Private Prisons

Labels can do far more harm than hurting someone’s feelings. According to a theory in sociology known as labeling theory, giving other people labels causes them to feel a connection to that label over time. In our high school environment, this appears to be true. Many students who classmates called athletic or smart during freshman year confidently identify as so by now. During my time here, I have made personal fitness a large part of my life, and I believe it was because my football team saw me as a weight lifting enthusiast despite me having no athletic background. For these students and me, labeling was not necessarily a negative phenomenon. However, much of the labeling that occurs in the media and in society is not positive. For

The presence of private prisons in America gives some groups in power an incentive to not unite the American people. These prisons exist on a capitalistic profit motive and are either required to hold a certain amount of prisoners to receive funding or are required to pay the government for every empty cell. Despite this, proponents of private prisons argue that they save the country money. While that may be true, they ruin American lives. The private sector that owns them has an incentive to lobby for mass incarceration, and unfortunately the people victimized by society are the most likely to be incarcerated and forgotten about. For example, although private prisons are only 8.4% of the nation’s prisons, they hold nearly 50% of its immigrant detainees. In addition to that, African Americans are convicted at rate more than five times greater than white Americans. Many of these convicted citizens are also impoverished, and this factor along with their race makes them valued poorly by society. This corruption is evidenced by many of these charges being drug related, despite both races using drugs at similar rates, in tandem with the fact that private prisons spend millions of dollars every year lobbying for harsher drug laws. Not only is the net effect of this unjust, it helps to create stereotypes against African Americans. With private prison counts more than doubling since the start of the 21st century, Americans must stand up to the injustice of current private prisons before the problems of persecution and oppression they create become