September 3, 2010

Let this be a placeholder post

This is here to mark off a long dry spell where I didn't make much posting effort. The plan is to not do that anymore and get back in the groove since I garnered an international following recently. yeah what's up richard, this is a shout-out from the depth of earths cancerous tumor that your country unleashed on the world. Not holding it against you or anything just saying.
Since i'm here i will post some reminder type factoids about our horrible prison system shamefully robbed from the prison nation National Geographic page. Normally i'd link back to them since they did the work but it's so hot and the sun is down, it makes no sense.



    • With 2.2 million inmates, America has more prisoners behind bars than any other country on earth. We now have 25 percent of the world's incarcerated, with just five percent of the population.
    • America’s population behind bars has gone up 1,000 percent in the last three decades. Get-tough-on-crime legislation and minimum sentencing laws are blamed for the explosion of inmates. 
    • Of all prisoners, 95 percent will be released. Half of them are currently serving a term of two years or less.
    • According to correctional officers, drugs find their way inside even the most secure facilities, but the more secure a facility, the higher the price. Drugs regularly go for up to twenty times their street value behind bars.
    • Among prisoners, 35 percent are drug addicts; 80 percent are drug users.
    • Since many correction departments have outlawed tobacco in prisons, the going rate for cigarettes in some prisons has skyrocketed from pocket change to $5 per cigarette. A thimbleful of tobacco goes for as much as $50.
    • There are as many as 5,000 prisons or jails in the U.S., employing at least 430,000 people as staff or correctional officers.[with tons being built with the last of our national wealth notes me]
    • In 2001, the average cost per inmate in state prisons is $22,650 per year or $62.05 a day. The taxpayer price tag is twice as much as just 15 years ago.
    • The number of female inmates is increasing almost twice as fast as the men’s incarceration rate, tripling in the last decade. At least 40 percent of jailed women have minor children.
    • Inmates in America’s prisons and jails aren’t evenly divided by race; African Americans make up just 13 percent of the U.S. population but 41 percent of the overall prison population. And Hispanics have 2.5 times the rate of imprisonment of non-Hispanic whites.
    • More than half of male inmates and roughly two-thirds of female inmates have symptoms of a serious mental illness.
    • The largest population of the mentally ill in America isn’t housed in a hospital… It’s in Los Angeles County Jail, followed by New York’s Rikers Island. In all, one-fourth of all state prison beds are occupied by the mentally ill.
    • "Solitary confinement" has a new name in prison systems: segregation. Single-celled, 23-hour lock-up units in some of these prisons are designed to limit inmates’ movement and contact with other staff or inmates. Officers can care for inmates electronically — from opening an inmate’s door, to shutting off his water, to turning off his lights. [another note here: psychologists have shown that total deprivation of human interaction makes people more fucked up not less, if we have even the pretense of rehabilitation this shouldn't even be allowed.]
    • More than 80,000 inmates are kept in isolation nationwide. The average stay in some states is now years.

And that's the list they have. it's short, doesnt scratch the surface on the worst problems and is awful enough in real life to justify our country being invaded to liberate our population from this system and law enforcement cadre (which is almost done morphing into a paramilitary force) that makes it a reality.
Does it mess with your mind at all to think that you could grow up with a person and the only thing keeping them from being able to murder you without major legal repercussion when you get older is the choice you  both make for careers. 
You'd think if a job was titled something like Final Arbiter of Life and Death would lend some weight to the notion that maybe it should be a job for like highly trained and well educated people with a good psychological profile and sense of fairness.
To be fair the the task of a police officer was to keep the peace originally. remember that? protect and serve...these words sound familiar? they conveiniently left the second half of those statements silent because they still serve and protect, just not you. 
I get more nervous when I see police looking my direction than gang members now days. at least a gangster can be reasoned with. anyway im done complaining about this pox on our nation for today. oh and if anyone cares to tell me about how glad i should be that police are around because they protect me from all this potential harm just by their existance, you can save it. The reason black america never made a full integration into white society was because of the police mostly, they are the reasons we even have gangs at all. and what are the worst and most dangerous gangs? the prison gangs, the needlessly large, motivated and jaded prison gangs. And if you take the stance that I shouldn't worry about it since i'm white then kill yourself, i'm sensitive enough to morn your stupid ass death which is more than you deserve thinking like that. There's a lot of white people just on the earth numerically so we'll be part of whatever solution there is to tall this even though we were the root of the problem so lets figure out who's who and get to work.



Read more: 
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/prison-nation-3457/Overview#tab-facts#ixzz0yXGwbZz7

15 comments:

  1. Interesting as always. Not directly related, but i wonder two things. One is whether any mainstream consciousness of this an other present day atrocities is remotely possible given our cultures' mass-media consumption. The other is if consciousness about any serious problems really has an effect at all. I know its a hopeless way of looking at things, surely wondering about a problem must be more useful than wondering about that wondering, but it bugs me that I can't imagine a series of events where anything of any big-picture importance gets any better over time. I know this is a naiive and basically weak perspective to reside in, but there, i said it.

    A side thought, maybe more related, but probably not: I find it interesting that solitary confinement is such a brutal psychological torture, while solitary expedition is what some people absolutely live for. Maybe I'm thinking sideways.

    ReplyDelete
  2. turns out prison is also a racket for re-selling otherwise cheap goods and services. for $52.34*, you can get Ramen Texas Beef 5
    Foam Cup 1
    Ramen Cajun Chicken 5
    Blueberry Donuts 2
    Cocoa 10 oz 1
    Sliced Pepperoni 1
    Oreo Cookies 3
    Hot & Spicy Pork Cracklings 5
    4.4 oz Columbian Coffee 1
    Tuna 1
    Brushy Creek Chili w Beans 1
    *Prices and gift packs are subject to change

    in other words ten bucks worth in junk food. you could also spend that same 50+ bucks on 20 minutes or so in phone time. I thought the markup at concerts and sports games was a rip off, but damn. from what i hear though, for the $62.05 it costs to keep a person there for one day, they still make top ramen look like fine dining by comparison. So help me think through this Keith, for my own sake. Obviously there is a net cost associated with keeping someone locked up, but its a cost that comes out of taxpayers pockets. This would be all well and good except that incarceration is one of the most, if not the most, prominent indicators of future incarceration. So, since we have slim to no evidence for rehabilitation, and more overwhelming evidence toward making bad matters worse for everyone involved, for the benefit of this discussion, we can remove rehabilitation from the discussion without much argument, i think. the next logical argument in defence of the prison system would be to keep dangerous people off the streets for as long as our socio-economic structure can allow, considering things like expense and overcrowding as practical obstacles to this end. rapists and serial killers aside, the large proportion of non-violent drug offenders adding to the overcrowd of prisons at best marginalises this argument.

    Now I'd like to ask you to clarify something i've seen you hint at and allude to but something which i've never heard an outright explanation (if you've said it already and i forget or didn't read it, forgive me. likewise if i'm butchering the whole concept, forgiveness.) what i've gleaned is that the whole prison system is its own sort of business, with goals and results like that of a business, nothing more or less. Maybe this whole nightmare started as an altruistic endeavor, or maybe not, I'm not about to do a whole history report to write a response on a blog, I'll leave that to others to d for me. regardless how it started, what we're left with now is a broken seemingly impotent system of putting people through the most humiliating, alienating, and spirit breaking period of life possible with a guise of justice and a reality of perpetuation amounting to a horrible failure of a society that prides itself on being better than any of the other ones. you with me? lets just say for the sake of argument that that last statement is a true one. prisons fuck people up, have a negative impact on society, and they're getting more and more crowded and will continue as such indefinitely. from a business perspective, you have a commodity of untapped manpower and resources that is subsidised by local, state, and federal government and trends steadily upwards at an ever increasing rate. since this is just a bunch of criminals we're talking about here, why not cut back a little more here or there and earn that extra dollar saved. from a business perspective, there's a lot of potential in something as reliable and as grand in scope as the vast prison population.

    It's all very vague and hypothetical in my own head but I, as with the majority of the population, don't make it a personal goal to know these sorts of things in any depth. It does make a sick sort of sense though, like when I found out that nursing homes are a profit-based industry. (No wonder they're so shitty! They have a financial incentive to be shitty!) What I don't know, and what I would like to be enlightened by, is in what ways and to what extent such a profit motive a (or the) driving motivator for a prison system that by any other measure is an outright failure?

    ReplyDelete
  3. turns out prison is also a racket for re-selling otherwise cheap goods and services. for $52.34*, you can get Ramen Texas Beef 5
    Foam Cup 1
    Ramen Cajun Chicken 5
    Blueberry Donuts 2
    Cocoa 10 oz 1
    Sliced Pepperoni 1
    Oreo Cookies 3
    Hot & Spicy Pork Cracklings 5
    4.4 oz Columbian Coffee 1
    Tuna 1
    Brushy Creek Chili w Beans 1
    *Prices and gift packs are subject to change

    in other words ten bucks worth in junk food. you could also spend that same 50+ bucks on 20 minutes or so in phone time. I thought the markup at concerts and sports games was a rip off, but damn. from what i hear though, for the $62.05 it costs to keep a person there for one day, they still make top ramen look like fine dining by comparison. So help me think through this Keith, for my own sake. Obviously there is a net cost associated with keeping someone locked up, but its a cost that comes out of taxpayers pockets. This would be all well and good except that incarceration is one of the most, if not the most, prominent indicators of future incarceration. So, since we have slim to no evidence for rehabilitation, and more overwhelming evidence toward making bad matters worse for everyone involved, for the benefit of this discussion, we can remove rehabilitation from the discussion without much argument, i think. the next logical argument in defence of the prison system would be to keep dangerous people off the streets for as long as our socio-economic structure can allow, considering things like expense and overcrowding as practical obstacles to this end. rapists and serial killers aside, the large proportion of non-violent drug offenders adding to the overcrowd of prisons at best marginalises this argument.

    Now I'd like to ask you to clarify something i've seen you hint at and allude to but something which i've never heard an outright explanation (if you've said it already and i forget or didn't read it, forgive me. likewise if i'm butchering the whole concept, forgiveness.) what i've gleaned is that the whole prison system is its own sort of business, with goals and results like that of a business, nothing more or less. Maybe this whole nightmare started as an altruistic endeavor, or maybe not, I'm not about to do a whole history report to write a response on a blog, I'll leave that to others to d for me. regardless how it started, what we're left with now is a broken seemingly impotent system of putting people through the most humiliating, alienating, and spirit breaking period of life possible with a guise of justice and a reality of perpetuation amounting to a horrible failure of a society that prides itself on being better than any of the other ones. you with me? lets just say for the sake of argument that that last statement is a true one. prisons fuck people up, have a negative impact on society, and they're getting more and more crowded and will continue as such indefinitely. from a business perspective, you have a commodity of untapped manpower and resources that is subsidised by local, state, and federal government and trends steadily upwards at an ever increasing rate. since this is just a bunch of criminals we're talking about here, why not cut back a little more here or there and earn that extra dollar saved. from a business perspective, there's a lot of potential in something as reliable and as grand in scope as the vast prison population.

    ReplyDelete
  4. turns out prison is also a racket for re-selling otherwise cheap goods and services. for $52.34*, you can get Ramen Texas Beef 5
    Foam Cup 1
    Ramen Cajun Chicken 5
    Blueberry Donuts 2
    Cocoa 10 oz 1
    Sliced Pepperoni 1
    Oreo Cookies 3
    Hot & Spicy Pork Cracklings 5
    4.4 oz Columbian Coffee 1
    Tuna 1
    Brushy Creek Chili w Beans 1
    *Prices and gift packs are subject to change

    in other words ten bucks worth in junk food (okay maybe 15 if you shop at a liquor store like i sometimes do). you could also spend that same 50+ bucks on 20 minutes or so in phone time. I thought the markup at concerts and sports games was a rip off, but damn. from what i hear though, for the $62.05 it costs to keep a person there for one day, they still make top ramen look like fine dining by comparison. So help me think through this Keith, for my own sake. Obviously there is a net cost associated with keeping someone locked up, but its a cost that comes out of taxpayers pockets. This would be all well and good except that incarceration is one of the most, if not the most, prominent indicators of future incarceration. So, since we have slim to no evidence for rehabilitation, and more overwhelming evidence toward making bad matters worse for everyone involved, for the benefit of this discussion, we can remove rehabilitation from the discussion without much argument, i think. the next logical argument in defence of the prison system would be to keep dangerous people off the streets for as long as our socio-economic structure can allow, considering things like expense and overcrowding as practical obstacles to this end. rapists and serial killers aside, the large proportion of non-violent drug offenders adding to the overcrowd of prisons at best marginalises this argument.

    Continued on subsequent post immediately following this one...

    ReplyDelete
  5. (...continued from immediately preceeding post {it was too long to submit as a single post [i thought the posts' thematic continuity should have been grounds for an exception to any predefined character limit, but blogspot apparently disagrees]})...


    Now I'd like to ask you to clarify something i've seen you hint at and allude to but something which i've never heard an outright explanation (if you've said it already and i forget or didn't read it, forgive me. likewise if i'm butchering the whole concept, forgiveness.) what i've gleaned is that the whole prison system is its own sort of business, with goals and results like that of a business, nothing more or less. Maybe this whole nightmare started as an altruistic endeavor, or maybe not, I'm not about to do a whole history report to write a response on a blog, I'll leave that to others to d for me. regardless how it started, what we're left with now is a broken seemingly impotent system of putting people through the most humiliating, alienating, and spirit breaking period of life possible with a guise of justice and a reality of perpetuation amounting to a horrible failure of a society that prides itself on being better than any of the other ones. you with me? lets just say for the sake of argument that that last statement is a true one. prisons fuck people up, have a negative impact on society, and they're getting more and more crowded and will continue as such indefinitely. from a business perspective, you have a commodity of untapped manpower and resources that is subsidised by local, state, and federal government and trends steadily upwards at an ever increasing rate. since this is just a bunch of criminals we're talking about here, why not cut back a little more here or there and earn that extra dollar saved. from a business perspective, there's a lot of potential in something as reliable and as grand in scope as the vast prison population.

    It's all very vague and hypothetical in my own head but I, as with the majority of the population, don't make it a personal goal to know these sorts of things in any depth. It does make a sick sort of sense though, like when I found out that nursing homes are a profit-based industry. (No wonder they're so shitty! They have a financial incentive to be shitty!) What I don't know, and what I would like to be enlightened by, is in what ways and to what extent such a profit motive a (or the) driving motivator for a prison system that by any other measure is an outright failure?

    ReplyDelete
  6. ...(continued from above)...

    Now I'd like to ask you to clarify something i've seen you hint at and allude to but something which i've never heard an outright explanation (if you've said it already and i forget or didn't read it, forgive me. likewise if i'm butchering the whole concept, forgiveness.) what i've gleaned is that the whole prison system is its own sort of business, with goals and results like that of a business, nothing more or less. Maybe this whole nightmare started as an altruistic endeavor, or maybe not, I'm not about to do a whole history report to write a response on a blog, I'll leave that to others to d for me. regardless how it started, what we're left with now is a broken seemingly impotent system of putting people through the most humiliating, alienating, and spirit breaking period of life possible with a guise of justice and a reality of perpetuation amounting to a horrible failure of a society that prides itself on being better than any of the other ones. you with me? lets just say for the sake of argument that that last statement is a true one. prisons fuck people up, have a negative impact on society, and they're getting more and more crowded and will continue as such indefinitely. from a business perspective, you have a commodity of untapped manpower and resources that is subsidised by local, state, and federal government and trends steadily upwards at an ever increasing rate. since this is just a bunch of criminals we're talking about here, why not cut back a little more here or there and earn that extra dollar saved. from a business perspective, there's a lot of potential in something as reliable and as grand in scope as the vast prison population.

    It's all very vague and hypothetical in my own head but I, as with the majority of the population, don't make it a personal goal to know these sorts of things in any depth. It does make a sick sort of sense though, like when I found out that nursing homes are a profit-based industry. (No wonder they're so shitty! They have a financial incentive to be shitty!) What I don't know, and what I would like to be enlightened by, is in what ways and to what extent such a profit motive a (or the) driving motivator for a prison system that by any other measure is an outright failure?

    ReplyDelete
  7. I apologize for going into hermit mode for several months and neglecting my blog. I have lots of interesting stuff to bounce of you on aim some time and im curious how steve is. you'll hear from me soon. possibly before you read this.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Wow dude I took a good thoughtful read of what you wrote in response to my post and I want you to know that It means a lot to me that you spend time out of your life that you never get back to find out what ole keith "ruined his life with heroin" hull has to say about the state of the world. I don't know if that makes any sense if you're not already depressed like myself.

    One thing I wanted to address about your comments is that many of your concerns and additions of your own to the list of bullshit injustices are the VERY EXACT IDENTICAL SOUL CRUSHING MORTAL HUMBLING thoughts that I wrestle with even after venting in a long article because I know there's always more horrification that I didn't get around to including and it grieves me. The fact that you already grasp these problems are constituent parts of what I'm babbling on about gives me a lot of hope. Not for humanity. I think humanity is fucked beyond repair and within our grueling lifetimes we will witness the unbridled payback that earth, fate, determinism, pissed off slaves to the economic cults that run the globe wrought upon the masses. The one glimmer of hope in my daily life is daydreaming about burning down some mansions when the shit hits the fan.
    anyway thank you dude for sticking with this blog all these years even though im inconsistent. even if i only have like 4 readers that's enough to make me want to keep doing this.
    by the way does steve still live up there? where is that guy?

    anyhow may the one black God have mercy on your nonblack soul in the mean time.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I didn't realize it had been years. shit. besides the point. I haven't been using the AIM so much lately and somehow your site made it on my links toolbar thing on my browser, right between newsmap.jp and text to ascent of humanity. I'm making it through that one slowly. great stuff that ascent, but hard to read large amounts in a single sitting.
    burning some mansions sounds like a good time to me. Sort of puts a happy spin on the whole damned doomed world thing.
    about steve... the reason i re-visited the post with info on how much a grocery bag full of junk food costs to send to some one in jail is: yep. steve's in jail. cops picked up someone off the street in skid row for selling crack or something, and this someone i guess then pointed to steve, who, upon the initial hearing, learned there was also surveilance video footage of himself handing something to someone who turned out later to be in possession of crack. it all sounds crazy, and i'm shit for much detail on it, but given the choice to fight it with promise of a longer sentence, or take a shorter one by pleading guilty, steve plead guilty and is now serving what he was told should be about a fourth of a 180 day sentencing. i think that sentencing was maybe two weeks ago, maybe more. he's in the psyche ward and after maybe a week or so plus of not sleeping, they finally caved in and gave him some seraquel (sp?), and last i spoke to him, actually right after writing the last thing, he actually sounded like he was adjusting quite well and has made a couple of friends even. go figure. now a felony on his record will keep him from leaving the state in the next few years, so as always, should be interesting to see where it all goes.
    glad to hear you're doing well. Lately I'm feeling more isolated and strange on daily basis and a large amount of mental energy goes into hiding this from those i interact with regularly. I can only assume that means i'm doing fine. you should keep writing when you can. i don't know who your other three readers are, but i read this stuff and enjoy it, so fuck em.

    -Taylor

    ReplyDelete
  10. shit, i just realized that where it says "continued on subsequent post", that subsequent post didn't get posted. so here's this, which belongs as the rightful third post on this topic, which is actually supposed to be part of the second, but was to long to be so:

    ...Now I'd like to ask you to clarify something i've seen you hint at and allude to but something which i've never heard an outright explanation (if you've said it already and i forget or didn't read it, forgive me. likewise if i'm butchering the whole concept, forgiveness.) what i've gleaned is that the whole prison system is its own sort of business, with goals and results like that of a business, nothing more or less. Maybe this whole nightmare started as an altruistic endeavor, or maybe not, I'm not about to do a whole history report to write a response on a blog, I'll leave that to others to d for me. regardless how it started, what we're left with now is a broken seemingly impotent system of putting people through the most humiliating, alienating, and spirit breaking period of life possible with a guise of justice and a reality of perpetuation amounting to a horrible failure of a society that prides itself on being better than any of the other ones. you with me? lets just say for the sake of argument that that last statement is a true one. prisons fuck people up, have a negative impact on society, and they're getting more and more crowded and will continue as such indefinitely. from a business perspective, you have a commodity of untapped manpower and resources that is subsidised by local, state, and federal government and trends steadily upwards at an ever increasing rate. since this is just a bunch of criminals we're talking about here, why not cut back a little more here or there and earn that extra dollar saved. from a business perspective, there's a lot of potential in something as reliable and as grand in scope as the vast prison population.

    It's all very vague and hypothetical in my own head but I, as with the majority of the population, don't make it a personal goal to know these sorts of things in any depth. It does make a sick sort of sense though, like when I found out that nursing homes are a profit-based industry. (No wonder they're so shitty! They have a financial incentive to be shitty!) What I don't know, and what I would like to be enlightened by, is in what ways and to what extent such a profit motive a (or the) driving motivator for a prison system that by any other measure is an outright failure?

    ReplyDelete
  11. shit. just realized that where my second post says "Continued on subsequent post immediately following this one... ", that subsequent post didn't make it. i just tried doing this again a second ago and it didn't work either. that would make this my fourth try to send that second post in its entirety. fucking character limit! blog spot should recognise a well rounded, cohesive rant when it sees it, and make exception to whatever the damn character limit is, goddammit! anyways, in the post immediately following this one, is the post that should be immediately following the second reply post which should really actually be part of said post. (just imagine that thing that started off about overpriced junk food ran fluently into this next post)

    ReplyDelete
  12. Now I'd like to ask you to clarify something i've seen you hint at and allude to but something which i've never heard an outright explanation (if you've said it already and i forget or didn't read it, forgive me. likewise if i'm butchering the whole concept, forgiveness.) what i've gleaned is that the whole prison system is its own sort of business, with goals and results like that of a business, nothing more or less. Maybe this whole nightmare started as an altruistic endeavor, or maybe not, I'm not about to do a whole history report to write a response on a blog, I'll leave that to others to d for me. regardless how it started, what we're left with now is a broken seemingly impotent system of putting people through the most humiliating, alienating, and spirit breaking period of life possible with a guise of justice and a reality of perpetuation amounting to a horrible failure of a society that prides itself on being better than any of the other ones. you with me? lets just say for the sake of argument that that last statement is a true one. prisons fuck people up, have a negative impact on society, and they're getting more and more crowded and will continue as such indefinitely. from a business perspective, you have a commodity of untapped manpower and resources that is subsidised by local, state, and federal government and trends steadily upwards at an ever increasing rate. since this is just a bunch of criminals we're talking about here, why not cut back a little more here or there and earn that extra dollar saved. from a business perspective, there's a lot of potential in something as reliable and as grand in scope as the vast prison population.

    It's all very vague and hypothetical in my own head but I, as with the majority of the population, don't make it a personal goal to know these sorts of things in any depth. It does make a sick sort of sense though, like when I found out that nursing homes are a profit-based industry. (No wonder they're so shitty! They have a financial incentive to be shitty!) What I don't know, and what I would like to be enlightened by, is in what ways and to what extent such a profit motive a (or the) driving motivator for a prison system that by any other measure is an outright failure?

    ReplyDelete
  13. Now I'd like to ask you to clarify something i've seen you hint at and allude to but something which i've never heard an outright explanation (if you've said it already and i forget or didn't read it, forgive me. likewise if i'm butchering the whole concept, forgiveness.) what i've gleaned is that the whole prison system is its own sort of business, with goals and results like that of a business, nothing more or less. Maybe this whole nightmare started as an altruistic endeavor, or maybe not, I'm not about to do a whole history report to write a response on a blog, I'll leave that to others to d for me. regardless how it started, what we're left with now is a broken seemingly impotent system of putting people through the most humiliating, alienating, and spirit breaking period of life possible with a guise of justice and a reality of perpetuation amounting to a horrible failure of a society that prides itself on being better than any of the other ones. you with me? lets just say for the sake of argument that that last statement is a true one. prisons fuck people up, have a negative impact on society, and they're getting more and more crowded and will continue as such indefinitely. from a business perspective, you have a commodity of untapped manpower and resources that is subsidised by local, state, and federal government and trends steadily upwards at an ever increasing rate. since this is just a bunch of criminals we're talking about here, why not cut back a little more here or there and earn that extra dollar saved. from a business perspective, there's a lot of potential in something as reliable and as grand in scope as the vast prison population.

    It's all very vague and hypothetical in my own head but I, as with the majority of the population, don't make it a personal goal to know these sorts of things in any depth. It does make a sick sort of sense though, like when I found out that nursing homes are a profit-based industry. (No wonder they're so shitty! They have a financial incentive to be shitty!) What I don't know, and what I would like to be enlightened by, is in what ways and to what extent such a profit motive a (or the) driving motivator for a prison system that by any other measure is an outright failure?

    ReplyDelete
  14. Now I'd like to ask you to clarify something i've seen you hint at and allude to but something which i've never heard an outright explanation (if you've said it already and i forget or didn't read it, forgive me. likewise if i'm butchering the whole concept, forgiveness.) what i've gleaned is that the whole prison system is its own sort of business, with goals and results like that of a business, nothing more or less. Maybe this whole nightmare started as an altruistic endeavor, or maybe not, I'm not about to do a whole history report to write a response on a blog, I'll leave that to others to d for me. regardless how it started, what we're left with now is a broken seemingly impotent system of putting people through the most humiliating, alienating, and spirit breaking period of life possible with a guise of justice and a reality of perpetuation amounting to a horrible failure of a society that prides itself on being better than any of the other ones. you with me? lets just say for the sake of argument that that last statement is a true one. prisons fuck people up, have a negative impact on society, and they're getting more and more crowded and will continue as such indefinitely. from a business perspective, you have a commodity of untapped manpower and resources that is subsidised by local, state, and federal government and trends steadily upwards at an ever increasing rate. since this is just a bunch of criminals we're talking about here, why not cut back a little more here or there and earn that extra dollar saved. from a business perspective, there's a lot of potential in something as reliable and as grand in scope as the vast prison population.

    ReplyDelete
  15. It's all very vague and hypothetical in my own head but I, as with the majority of the population, don't make it a personal goal to know these sorts of things in any depth. It does make a sick sort of sense though, like when I found out that nursing homes are a profit-based industry. (No wonder they're so shitty! They have a financial incentive to be shitty!) What I don't know, and what I would like to be enlightened by, is in what ways and to what extent such a profit motive a (or the) driving motivator for a prison system that by any other measure is an outright failure?

    ReplyDelete

What can i say? The 'Vette gets 'em wet! HAHA