Truth 
in politics. 
What a concept!

Lock Down the Prison-Industrial Complex

By Kevin Barrett 

Land of the free? More like land of the caged. 

The USA imprisons its citizens at a vastly higher rate than any other country. We have five percent of the world’s population, and almost a quarter of its prisoners. The whole country is turning into a gigantic prison camp. We’re going broke paying for all these gulags. And now the prison-industrial complex is turning into a political monster, like the military-industrial complex and the medical-industrial complex.  

Do we really need to lock all those people up? I don’t think so. I think it’s the psychopathic politicians who have built all those prisons who need to be locked up.  

There is no reason to imprison people for drug offenses. Yet about half the people in prison are locked up because of drugs. Many others are imprisoned for petty crimes like writing bad checks and shoplifting. These days, I wouldn’t be surprised if folks are going to jail for tearing the tags off mattresses. 

Criminal offenses are punished with such harshness in the USA that the rest of the world thinks we’re insane. Get a load of this extract from a recent International Herald-Tribune article:  

Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror," James Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. "Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons." 

Prison sentences here have become "vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared," Michael Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in "The Handbook of Crime and Punishment." 

Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States "a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach." 

It’s time to bust up the prison-industrial complex. The corporate bigwigs who profit from building more and more prisons, and funnel their profits back to the politicians as bribes to create draconian laws, should be arrested, tried for crimes against humanity, and allowed to inhabit their own prisons for the rest of their lives. They should share cells with the punk politicians who voted for bloated prison funding and insanely punitive laws. 

We need to review our entire legal code and bring punishments into line with those of other Western nations. And we need to legalize and regulate all mind-altering drugs, and treat drug use using a harm reduction approach. That will free up half our prison space in one stroke.

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