WHO DO PRISONS SERVE?

In the battle over our ever growing private prison industrial complex one question has been left out: Who is it that this prison system is supposed to be serving? This may be the key to why privatization works so well in some instances and is such a disaster in others. The public that a for-profit company serves must be compatible with the means of making a profit. In the prison industry they are not compatible. Our prisons are one component of our system of justice and that system exists to protect the law abiding people in this country from those who would prey upon them if left unchecked. The appropriate product of such a system is a society where people can live without fear of becoming victim to a criminal act. To accomplish such a goal it is necessary to lessen crime and that is what our system of justice, in its service to we-the-people, is supposed to do. Prisons are part of that system and so they serve the people as well. It is their duty to contribute to a reduction in crime.

When a prison system is run for profit, a reduction in crime means less money paid to the prison as well as to the various industries connected to that prison, so their target public and their bottom line are not compatible. Companies must grow and make profits. To grow, private prison corporations must have an ever expanding demand for their service. That service is to keep criminals locked up to prevent them from continuing to commit crimes. No company can grow by creating less need for its product. To survive and to insure a good return on investment and time, it is absolutely vital that they increase demand for what they offer. In the case of privatized prisons, that product is the incarceration of people perceived to be dangerous. The demand for that product depends upon an ever growing number of criminals OR on an ever growing number of human actions perceived as being criminal. By creating a for-profit prison system within our system of justice we have guaranteed an increase in victims, an increase in crime, an increase in the number of actions that are perceived to be dangerous and worthy of incarceration and a lessening of freedom from fear for the rest of us.

Our government’s growing refusal to acknowledge and act upon their responsibility to serve their appropriate public, we-the-people, has resulted in a bloated and sluggish system of justice that serves no one beyond those who financially profit from it. Though this country holds only 5% of the world’s population, it holds 25% of the world’s prison population. Contrary to what some may believe, the United States is not an exceptionally degraded and criminal country, so those two statistics are shockingly out of sync. They exist because crime has become big business – not to the criminals who commit it, but to those who keep them locked up. This is how we wind up with characters like Sheriff Joe Arpaio gleefully expounding on how tough his prisons are and how thoroughly he degrades his prisoners without one word being uttered about that prison’s responsibility to the community. The prisons in Arizona have come “out of the closet” on that score and now openly serve the corporations that run them, but in truth, ever prison system run for profit has changed masters from us to the bottom line. The marketing of a dangerous environment in need of more and more prisons is in full swing. Advertisements to convince us we need the products these prison corporations offer are fed to us daily through our news media. These companies intend to make profits and they will continue to grow and continue to make those profits at our expense as long as we continue to allow for-profit prisons to exist. We need to restore the people’s understanding of the purpose of our system of justice, of why our Founding Fathers designed it the way that they did. To do that, we might want to stop and think for a moment whose pockets those profits are coming from. That may be a criminal with his hand in your wallet, profits demand more criminals, so there are plenty to go around, but it is also the corporation that promises you protection from that criminal . . . for a price. Pretty good racket these boys have going on. How long will it take us to catch on?