Can America be Cured of a Prison Addiction?

Give me your BLACK, your SPANISH, your poor,

Your INCARCERATED masses yearning to breathe free,

I lift my lamp beside the PRISON door

- The Statue of Liberty 

"Gimme some more!" you can hear her screaming from across the atlantic, "just a few more... I need more convicts! please, I am begging you..." 

The United States has built up her tolerance and is now capable of incarcerating over two million humans at any given moment. This is quite impressive for such a young nation; perhaps it is her youthful hormones that allow her to metabolize these prisoners so quickly and spit them back out into society after having corrected them. But does she actually spit them back out, or does she merely circulate them through her massive corporeal system for what seems to be an eternity? 

America just can't seem to get enough of her population in shackles. She is injecting her prison system with more and more people every day, her corridors flooding with this highly addictive substance known as human life. Her veins are pumping it past the tourniquet of minimum security all the way to her heart, her Supermax prison.

Three quarters of the two million people are of color, one half is black. More and more women are being incarcerated, of whom the majority are also black. The United States incarcerates far more people than any other nation, averaging one out of every hundred adults. 

"America, come out with your hands up!

We know you’re in there,

put the black man down and come out quietly.

It’s okay, we are not going to hurt you!"

In the United States, the problem of prison overcrowding has been solved by building bigger and more efficient prisons that are, coincidentally, privately owned.

The cost of imprisoning all these people is quite high. The combined total spent on these individuals by all 50 states last year was around $44 billion (44 Billion of taxpayer dollars that is). The irony is that the United States incarcerates so many people that it can scarcely afford to cover these costs. Who will imprison these people?

The majority of the correctional facilities in America are state owned and operated, but a growing number of prisons are in the hands of private entities; about 10% of all prisons so far. These corporations may be in private hands but they are publicly traded and you can buy their shares on the stock exchange (some are expected to be big earners). In this way the market regulates itself; private companies step in to "manage" the surplus of US inmates while making a tidy profit for themselves and their shareholders. How do they economize to make a profit? by cutting corners and warehousing as many prisoners as possible in the least amount of space. Not only are there public and private prisons but there are also different security levels within these prisons; jails within jails to be precise.

At the very heart is what’s known as a Supermax prison, where the most dangerous offenders are kept close to America's bosom. Here inmates can suckle from America's strongest source of power, her fear. One inmate of a supermax prison claimed it had been almost a year since someone had shook his hand. Obviously, the cost of keeping person in a supermax prison is significantly higher than keeping one in a warehouse; for an accommodation like the one pictured above, it costs around $65,000 a year.

So what does all this have to do with drugs? The majority of the people filling America's prisons are in jail for non-violent drug offenses and the prisoners keep on coming! 

Strangely, the prescription drug market is as strong as ever with $290 billion in sales and growing, however none of these drugs users wind up jail. Prescription drugs such as Adderall can have grave side effects, but as long as you have a prescription you're fine. The prescription drug industry is the biggest industry in the United States with about half of the population taking at least one prescription drug and many prescription drugs are highly addictive. 

In states where medical marijuana is legal (with a prescription), people (without the money for a doctor that can give them a prescription) are still arrested for possession. In California, marijuana arrests have doubled in recent years.

If everybody is using drugs (with or without a prescription), then who is getting arrested and filling up the jails? Blacks and Hispanics mostly.

So the prisons are filled with people who use drugs, private companies come in and undercut the state's costs to win government contracts to hold inmates, and then they earn again on the same inmates by leasing out their labour to other private corporations. That means the private correction facilities are earning twice on each prisoner and sharing the profits with their investors; that is America's self prescribed fix for justice (at a profit).