Who Wants Keep the War on Drugs Going and Put You in Debtor’s Prison?

This is a perfect example of why we can't have nice things: better energy systems, better laws, better public services, better social policy, better schools, regulations that are both simpler and more effective...

Everything has a vested interest behind it, and those vested interests are a bit like ticks. They burrow in, suck, and they're damn hard to pick out. They go by many names: special interest groups, contractors, corporations, political action committees, government alphabet agencies with funding tied to pet mandates, public sector unions, and politicians who only care about getting re-elected. Some play the left side of the political divide, some play the right, and some play both and don't care. They're all just parasites.

Unions and contractors are sort of the yin-yang of the whole thing. I recall reading about the California marijuana legalization proposal... the major opponents were being backed by the private prison industry and police unions.

Sometimes I think our society needs some sort of jubilee: fire everyone, dissolve every corporation, cancel every debt, end every politicians' term, and start over. Otherwise complexity and special interests just accumulate until we collapse from sclerosis and corruption. We're already teetering...

I think of social infrastructure like the prison system (including the private prison system) as like a gigantic potential well. As we build out more and more of the tools of a totalitarian fascist state embarking on a genocidal project -- we become more and more likely to fall into that potential well and actually become exactly such a state.

It's worse than the article says. In CA the prison guards union is one of richest and most powerful organizations is the state. Combine that with the propensity of conservative social engineers to throw anyone who doesnt fit in their mold to the wolves or into jail and you get the mess that we have today.

Apologies for the rant, but these things make me cranky.