BY STUDENT
Prison, a place where convicts, felons, and those who break
the law go to serve a sentence handed to them by the government. According to a
website Stop the Crime, prison has four purposes; retribution, incapacitation,
deterrence, and rehabilitation. Does going to prison really mean inmates are
there for rehabilitation? Retribution? Incapacitation? I for one do not believe
that the current prison system being used to do any of these. An article titled
“Making Profits on the Captive Prison Market” by Eric Markowitz spoke on the
profits that prisons and those associated with prisons make and how much of
that money goes into the pockets of big corporations.
Corrections seems to be a lucrative market. Around 80
billion dollars is spent every year on corrections for private prisons which
house significantly less prisoners than federal prisons. This money is used for
things such as telecommunications, healthcare, and even some basic needs like
food and toiletries. Couple this with the abysmal pay inmates receive and you
have the making of a multi-billion-dollar industry. When an inmate goes to
prison, he/she is there to serve a sentence passed on to them by the government
where the severity of their sentence is based on the crime. This way of
thinking promotes the poor treatment inmates receive. In 2012, a company named
Corizon Health was investigated for neglect in a prison in Boise, Idaho because
the inmates were sick but they did not receive appropriate healthcare. The same
company was sued in 2015 for allowing an inmate to die due to medical neglect.
These cases lead the American Civil Liberties Union to pose a question, “How
does this for-profit healthcare company keep its costs low and profits high? By
failing to provide sick prisoners with needed care. (Markowitz)”
The high costs of prison related industries isn’t the only
problem. Prisoners are being worked extremely hard for little to no pay. These
services that the inmates provide go directly to big corporations who make a
killing out of a form of legalized slavery. The more inmates that go to prison,
the larger the cash cow gets for these companies and more and more money is
lining the pockets of “important” suit wearing Americans. As long as the
inmates keep flowing in, so does the money. It objectifies inmates as monetary
gain for these corporations when they are in prison to serve a sentence and
undergo rehabilitation, incarceration, retribution, and deterrence. When people
start seeing inmates as dollar signs and stop seeing them as people, what does
that make us?
Bibliography
Eric Markowitz, “Making Profits on the Captive Prison
Market,” New Yorker, September 4,
2016.
I.V.:
ReplyDeleteI believe that the prison system needs fixing, I believe that sometimes instead of assisting the inmates in there rehabilitation, it makes worse. We have convicts that leave in a few months they are right back in the correctional facility that were incarcerated too. But the sad truth of it is that the style of imprisonment is legal, in the U.S constitution. It is a form of punishment, that unfortunately requires us to waste millions of dollars on it.