could come up with arguably the worst prison system in the world
I will leave you with this quote by John Erlichman:
"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities, (...) We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
Source: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman
And, because everything is complicated, the family denies it all:
The 1994 alleged ‘quote’ we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father. And collectively, that spans over 185 years of time with him,” the Ehrlichman family wrote. “We do not subscribe to the alleged racist point of view that this writer now implies 22 years following the so-called interview of John and 16 years following our father’s death, when dad can no longer respond. None of us have raised our kids that way, and that’s because we were not raised that way.”
Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...
One thing has become abundantly clear over the last few years: people in politics regularly do things that go against their most cherished beliefs when it is politically expedient. Those that hold out are notable for how rare they are, and it frequently ends their political career.
One of the several hundred thousand nazis, erm German refugees, the Eisenhower administration brought here in 1953. This was much larger than operation paperclip. The GOP reloaded with that cohort. Their descendants are still wrecking havoc upon our country. I'm sure some come and have done well for us but many are trouble. That huge S&L scandal back in the late 80s was by some of them.
Could you provide more info on this? I haven’t heard of this before. I don’t doubt it’s true, I’d just like to see more about it.
Regarding Ehrlichman specifically, his Wikipedia page says he fought for the US during WWII, and his father died serving in the Canadian military in 1940 (when Canada was fighting, but the US was not).
So it seems pretty low to call him a Nazi.
What are you talking about? Ehrlichman was born in the US in 1925.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman
Ehrlichman was born in the US though, so I'm not sure where you take the Nazi part from?
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Private prisons are problematic in their own right, but they only make up 8% of the total prison population at the state and federal level. imo, we (the citizens) are to blame for constantly championing a system of accountability that believes accountability is putting a man in a box and taking every future opportunity he doesn't know yet away from him. You can certainly blame those in power, and they share some blame, but we also elect to these sentences.
https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/private-prisons-in...
Agreed. It's not "powers that be" that impose this system on Americans, it's we Americans ourselves. We vote for politicians who are tough on crime - meaning long prison sentences, unsafe conditions, no robust public defense.
All true, but we also don’t rehabilitate. Prisoners should come out better then they went in not worse.
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I said "prisons...are for-profit enterprises", not "prisons are privately owned". Government-owned prisons still rely on, and provide revenue to, companies specifically designed to profit from the prison population.
That’s true of everything in an economy. It’s also true that Norway’s prisons rely on, and provide revenue to, companies specifically designed to profit from the prison population. Is a prison suddenly better if a government worker builds the bars rather than a contractor?
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> Private prisons are problematic in their own right, but they only make up 8% of the total prison population
It's not how many people they are in charge of that matters, but how much money they donate to politicians to be be "tough on crime", and how much other soft money influence they have to make citizens think that crime is a problem that politicians need to be tough on, and to demonise politicians who aren't (which right-wing media is all too happy to help with).
Even if private prisons only have a small slice of the prison pie, they still work hard to make the pie as big as possible.
Serious question: does this come from real first hand experience of knowledge of the issue or are you simply repeating the NYT/the Atlantic/Vox etc.?
My understanding is that about 8% of US prisons are privately owned. Perhaps that's not a good thing, but I don't think it is at all correct to say that "prisons in the USA are for-profit enterprise" when the actual number is so low.
I have also heard this narrative for a long time that the prisons were filled mostly with non-violent drug offenders, only to learn that this description only applies to about 3.5% of the prison population. Maybe that's not a good thing either, but again I feel like I have been intentionally deceived after reading supposedly high-minded journalism into believing a fundamentally false understanding of what is going on.
Yes, my introduction to the world of commercial software development was an internship at a company that built products for prisons.
To be clear, I said "prisons...are for-profit enterprises", not "all prisons are privately owned". Even state-owned prisons are cash cows for the prison industry. I'm not interested in what narrative you identify with, I'm stating a fact.
Well that's true of literally every thing that is made and every service delivered. There's an absolutely huge industry build around primary education that dwarfs the prison industry by a significant margin.
Actually prisons and schools have quite a lot in common so maybe you're onto something.
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The criticism of private prisons (or the prison industrial complex) in general is more than just referring to privately owned and run prisons, its referring to prisons, jails, detention facilities, psychiatric hospitals, private security and guards, transportation and logistics, health care services, surveillance and other technology providers, food/commissary/library services, communication/phone services, cash bail creditors, etc. etc. all run for-profit.
The other issue is more in general about having incarceration rates that are "four to six times that of its high-income peers in Europe and Asia". So you might recognize that as an issue too and think perhaps its the privatized prison system, the root causes for crime like inequality, disenfranchisement, homelessness, the reasons for drug use in the first place, or even just perhaps switching to an evidence-based rehabilitation system.
But now imagine you are a liberal, you need a way to acknowledge and talk about these problems without ever actually having to change anything. So that's why liberal journalists are talking about non-violent drug offenders and the 8.41% private prison population and so Biden stopped the justice department from renewing contracts for federal private prisons and he pardoned all prisoners of federal non-violent marijuana possession charges. Of course it doesn't actually do anything, but that was the point. And that's what liberalism is.
As it turns out, Maine (where the author of the article ended up) has gotten rid of all their for-profit prisons, as of 2020.
https://www.criminon.org/where-we-work/united-states/maine/
> Prisons in the USA are for-profit enterprises
About 7-8% of US jail and prisoners inmates are in for-profit correctional institutions, most are in public institutions which are not operated for profit.
Private, for profit prisons are an issue, but they are very much not the norm in the US.
A very small number of prisons are for profit and advocates of being soft on criminals love to push the idea that they make up a majority, just as you implied.
> As a citizen
Of where?
I, as a lawful citizen of the United States of America, am not embarrassed by the prison system.
I am embarrassed, however, by folks who use hyperbole without merit to try and appease the masses without having the courage to go against the grain for fear of getting "downvoted" and losing faked internet points.
The fact that you believe the USA has the worst prison system in the world, compared to somewhere like, I dunno, Venezuela, supports my prior point.
This has nothing to do with "fake internet points" and everything to do with firsthand experience that most citizens lack completely.
You chastise those that "appease the masses" but mention Venezuela's prison system. How much firsthand experience do you have with Venezuela's prison system? My wager is that your concept of their prison system is based on articles specifically designed to "appease the masses".