Prison for Profit

[SHRED]

The corporate powers that be make money off of building prisons, running prisons, and all the maintenance/support.

The amount of privatization of our incarceration system of what were former governmental departments has grown exponentially.
There is profit (for some) in locking people up plus keeping hemp illegal. A "two-fer-one" deal.

Imprisoning for profit



Fascism sucks.

Hemp for America! Farmers plant hemp seeds on DEA's front lawn
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) You can buy hemp products in America, including textiles, nutritional supplements, soaps and ropes. You just can't grow hemp in America. So all the hemp used in these products purchased by Americans is grown somewhere else: China, Canada, India, Chile and many other countries. Meanwhile, Americans farmers suffer under increasing debt and decreasing revenues from stalled crop prices. What's wrong with this picture?

What's wrong, it turns out, is that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) makes no differentiation between industrial hemp and marijuana. To the DEA, it's all the same crop (never mind that smoking industrial hemp will only make you vomit, not high) and anyone caught planting hemp will be arrested and prosecuted using the same laws that were really only intended to halt hard-core street drug pushers.

As anyone who isn't smoking crack has already figured out (and even a few who are), America's drug policy is a scandalous failure. Not only has the so-called "War on Drugs" utterly failed to stop the flow of recreational drugs in America, it has criminalized struggling farmers who seek to grow industrial hemp as a profitable, renewable crop that's in high demand across multiple industries.

The War on Drugs has accomplished one thing, though: It has filled the nation's prisons with small-time "offenders" who got caught with an ounce or two of weed in their pockets. America's drug policy, it seems, is a boon for the prison industry, but a curse upon our nation's farmers.

MORE:
http://www.naturalnews.com/027257_hemp_America_farmers.html

[LAGC]

1. Amazingly, often the private prisons are more expensive to run than the state-run prisons!

This is the case in Idaho, for example, where the lone private prison costs several million dollars more in yearly expenditure outlays than does the main state-run prison that holds even more prisoners! Clearly, someone is making serious money out of this arrangement, all at tax-payer expense!

[dghll]

2. Private prisons are just wrong

so are private armies.


thanks for posting this.

[geniusiknowit]

3. Not what one would expect

when you consider that private schools spend less per pupil than public schools (half as much in some areas, such as D.C.).

But hey, if that's the way imprisonment costs are, then good. It should be expensive to imprison people. The cheaper it is, the more people can be put in prison for stupid reasons.