The United States officially incarcerates more people than any other nation on earth.
Incarceration cost U.S. taxpayers more than $80 billion in 2016. Some states such as New York and Washington spend between $50,000 and $60,000 a year for each prisoner.
What does that cost buy?
What purposes does imprisonment serve?
What purpose should it serve?
Who should be imprisoned? For what? Why?
Who should operate prisons in the United States–government or for-profit corporations?
Pima County Public Library is inviting the community to explore these questions and share ideas at an upcoming FRANK Talk facilitated by Dr. T.J. Davis, Arizona Sate University, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies.
The event will take place Saturday, March 9 from 2 to 3:30 p.m. at the Joel D. Valdez Main Library. The event is free to attend and open to all. No advance registration required.
This article appears in Feb 7-13, 2019.
Let’s cut the cost to 20,000 and see what it buys them. Less privileges I’m sure, but why should even more harm be done to society because of their actions?
Setting all the religious and philosophical arguments aside, prisons in America are a growth industry and that tells you everything you need to know.
Think about it: prisons used to be about decreasing recidivism through education and job skills training focused on providing opportunities for people to turn their lives around if they so wanted. The “old” prison farm model decreased the cost to taxpayers by having the prisoners grow, harvest and feed themselves through their own labor.
Today, it is about warehousing people to maximize the return on investment regardless of the human toll.
Perhaps instead of building “a big beautiful wall” along the United States’ southern border the administration should considered building one continuous multi-level prison along the border, and they could get the private prison industry and its investors to pay for it.
Now wouldn’t that tell potential immigrants all they need to know about what this country is fast becoming.
“prisons used to be about decreasing recidivism through education and job skills training” – not in my lifetime. They’ve always been horrid. This is nothing new.
When the United States has less than 5% of the world’s population but more than 25% of the incarcerated population is nothing more than a false indicator of our wealth, and as a country, living beyond our means.
If the politicians who love to campaign on getting tough on crime with mandatory sentencing and longer terms of punishment were noble enough to balance a budget with current revenues without debt— I am confident that fewer wrongs in society would be worthy of being labeled “criminal”
With so many rules and regulations our society has made it very easy for the ordinary citizen to become a criminal. It’s no longer about rooting out evil and injurious behavior but rather forcing the masses to live politically acceptable lives rather than any life of liberty that always has a measure of risk.
concoin nails it! “With so many rules and regulations our society has made it very easy for the ordinary citizen to become a criminal. It’s no longer about rooting out evil and injurious behavior but rather forcing the masses to live politically acceptable lives rather than any life of liberty that always has a measure of risk.”
Government driven prohibitionist policies that have nothing to do with the traditional badge of the outlaw, “moral turpitude,” and everything to do with massive profits for the Prison-Industrial-Congressional complex contribute to the massive incarceration rates across the land.
Recall that silly phrase, “build it and they will come?” Prison building and staffing profiteers cynically utter, “Build them and neo-Prohibitions will fill them up.” And so we’ve arrived at this bankrupt point in American economics and politics. But why blame cynical, fear-of-crime mongering politicians alone? The television entertainment industry, hard-up for original storylines, sticks in our culture’s fear-stoker and bogeyman par excellence, “The Serial Killer,” into every other cop porn show. Not to mention that other strawman, the grade-school drug dealer, ever-ready to convert those 4th graders into meth freaks… The former tends to be the stuff of urban legend and if statistical data be accurate, one may be safer in her/his average campground than on the highway getting there! As for the latter, Prohibition and the logically-ensuing black market introduce the “profit” and proselytizing “factors.” I suspect that decriminalizing use, tax infusions into behavioral health systems, and character-boosting, living-wage job creation would go a long way toward extinguishing addictive escapist behaviors. An ego-corroding, alienating culture does nothing more than create a strong desire to “escape” it. The status quo may be good for the constant ka-ching of salve-merchant cash registers, but detrimental to the typical culture-inmate who merely wants his handful of happiness and has few avenues to turn to…
Be well.