The United States has over 2 million people in jail. It is home to 4.4 percent of the world’s population, and 22 percent of its prisoners. The private-for-profit prison “industry” is a $70 billion industry.
The system is deeply immoral. State governments guarantee private prison corporations an occupancy rate that will keep prison cells filled. These companies charge exorbitant rates for prisoners to contact their families by phone, and outrageous service fees to prisoners trying to access their money upon release. Prisoners work for pennies an hour on behalf of major corporations. The work is fine, but the profits made out of it are not. This has all come about because the prison companies spend millions of dollars lobbying for laws that needlessly keep people behind bars for far too long.
Bernie Sanders has introduced legislation that will put an end to for-profit prisons, barring bar federal, state, and local governments from contracting with private companies who manage prisons, jails, or detention facilities. It requires Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to improve their monitoring of detention facilities and eliminate private detention centers within 2 years. It reinstates the federal parole system so that officials can individually assess each prisoner’s risk and chance for rehabilitation. It also ends the immigrant detention quota, which requires officials to hold a minimum of 34,000 people captive at any given time! Inbelievable! (information from the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign). Prof. Mark Mazower of Columbia University asks, “Can one expect voters to object to indefinite detention without trial in Guantanamo when they acquiesce in sentences that condemn people to decades in solitary confinement or sentences that run into hundreds of years?University
I wouldn’t blame the foreign reader for thinking I was making up all this up; but I’m not. It is wrong to profit from the imprisonment of non-violent human beings and the suffering of their families and friends. There seems to be a modestly bi- partisan drsire now to end the era of mass incarceration, to treat people with dignity and to ensure that they have the resources to get back on their feet when they get out. Recently, President Obama ordered the release of nearly 6,000 nonviolent offenders from federal prison, but a drop in the ocean of over 2 million prisoners, most of whom are non-violent; but it is a start.
To make matters worse, it is very difficult to find a job if you’ve been in jail, and the idea of having been punished and that is the end of the matter is an idea that is not widely held. Some states also take away your vote permanently. There is a suspicion that this whole incarceration policy is a way of keeping young, black men out of circulation; I don’t know if this is just and fair.
No non-violent offenders should be in prison. Even heroin addicts- who ought to be treated, rehabilitated and possibly fined. But if you are non-violent, by definition you are not a danger to society, and so do not need to be in prison. Republicans often justify a lack of gun control on the basis that America, despite a high rate of gun ownership, has a low crime rate. But if America has such a low crime rate, then shouldn’t its incarceration rate reflect it?
Having said that, I disagree with Democrats when they say that the prison system is racist. On the train home yesterday, me and my friends were shouted at and verbally abused by an African-American who blamed us for his problems. (Never mind the fact that we’re British.) He was also highly misogynistic, declaring that ‘when the black man speaks, the woman must listen.’ Granted he was drunk, and his wife (also black) was visibly annoyed at him. But his abrasive manner reminded me of the worse excesses of the Black Lives Matter movement, who seem to play the victim card with everything- the incarceration movement included. One of the most effective ways of reducing the incarceration rate is to get people to commit less crime. This is a problem that disproportionately affects blacks, because they commit a disproportionate amount of crime.