Prisons: the New Growth Industry

America, the great America, is renowned throughout the world for its entrepreneurial opportunities and economic prowess. Its methods of ascension haven’t been the most glamorous, though. Almost immediately after its birth, infant America embarked on one of the most brutal and horrific human exploitation schemes known to man—slavery.

Native Americans, and particularly black slaves, were beaten, worked and beaten, to a deathly demise for profit. Their owners, with delicate, manicured hands and dressed immaculately, quickly grew rich from their chattel labor.

Later, the Industrial Revolution spread that wealth to an extent, growing the middle class. Even a portion of the descendents of slaves got a piece of the action.

Growing beside the Industrial Revolution, and then surpassing what is now a bygone age, is the military-industrial-complex. Profits in the unfathomable trillions are collected off of wars, destruction and grisly death.

Emerging still is yet another profit monster—America’s multi-billion dollar prison matrix; sixty billion dollars a year to cage and confine a large and growing mass of non-violent human beings.

The state of California alone doles out $10 billion annually for its prison system; the largest in the world with 174,000 prisoners and another 125,000 on parole or in juvenile detention. Just four years ago Californians were paying just half that for so-called “corrections.”

To put this in perspective, check this out:
*The U.S. watch industry pulls in $6 billion a year;
*U.S. mass transit collects $8.8 billion a year

Yet the state of California’s annual prison budget alone exceeds these national numbers. There’s more:
*American fuel and coal consumption amounts to $16.9 billion annually;
*Our use of stationery supplies adds up to $17.7 billion;
*and we spend $35.6 billion on personal care:

None of which comes close to the national $60 billion prisons suck up while sapping the life out of their inhabitants.

Prisons are one of the fastest growth industries of our time. The brutal and horrific business of locking up people; separating families, stigmatizing for life drug addicts and other non-violent souls is the financial life-line of a few rich folk against the poor masses.

And what does America get for all those greenbacks? Not much… the highest recidivism rates in the world; the highest unemployed parolee pool on the globe, and the highest prison-to-homeless rate on record.

In other words, dismal failure is what taxpaying citizens see in return for this thing we call “corrections.”

With every new prison, and the breaking of new ground for each new penal site, we’re just digging society deeper into a bigger financial hole, with the gravest of possible societal returns, for the few that profit off prisons—the new growth industry.

Sources:
U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
The Today Show, January 12, 2008 (U.S. Watch Sales)
The World Almanac and Book of Facts: 2005 (World Almanac Education Group, Inc., New York, N.Y., 2005) p. 113 (Economics—U.S. personal consumption)
DeNeal Young, CDCR#J-55381, came up with the financial comparisons