Mass Incarceration

Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration–The Problem of the United States In America, the private prison industry was made for necessary profit based off of the management of prisons by large, private companies. In David Shapiro’s insightful report “Banking on Bondage”, he discusses the logistics of the United States prison system, saying “In America, our criminal justice system should keep us safe, operate fairly, and be cost-effective”. Today, the United States imprisons more people than any other nation in the world, including Russia, China, and Iran. Alongside the issues of private prisons, the increasingly apparent problem of mass incarceration has stripped record numbers of American citizens of their freedom, has a minimal effect on public

To much of the common citizen’s disbelief, the spike in the mass incarceration of citizens in America is not necessarily a result of the national increase in violence, but rather an operation fueled by the corruption within our own legal system. Although many individuals in the United States would stand to believe that there is no particular way that anyone could stand to profit from the mass incarceration of Americans–they are wrong. The standing profiteers for mass incarceration is the private prison industry. The name to their game is simple, the more that the public good suffers from mass incarceration, the more government money the companies can obtain. As a result of these efforts, the private prison industry cuts corners at the expense of public safety and prison security in order to maximize profits by obtaining government money, resulting in the mass denial of American citizen’s liberty. Worsening the problem, as the increase in the incarceration of individuals continues, the sense of rehabilitation for inmates has been heavily reduced. This is not just by chance, but rather because the capitalistic private prison industry does not view incarcerated individuals as

David Shapiro, a member of the American Civil Labor Union and lead author of “Banking on Bondage”, deems private prisons a “danger to state finances” in his report on the corruption of today’s for-profit prison. In the process of cutting costs, the private prison industry puts together a low-quality staff with poorly trained guards and a high turnover– thus, increasing the risk of escapees, inmate violence and prisoner mistreatment. As a result of the poor quality, the public sector is heavily affected. In one case, the conditions of a privately run Arizona prison were studied after the escape of a prisoner, and it was reported that the prison staff was fairly “green” across all shifts, lacked weapon proficiency, and even ignored the sounding alarms as a prisoner