Something is Wrong . . . Something is Very, Very Wrong . . . .

The Gadfly knew that there was an escalating problem on this issue, but honestly was stunned to find out that it is this horrifyingly out of control:

The United States has about five percent of the world’s population and houses around 25 percent of its prisoners. In large part, that’s the result of the “war on drugs” and long mandatory minimum sentences, but it also reflects America’s tendency to criminalize acts that other countries view as civil violations.

In 2010, The Economist highlighted a case in which four Americans were arrested for importing lobster tails in plastic bags rather than in cardboard boxes. That violated a Honduran law which that country no longer enforces, but because it’s still on the books there its enforced here. “The lobstermen had no idea they were breaking the law. Yet three of them got eight years apiece.” When the article was published 10 years later, two of them were still behind bars.

http://crooksandliars.com/2013/12/land-free-us-has-25-percent-world-s


Get that dear readers?  The country that is supposedly a beacon to liberty and freedom seekers the world over, holds 25% (1/4th) of all of the incarcerated people on the entire planet in it's own jails and prisons.

It has become so bad that as the article goes on to state:

According to a 2012 report in The New York Times, state spending on prisons is now growing faster than any other budget item other than Medicaid. California now spends more on its prisons than its higher education system – a stark reversal from thirty years ago, when it spent three times as much educating its citizens than locking them up.

How in the fucking name of Jeebus H. Kripes do we as a nation expect to thrive and prosper as the world's foremost democracy when we are spending our tax dollars at three times the rate on imprisoning and keeping imprisoned our citizenry than we are in providing them with a quality education?

How did we get to this ignominious point in our short history as a nation state?  This is the kind of statistic that a country, whose founding principles employ lofty words and phrases such as "equality," "unalienable rights," "life," "liberty," and "the pursuit of happiness," should simply be ashamed of.

The article highlights one of the obvious causes of this atrociousness, namely the now widely recognized miserable failure that has been the 40+ year old national "war on drugs."  But there are other culprits as well and the article, worth reading even if a bit lengthy, documents other contributing factors.

And as it so happens, one of those contributing factors, and in The Gadfly's humble view, one of the most despicable, has only cropped up in the past decade --- and that is the privatization of the prison industry.  As a Mother Jones article recently noted:

We are living in boom times for the private prison industry. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation's largest owner of private prisons, has seen its revenue climb by more than 500 percent in the last two decades. And CCA wants to get much, much bigger: Last year, the company made an offer to 48 governors to buy and operate their state-funded prisons. But what made CCA's pitch to those governors so audacious and shocking was that it included a so-called occupancy requirement, a clause demanding the state keep those newly privatized prisons at least 90 percent full at all times, regardless of whether crime was rising or falling.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/private-prisons-occupancy-quota-cca-crime


In other words, factoring the corporate facets of profit margins and investor returns on investment in to the equation of locking people up appears to be influencing lawmakers to legislate new laws, and update existing laws, with the thought firmly in mind that taxpayers will be on the hook for private prison beds that remain empty.  Got to fill those beds somehow - right?  The only solution?  More draconian laws!

Hell - if we keep this shit up, it's only a matter of time before debtor's prisons return as a routine aspect of our society -- which was basically the act of imprisoning people for the crime of being too poor to pay off their financial debts and . . . oh shit! . . . . . The Gadfly spoke too soon:

ByALAIN SHERTER  MONEYWATCH April 5, 2013, 12: 39 PM

(MoneyWatch) Thousands of Americans are sent to jail not for committing a crime, but because they can't afford to pay for traffic tickets, medical bills and court fees.

If that sounds like a debtors' prison, a legal relic which was abolished in this country in the 1830s, that's because it is. And courts and judges in states across the land are violating the Constitution by incarcerating people for being unable to pay such debts. 

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/as-economy-flails-debtors-prisons-thrive/


Sigh . . . .

The Gadfly can only bring these issues to your attention dear readers.  It's up to you to find the collective will to do something about it with the goal of effecting the necessary changes which are needed to put us, as a unified country, back on the path to "Liberty and Justice For All."



----TFG