In March, we tried to fulminate your fury with a report on “Prisons for Profit”. We started the article with this observation… “Profit is not the only good in our world! Other things are important as well, and some may be even more important than profit.” We then went onto suggest that liberty might be one of those things, and showed several examples of our Justice System squeezing the liberty from regular citizens, storing the desiccated husks in an inadequate prison warehousing system, and pumping the money to judges and corporations. We hoped that was enough to make you aptly appalled, then moved on to the next outrage. We’ve updated “News To Make You Furious” before, but generally we like to give you a little breathing space before we do. However, this month we ran across a couple info tidbits that we just couldn’t sit on…
The first eyepopper we encountered was the overall rate of incarceration in the US. You may know the US leads the rest of the world in the number of people behind bars, both as absolute numbers and as a percentage of population. But do you know how big that percentage is? One in 1000 (.1%)? One in 500 (.2%)? C’mon, it couldn’t be as much as 1 in 200 (.5%), could it? Guess yet again. According to the Pew Center on the States, slightly over 1 in 100 (1%) of the US population is currently behind bars. This doesn’t include the people on parole, probation, or other forms of non-prison “judicial oversight”, it’s just the folks actually behind bars. Let’s say that one more time…
Over 1% of the US population is currently behind bars!
So what was the other thing that got under our skin? Well, it was once again the role of profit in imprisoning our fellow citizens. An article entitled “Corrections Corporation of America Named Top Dividend Stock with Insider Buying and 5.72% Yield” gave the joyous news about the stunning growth of CCA, Corrections Corporation of America, the conglomerate buying up prisons around the country. OK, fine, we’re all very happy for the people whose 401k’s have grown with them.
But then look at this graph… as you can see, it jumps sharply right around 1980. Was there any prison-related event that happened around that time that could have caused the jump? As any statistician will tell you, “correlation is not causation”, but here’s something that happened just about then… CCA was founded in 1983.
If this doesn’t give you enough ammunition to ruin Christmas dinner with the family, let us point you toward a couple more links you may love to hate…
Corrections Corporation of America Loses Four Prison Contracts This Month from the ACLU
Are Prisons Bleeding Us Dry? By Sheila Bedi, The Daily Beast
“Beyond Bars” a project of Brave New Foundation
Update 12/19/2013– The hits just keep on coming. We ran across this video today that puts all the prison statistics into one depressing place.
