Comment by oooyay
3 years ago
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.
We are in agreement. I could have added "... prioritize retribution with rehabilitation at best an afterthought"
My main concern exactly.
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?
I agree with your one example and disagree with the thousands of others designed to profit off of incarcerated individuals instead of rehabilitate them.
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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.