Ugly, plain ugly

[kpete]

http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/overviewprivate.html

[Scuba]

1. Remind me when prison privatization really got swinging. Wasn't that early 90's?

Not that that has anything to do with it.

[SammyWinstonJack]

2. It has everything to do with it.

[woo me with science]

3. It's a profit-making enterprise

and a means of oppression. How many news stories have we seen lately of arrests that are just beyond the pale and excessive for the situation?

We are more and more living in a police state.

I would be interested to see the statistics for total arrests and imprisonments and how they compare to, say, twenty years ago.

[Lunacee2012]

5. I think this is why there are such harsh

sentences for pot (which really shouldn't be illegal anyways) and other small crimes.

[Arkansas Granny]

4. That sharp rise also coincides with Mandatory Minimum Drug Sentencing.

. . . . .evidence shows that recent years have seen increasing numbers of people arrested for drug related offences being sent to prison. The steepest rise has been in the US, where the increased use of imprisonment as a policy option in general has led one author to give it the title “The Great Incarcerator” (Stern, 1998). Today over half of Federal inmates in the United States are in prison due to a drug charge (West and Sabol, 2008.)

http://www.beckleyfoundation.org/pdf/BF_Report_16.pdf

[woo me with science]

6. K&R

[Sheepshank]

7. "The Punishing Decades" espcially 1990's

http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/00-05_rep_punishingdecade_ac.pdf

Details are attempted, but elusive still.

[countryjake]

8. I wonder how many of the "new" jobs....

that so many keep touting as signs of recovery are coming from and are directly related to this Prison Industry?

Thanks for the truly ugly image, the update to it will most likely be even more disturbing, once they graph the past decade into the mix.

[LiberalEsto]

9. Where else do you think "Made in the U.S.A." stuff comes from?

Prison labor is probably as cheap as Chinese slaves, and there are no shipping costs

[woo me with science]

10. Kick