In the end we will be fighting wars to keep people employed (probably already the case) just like for profit prisons strongly encourages incarcerating more people.
It is a very sad world where we favor profit over lives and suffering.
It is a very sad world where we favor profit over lives and suffering.
https://reason.com/blog/2015/06/02/are-for-profit-prisons-or...
Most likely the reason for this is that private prisons enjoy no monopoly position; why lobby when others will capture the benefits?
Generally you're going to find very, very, very few people that are willing to have a facts based conversation on the topic. The popular narrative is to pretend that private prisons have driven the population boom - having a single digit share of the total prison population 15 years ago - despite the fact that it was overwhelmingly the government prison system and government employees that pocketed all that money the last 40 years.
Anyone here want to run rough numbers on how much combined income the millions of government prison and related workers derived in the last 40 years? Or tally how many millions of government jobs were created over the decades by politicians by putting millions of people into government prisons (and keeping them there)? It's trillions of dollars that the government has paid to its own workers, between the government employees putting prisoners there, and the government employees that keep them there. Accordingly, nobody could possibly have a larger vested interest in the prison boom than the government.
You are correct to note that public prisons are just as bad. Prison guards, companies that supply public prisons, police, firms that contract prison laborers, etc., are just as greedily pro-incarceration as private prison shareholders.
From this position of wisdom, what is the optimal communication with people who are against mass incarceration and excessively anti-privatization?
Is it to attack them for being ideologically blinded? Or try to convince and coalesce with our natural allies?
If someone is ignorant of a truth that is plain to you, you get to decide if they are a friend or an enemy.
Apparently government profit prisons do an even better job. Now that private prisons are increasing, the prison population level is beginning to decline after 40 years. Look out for the narrative violation.
And yes I'm aware that the rise of private prisons isn't actually the reason prison populations are finally no longer increasing. However, I find it hilarious to poke a hole in the false narrative of government prisons somehow being better, when at least 95% of all the prison population of the last 40 years went into government prisons.
Nearly the entire prison population boom - mostly 1980 to 2010 - occurred at a time when private prisons represented a tiny fraction of the prison base. If you go back to Clinton's Presidency - a time in which we saw the prison population continue to explode upwards rapidly - private prisons represented a meaningless single digit portion of the system.
The radical majority of the profit earned from the prison boom went into government specified pockets, not to the shareholders of private prisons. Handed out as special favors to create jobs in a political district, benefit construction companies, benefit police unions, and so on. Most of the employees that have benefited from those jobs have been government employees, millions of them over the years, which have derived hundreds of billions of dollars in pay from the government prison complex.
So the theory is that private prisons have a greater vested interest in boosting the prison populations than the government does? Then explain the massive boom in government prisons (and the government prison population) from 1980 to 2010. Explain how the government doesn't have in its own interest, growing its own size by putting more people in prison to be managed via ever greater tax sums / demands; passing more laws to hire more police to put more people in prison; hiring more government workers to manage more government prisons, to benefit voting districts, to ensure re-election; and on and on it goes.
> probably already the case
This also leads to this problem: "Pentagon Tells Congress to Stop Buying Equipment it Doesn't Need" (http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tells...)
One may argue whether or not that leads to wars but the mechanism, if demonstrated, surely would not be a simple one.
"It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear. While such an economy may produce a sense of seeming prosperity for the moment, it rests on an illusionary foundation of complete unreliability and renders among our political leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war."
if anything, we are living in a phone economy.
That's not to downplay phones, or electronic portable devices in general, but they are one of the most ubiquitous non-foodstuff around now.
Should the US be "the world police"? If not us, then who?
US as a world police is heavily biased to it's own interests, and not to the interests of peace and coexistence.
The (military historical) literature is full of examples of this not working well. Making it Canada instead of the US, and using the UN as an IWP, the rules of engagement in Bosnia led to ... extremely widespread dissatisfaction.
I don't think an IWP is consistent with the mores and reality of the nation-state.
It sounds pretty, but until we are ready to say what is and isn't just, and acknowledge that that makes some other sun just and needing of adjustment, it won't matter.