Another thoughtful piece from Alex.

"Locked Up: How the Modern Prison-Industrial Complex Puts So Many Americans in Jail." By Alex, Ammo.com, January 2019.

My thoughts on this subject are:

1. Do contract prisons save money compared to government operation? That supposedly is the primary reason for removing certain activities from government control and having them be performed by private contractors with a direct stake in providing superior service lest competitors take the business from them.
2. Is management of a prison more like management of a snow removal service or are prisons too much like functions that should be subject to the control of officials answerable to the voters? Determining guilt and imposing sentence is obviously something we don’t want in private hands but is controlling and feeding bodies during their sentence all that invested with issues of government accountability? The need for the use of deadly force seems like something we’d only want government officials to be involved in but then we are fine with private security firms and Brinks trucks are we not?
3. Alex doesn’t make this point but it’s urged explicitly or implicitly by critics of Prison, Inc. that any “profit” (obscene profit, of course, as Rush would say) is necessarily shared by corrupt judges and other officials who conspire to increase the rate of conviction to ensure that prison contractors make more money. The contractors are somehow on board with ensuring that part of the “profits” make its way back under the table to judges, sheriffs, mayors, etc. I have never seen any proponent of this theory provide a shred of evidence that the court system is corrupt in this way. Alex provides one example of corruption but he also makes clear that it was punished severely.
4. Overall rates of incarceration need to be seen in the light of certain realities. Black are in jail because they chose to commit more crimes than whites. That they are ostensibly in jail because of some unfair focus on drug crime by white prosecutors is not supportable in view of the fact that more serious crimes that may be difficult or time-consuming to prosecute are ignored by prosecutors in favor of allowing the accused to plead to a less serious crime like drug possession and/or distribution where the accused knows he’s a cooked goose. Maybe reducing prison populations has some merit but it should be joined at the hip with stronger “three strikes and you’re out” provisions.
5. We should abandon the rehabilitation focus of prisons. Self-improvement should always be an option but criminals who scoff at the law, which they do in spades, should experience the full force of society’s retribution. Flogging early on in the process would communicate that society is serious about toeing the line, which it currently does not. But then the national debate on anything is a joke and taken instantly to the Ocasio and Pelosi level.