Prison For Profit Is Alive And Well

When I was growing up my sisters and I watched television religiously. I can remember, around 1984 or so an episode of the now extremely cheesy Diff'rent Strokes.

This episode was deemed “a very special episode” because it dealt with young Arnold Jackson being offered marijuana by a classmate, but more importantly it ended with an appearance by then First Lady Nancy Reagan who offered up her now infamous catchphrase “Just Say No”.

Just like “Where's the beef” from Wendy's and Bartles and Jaymes' “Thank you for your support”, “Just say no” became synonymous with the 1980s, and it also help to usher in the “prison no matter what” culture that now exists here in the United States.

How many people in this country are aware of the fact that in the last three decades the prison population ballooned from 300,000 to over more than two million, that ladies and gentleman gives us the highest incarceration rate in the world, not exactly the thing we want to be remembered for.

The reference to the former First Lady is appropriate because we really have her late husband, former President Ronald Reagan to thank for the spike in these numbers. In 1982 it was the Gipper's White House that gave us another infamous 80s catch pharase “The War on Drugs”, four years later after the tragic death of University of Maryland basketball superstar Len Bias from a cocaine overdose,

the Reagan Administration and politicians on both sides of the aisle demagogued a serious issue for political gain.

To keep the ear of his suburban insulated base Reagan, in response to the crack epidemic proposed what is now called mandatory sentencing (or mandatory minimums). In some states the laws basically breakdown this way, people convicted of possessing five grams of crack, which weighs less than two sugar packets, are automatically sentenced to five years in prison, ten grams of crack ten years, and so on.

Since these sentences are on the books as laws, judges are not given the opportunity to impose their own sentences which would provide more leeway. Under mandatory minimums counseling, probation, and suspended sentences are not even an option.

Now ask yourself, does a seventeen year old kid arrested for possession of crack cocaine deserve to effectively have his life ended for one mistake, albeit a glaring one. Even if the kid does the full five years and is released from the can at around the age of 22, the amount of opposition he will face as a convicted felon on his intergration back into society is an uphill battle to say the least.

Ask any convicted felon how difficult it is to get a job, an apartment, or get into college. America is good at times at paying lipservice to second chances and we wax poetic about everyone making mistakes, but when it comes to those who have done time, more often than not we turn our backs on those principles.

I mentioned earlier the automatic five years for five grams of crack law on the books of most states, one important piece of information that is conveniently left out by most on the right is that the same defendant who is caught selling powder cocaine has to be caught selling 500 grams of cocaine 100 times to receive the same five year sentence.

I am thoroughly convinced that the difference in that law is to incarcerate a large porportion of black and brown men in America's inner cities across this country. Crack was and still is extremely prevalent in large cities around the country, and the majority of possessors of it are ethnic minorities, whereas cocaine was and is seen as a status drug prevalent in America's suburbs, where it's user's and sellers are overwhelmingly white. The same drug with the same affect on the people who use it, yet the punishment for possession of the same drug is heavily skewed. The question is why would any politician from either side of the aisle put in place a law with this kind of disporportionality.

America's dirty little secret is that the “prison for profit” scheme is alive and well. Corrections Corporation of America and the Geo Group are prison's answer to Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers.

With state governments not being able to keep up with the costs of housing thousands of prisoners, especially with the grim economic times, private prisons are ready to step up and assume the states overflow of the convicted. “CCA, one of the leading providers of for-profit prisons in the nation, recently sent letters to 48 states, offering to buy their facilities for a huge chunk of dough — $250 million toward the purchase of state prisons. In a time when the national economy is still limping and state budgets are shrinking, the state of Ohio found CCA’s “Corrections Investment Initiative” was an offer it couldn’t refuse.”

To my knowledge, there are not too many civilized nations around the world that actually allow corporations to profit from locking people up, however in this world where the right wants to privatize everything from our mail to Social Security it's not surprising.

When you ponder all of the questions and look to the future you can't help but ask yourself how did we get here. We used to be invested in our children's education, now we are invested in locking them up. Kinda backwards isn't it?