#prison privatization

    Ask anybody about the harsh realities of prison, and they will paint for you a picture of an unspeakable hell. It’s not just prisoners who tell of a patterned corruption in prisons (their suffering and bias is the most obvious). It is also those who are meant to uphold the law and enforce it that share horror stories. In an opinion editorial released this year in The New York Times, Nicholas D. Kristof shared an anecdote chronicling this reality. “Judges and prison officials are rebelling at the injustice of our justice system. . . Judge James R. Spencer, a federal district judge said when sentencing a former F.B.I. informant to life without parole for selling crack cocaine to support his own addiction: “A life sentence for what you have done in this case is ridiculous; it is a travesty.” This is just one example of somebody suffering the repercussions of the mass incarceration that makes America’s prisons so notorious. So why, then, if so many people with so much power in the law that disagree with this system, must this virulent issue persist? Federal legislation makes combating this tragic human rights issue nearly impossible.

This goes deeper than legislation, however. The Corrections Corporation of America gets help from government contracts. Private prisons build relationships with right-wing politicians. A devastating example of this symbiotic dynamic between the government and the privatization of prisons was revealed in a piece done in the Times by Paul Krugman, documenting Chris Christie’s (R-New Jersey) “close, personal ties” to Community Education Centers, which is a halfway house system for criminals. Halfway houses are an offshoot of private prisons, carrying over the same ethics, style of imprisonment and punishment, and attempt to reform. Despite claims from Christie that the Community Education Centers is a morally sound, and safely conducted system, prisoners are still abused and raped by other inmates, the halfway houses are severely understaffed due to budget confines, and those who do work there are disillusioned and do nothing to ease the pain of people spending their life there (those of which are there for non-violent crimes). Krugman continues in his Times piece, “You shouldn’t imagine that what was discovered about prison privatization in New Jersey is an isolated instance of bad behavior. It is, instead, almost surely a glimpse of a pervasive and growing reality, of a corrupt nexus of privatization and patronage that is undermining the government across much of our nation.” This is undeniably true. Reports of abuse, unfair life sentences carried out by reluctant judges, and the continued growth of private prisons as a business are ubiquitous in nature.

    Personally, what makes this entire ordeal with the CCA and other private prisons so dubious for me, is that they do not wait for people to commit crimes to predict how many cells they will have to fill. The root of predicting this criminality starts by turning an eye towards childhood. Neil Gaiman, an English author popularly known for his children’s books, wrote an interesting, and eye-opening article in The Guardian. He underscores the importance of literature and education by prefacing, “Once in New York, I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons -- a huge growth industry in the U.S. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth -- how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be 15 years from now? And they found they could predict the answers very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year olds couldn’t read.” What a startling revelation. At a time where high school students are dropping out at such a high rate never seen before, education funding decreasing or being slashed altogether throughout the country, and America falling behind in education comparative to places like Japan, it is difficult to deny the correlation that exists between falling education rates and rising crime rates. Are we inadvertently putting our children in the crosshairs of the private prison industry? With America incarcerating people at five times the rate as the rest of the world (to put that in even more context, that is more people imprisoned than citizens in countries such as North Korea, Saudi Arabia, China, and even Russia), and with so many students dropping out and doing poorly on the Programme for International Student Assessment test (PISA), it’s a sad reality that puts the evils of the CCA in perspective. Moreover, poverty in the U.S. continues to grow at an alarming rate ever since the recession that started in 2008.

Due to this problem that the rich have created by subsidizing the utmost 1% of gains in the country, job opportunities for the “99%” disappear. Consequently, people become desperate and turn to selling and abusing drugs or getting involved in other criminal operations to support themselves and their families (who are either oblivious to this activity or have no power to stop it). When they eventually get caught, as they always do, they spend the rest of their lives going straight into the system that created those circumstances to begin with. Furthermore, with no access to money before turning to drugs, they were not able to get access to higher education -- reaffirming the correlation between low education levels and the likelihood of committing crimes. In a nation where everybody loves to talk about freedom, and how hard we had to fight to obtain it, we have done a superb, brilliant job at creating a for-profit modern day slavery nightmare.