Private Prisons: Corruption Today

Corruption exists in every society and America is no exception. From Watergate drama scandals to GM brakes, scandals and corruption serve to enrage and invigorate the people. But today, there exists an institution that is brilliantly and wholly corrupt and pervasive in our society, flying under our radars and in the back of the media. Private prisons. America is home to the largest prison population in the world, both in number and per capita. It’s easy not to care about prisoners--after all they are, by definition, convicted criminals. This is one of the reasons why private prisons, amongst the 2 million prisoners in the U.S., have gone relatively unnoticed and unchanged. But even though they’re not this month’s hottest topic, private prisons are a topic that our federal government needs to address. Not only are these prisons violating moral standards by mistreating their prisoners in favor of profit, they are a significantly contributing factor in our country’s prison population and government corruption. Private prisons are a serious issue that the government and people of the United States need to become informed about and hopefully ban from our prison system.

The first, and most prominent, issue regarding private prisons is corruption. To help and keep private prisons unexposed and running smoothly, three major private prison companies, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), The GEO Group (GEO) and the Management and Training Corporation, have spent a combined $45 million on lobbying in the past decade. They are also aided by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate run non-profit organization that introduce over 1,000 bills every year, with one in five enacted into law. As a result, the government has enacted increasingly harsher immigration and incarceration policies, skyrocketing prison populations by 159,200 from 2000 to 2008. The CCA is currently getting $5.1 billion from immigration incarceration alone, a stark contrast to the $760 million in 2004. Private prisons also In 2009, two Pennsylvania judges

Another facet of the corruption in private prisons is the way they treat their prisoners. In order to make more money, private prison corporations cut corners on staffing, medical care and basic training. As a result, prisoners take the suffering so companies can make money. One woman in Arizona had her c-section treated with table sugar. Last year, an examination of the CCA found that they had fabricated 4,800 hours of work from employees over seven months. Violence in Idaho’s first private was found to be four times the rate of all of the state’s other seven prisons combined. There are videos of prisoners being beaten unconscious in front of several guards. One prisoner was forced to defecate in containers other than toilets, due to a lack of toilets in cells.

Proponents of private prisons claim that they bring savings to the people, that these problems are not only not happening, but that any problem in private prisons can be fixed through reform. Sadly, the problem has moved past the point of reform or regulation. Private prisons often are monitored on a daily basis and randomly inspected, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, and are responsible for upholding various standards required by health, building, and fire inspectors. If prisons are already heavily regulated, why are all of these atrocities still happening? If all it takes to stop the terrible conditions is a few bills, then why hasn’t it stopped yet? Not only has this problem become bigger than regulations, the so-called economic benefits are non-existent as well. A comprehensive study done by the U.S. Bureau of Justice concluded that these savings “have simply not materialized”, and a University of Arizona meta-analysis found that the assertion that private prisons save money is “mixed at best”, and some studies even found that states actually lost money.

It is the job of the government to enforce the laws and punishments on its citizens. This is so the justice system remains fair, much like the reason why every citizen has the right to a trial by a jury of their peers; if people were judged by an entity with an agenda, then the trial and ruling would not be fair or morally correct. The government is made of people, and as a result, its goal is to maintain the welfare of its citizens, because the people in the government are also citizens. Like what happens in the courtroom, the enforcement of punishment is also a part of the justice system. Therefore, the regulation and ownership of jails and prisons is a responsibility that should be solely delegated to the government, to ensure that they remain as humane and just as possible.

When we look at the atrocities happening in these private prison: the corruption, the violence, and the general treatment of our fellow human beings, it is clear that this ideal is not happening. Corporations do have an agenda: to make the most money. What we have to understand is that for corporations, money will always come first. This doesn’t make corporations inherently bad or evil--this agenda is a necessary component in free enterprise--but what that agenda does do is make them unfit to uphold and maintain prisons as institutions of justice rather than institutions of profit. It’s time to take a look at the facts, and make an informed decisions about the future of the prison system. The banning of private prisons will be a step towards a more just society and decide the fate of over 2 million Americans.

It’s Made of Plastic!

To what extent did the U.S. experience an economic boom during the 1920s? is a curiously worded question for a curious time in American history. The twenties were one heck of an oxymoron. Not only was it directly after World War I, it was the time that preceded the Great Depression, and, for such grim surroundings, still managed to have an especially stunning reputation. The twenties were seemingly the peak of human accomplishment in the U.S., the arts and technology working together to create talking movies, jazz, Fitzgerald, Einstein, surrealism, Hemingway, baseball, Lindbergh, and on and on and on. It was seen as a time of prosperity in the U.S., where per capita income increased by 33 percent and consumerism and the auto industry boomed. But at the same time, these seemingly great economic feats, like so many other things, are much more complicated than they seem. Here’s where the wording of the question comes in. It would seem like the twenties saw an undisputable economic boom. And if you thought that, then you would be, technically, right. But when held up to scrutiny, the apparent economic growth in the U.S. was in reality a façade for some deeper, more serious economic problems that were growing in America and the international community.

A bit of background and oversight on international economics at the time in a simple statement: Europe was devastated. Germany, being on the losing side of WWI, had a massive amount of debt to pay off. The Allies, having borrowed so much money from the U.S., had more to pay back than Germany did. To help matters, the entirety of Europe, including its workforce and its industry, was completely in tatters from the terrors of war, and France, having refused to raise taxes on its people, was completely broke. Needless to say, this was not the start of a promising economic future. What happened that allowed the U.S. to remain unaffected, and even “prosper”? Well, there was a two-part plan, so to speak: debt and tariffs. The U.S. didn’t really play that big of a part in the war physically, so all of its land and factories and agriculture were completely fine, and they had $2.6 billion in war debts waiting to be collected from the Allies who were owed $2.0 billion by Germany. Sadly, Germany didn’t have any money, so to keep this cycle of money from Germany to the Allies to the U.S. going, the U.S. started the Dawes Plan, where they loaned $2.5 billion to Germany so they could pay off their debt to the Allies (who again, in turn, had $2.6 billion in debt to the U.S. See where this is going?). The debt situation severely weakened and subdued the European economy, but what struck the final blow was the tariffs. At around the same time as the Dawes Plan, the Fordney-McCumber Tariff was enacted, creating tariffs of 60 percent, the highest in American history. As a result, the American people tended to buy American-made products instead of generating much-needed revenue for Europe. This short-lived and crushing plan swiftly put the U.S. into control of western economics, and at the same time, debilitating the European economy, and setting up a teetering global market, just waiting for a gust of wind to blow it over the edge.

Now, back to domestic affairs. One would think that all of these tariffs and the fact that per-capita income increased by 33 percent or exports increased by 60 percent would be indicators of a healthy, sustainable economy. Sadly, in this case, one would be mistaken. Although these statistics and facts are true, the economy, as can be seen just a few years later, was far from sustainable. The economic growth seen by the U.S. was facilitated by a short term strategy and a series of ineffective plans, including the implementation of trickle-down economics and (again) tariffs. Trickle-down economics (implemented later by Reagan) was a policy where governments would give big businesses and other wealthy entities big tax breaks and other benefits with the idea that they would invest in other ventures and stimulate the economy as a whole. Sadly, when implemented, it was found that the rich would rather save money than frivolously spend and invest it and the “trickle-down” benefits to the poor were never really seen. Tariffs and trickle-down economic policies ended up benefiting the rich and hurting the poor, creating a concentration of wealth, increasing the class divide, and artificially inflating the market. As you can see, those statistics only tell part of the story; when you omit the fact that over half the people in the same decade were living below the poverty line and two-thirds of Americans were living at “minimum comfort level”, the twenties did indeed seem like a prosperous time. As a side note sub-factor, consumerism was also booming--the auto industry employed 6 million people by the end of the decade. But, not only were people starting to buy things that they couldn’t afford on credit, the ultimate consequence of the mass production consumerism of the twenties was the oversaturation of the market. Companies quickly found that households often didn’t need more than one toaster or one car, and as a result, companies that stuck with one model rather than operating on an constantly updating system (buy the new iPhone! with even more gizmos!) were quickly weeded out. By the end of the decade, the U.S. had a whole lot of metal, but not a lot of cash.

Ultimately, when discussing the extent of the economic boom of the twenties, we must also look at what came after: the Great Depression. Look, you can’t have one day with economic prosperity and suddenly the next with poverty; history just doesn’t work like that. The nature of history is that one event fluidly transitions into the other--every single thing that happens in one decade becomes a factor in the next, and the twenties were no exception. The Great Depression was a result of poor and unsustainable economic strategies implemented in the 1920s. All of the faulty tariffs, debts, taxes, and policies eventually started to add up. They temporarily boosted the market, inflating our economy for a short amount of time and for a small amount of people before it became completely unsustainable due to a lack of proper infrastructure and crashed. So, while it would be technically true to say that the U.S. experienced an economic boom during the twenties, calling it “effective” or “sustainable” would be equivalent to calling alcoholism a sound solution to life’s troubles; it might have worked well enough for a few hours, but shortly afterwards, you’re left with no money, a pounding headache, and a whole pile of problems.