It's Just Business

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prison.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

A lot of people get confused when they think about prison. They get the false impression that it’s a system of correction. If you do something that merits your incarceration, you do your time, go home and put your life back together. Oh, if it were only that easy.

Think about this: the United States as a country is only 5% of the world’s population. Yet, we have the highest prison population. There are other countries larger than us by far, just as Texas and New York are larger than Rhode Island or Connecticut.

One of two things are usually the most common assumptions. Either the United States has the worst people in the world or something is drastically wrong. You can’t have it both ways, can you?

But what if it isn’t? What if we don’t have the worst people in the world. Well then something has to be drastically wrong there. Nope, try again.

Nothing is wrong because it is designed the way it was supposed to be. It works just as it was designed. It’s a business run off of cheap labor and institutionalized workers. It’s not designed for corrections. That is a vastly mis-believed fabrication!

Inside, they get paid for every body that fills a bed. Every person who signs an attendance sheet for a class or a program. Being locked down is not an issue because they will bring the sheet around anyway and always get the mindless to sign regardless of actual attendance. Forget teaching you anything, and everyone gets paid.

The arms and the legs of the system are not designed for you to succeed. They want you to come back to this concrete hotel to work in their kitchens and so forth. They’re set up for failure to keep these turnstiles moving and rotating the mindless drones back through this system of so-called corrections. All for the almighty dollar, the very root of evil.

Now that’s not to say it’s impossible to finally escape its treacherous tentacles but rare enough that it’s dreamt about more than it’s accomplished. Why is that? One may desire it but working for it is a whole different story. The only thing that is ever going to break you from this business that’s not designed to let you escape it’s grasp is you. Educate yourselves. Be fully aware of all the why’s, the how’s, the when’s and the inevitable who’s.

MIM(Prisons) responds: It is true that many people are profiting off of the existence of prisons. Most importantly all the people who get paid to work in and around the criminal injustice system. States are subsidizing a huge welfare program for prison workers who can torture and abuse people at work and earn a good salary for it. But we can’t ignore the primary intent of the Amerikan criminal injustice system: social control. If not for this goal, it should be easy to convince politicians that the subsidy given to the vast prison system would be better spent on infrastructure work (which would also employ lots of people) or schools (again lots of employees). But prisons are essential to keep the oppressed nations in check.

The disproportionate rate of incarceration of Chican@s and New Afrikans demonstrates the social control function of prisons. We can also see it in the historic rise in imprisonment rate as the Amerikan government attacked the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s and tried to figure out how to stop this growing revolutionary movement. This is why we can’t take down the criminal injustice system with economic arguments alone.