Private Prisons are the Very Personification of America

Back in 2006 I asked:

How come we have so readily accepted prison sex? We think of a prison we shrug our shoulders and think ah well, dudes fucking dudes, it’s just the situation they’re in. What is this?

Meanwhile, here’s Bill Maher on last week’s Real Time:

Someone has to look into the puzzling paradox of why it is that rape jokes are completely unacceptable, and unthinkable, and totally out of bounds, but raped in prison jokes? Fucking hilarious! For some reason, Americans simply accept that not only do we lock up way more people, but that if you're a criminal of any kind, yes, sodomy is the appropriate comeuppance. And we all sort of just accept that, like, "Well, that's how prison works."

Maher also pivots to the somewhat new reality of for-profit prisons, which may be the most simultaneously inhumane and American thing we’ve dreamed up yet:

Private for-profit prisons. That's what we have here. And corporations, it turns out, don't run prisons to improve society. They run them to make money, which means putting more people in the system. The more prisoners, the more profit. This is why they lobby Congress for three strikes rules and keeping weed illegal. They don't want them rehabilitated. They want return customers.

"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), “didn’t you ALSO call this bullshit out just as it was ratcheting up in 2006?"

Sigh. Yes I did, faithful readers, YES I did:

There is something strange about a nation that sets up a collection of laws based on morals and values, and then is okay with paying private companies to house people that (allegedly) break said laws. But the main thing I got from this article is that housing criminals pays, so it behooves private prisons to keep their facilities stuffed as much as possible. Which means they're not particularly interested in whether or not an inmate is guilty or not, so right away you have a kind of flimsy, so what? kind of justice. And, even worse, having privately-run detention facilities opens the door to judges getting kickbacks from these centers, as was the case HERE. So now we have innocent people thrown in jail for money, and we hafta question whether or not every judge's decisions are based on if he/she is getting a kickback or not. How comforting.

Also, what are the legal bounds of such ownership? If I own one of these detention centers, can I decide that from 2-4pm every day they're free to roam, say, the Capitol Mall? Why not, since I own the joint - can't I open the doors when I want? Can China or Iran buy these prisons?

There are practical reasons private detention centers are bad (innocent lives ruined, complete corruption of the bench) but as I opened this post, there's something wrong with deciding the rules of law and then handing over the reins of punishment to someone else for money.

And of course we all sit around scratching our heads: re why prisons mostly fail when it comes to rehabilitating people.