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Comment by Sacho | Hacker News Reader

...criminals? See https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5869, quoting from the summary:

"More than half (53%) of state prisoners were serving sentences for violent offenses in 2014 (the most recent year for which offense data are available), compared to 19% for property offenses and less than 16% for drug crimes."

Also to parent's point:

"Almost 7% of state prisoners (91,300 inmates) and 18% of federal prisoners (34,900) were held in private prison facilities in 2015"

The evil corporate private prisons trapping the poor pot smokers to extract money from them is a nice fairy tale. The reality is more complicated and forces us to grapple with the fact that there are some pretty bad people out there, and we're apparently OK with treating them inhumanely when we seek retribution.

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I don't think it's that simple. Once you get put in jail for some stupid offense you will have a lot of trouble finding work making it more likely to do criminals things. It's a negative cycle.

You're assuming the only point against private prisons is that private prisons have resulted in ridiculous sentencing for petty crimes.

The US incarceration rate is ridiculous and you know it. Even if the share of violent offenses seems plausible, that still means either there's something very wrong with the US that's turning too many people into violent criminals, or there's something very wrong with the US that's getting too many people convicted for violent crimes.

It's a lot more complex than just "poor pot smokers" getting sent to prison, though. The War on Drugs alone causes a lot of collateral damage that's feeding into the prison system. Bails, plea bargains, entrapment, ... there's a lot of problems with the US criminal justice system from an outside perspective.

There are enough private prisons in the US for there to be a private prison industry and a lobby. That lobby has obvious incentives to help shape legislation in a way that lands more people in prison. It's impossible to say what role that lobby has had so far exactly but it seems a safe bet that politicians are paying attention.

Made bad in no small amount by the American prison system. That is were most American gangs come from. Even ISIS was formed in American prisons.

> Even ISIS was formed in American prisons.

This is probably what's getting you downvoted. This seems like an extreme claim that runs contrary to common knowledge but is presented without any evidence.

Do you have a source for that? According to Wikipedia ISIS started out in Jordan as Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad and merged with several other groups before rebranding itself as ISI in Iraq and later ISIL/ISIS/Daesh. Its founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi did end up in prison early in his "career" (1992) but that was in Jordan, not in the US, and he already had founded a terrorist group at that time.

Considering al-Zarqawi is generally considered the leader/founder of ISIS and never saw a US prison, your claim seems odd.

Although al-Zarqawi was the original founder of what became ISIS, the person that made it what it is today is al-Baghdadi, who did spend time in a US prison and I presume OP is talking about him.

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