I will leave you with this quote by John Erlichman:
"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities, (...) We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
Source: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman
And, because everything is complicated, the family denies it all:
The 1994 alleged ‘quote’ we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father. And collectively, that spans over 185 years of time with him,” the Ehrlichman family wrote. “We do not subscribe to the alleged racist point of view that this writer now implies 22 years following the so-called interview of John and 16 years following our father’s death, when dad can no longer respond. None of us have raised our kids that way, and that’s because we were not raised that way.”
Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...
Regarding Ehrlichman specifically, his Wikipedia page says he fought for the US during WWII, and his father died serving in the Canadian military in 1940 (when Canada was fighting, but the US was not).
So it seems pretty low to call him a Nazi.
https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/private-prisons-in...
> The next year, 111 inmates continued to produce “decorated party balloons” for MINNCOR, according to NCIA’s database. Large contracts such as this, coupled with correctional industries wages of between $0.50 and $2.00 per hour, allowed MINNCOR to make a profit of over $13 million in 2019.
Also relevant: https://minncorprod.blob.core.windows.net/files/MINNCOR%20In...
I'm actually having trouble squaring the claim from corpaccountabilitylab.org of an average of $.50 - $2/hr and what MINNCOR claims which is an average of $14.20/hr. The leading value of MINNCOR industries is to have the industrial programs pay for the prison system, thereby not passing new taxes onto residents. The only way that I can think to measure whether that system is healthy or not is to determine if it can both scale down and scale up. If it can't scale down, then they will indeed be incentivized to incarcerate new people.
Also of note, MINNCOR continues to employ people on release. From the report: 172 released + 753 incarcerated = 925 total active participants. The low of self-reported wages is $10/hr, the high is $22.38.
It's not how many people they are in charge of that matters, but how much money they donate to politicians to be be "tough on crime", and how much other soft money influence they have to make citizens think that crime is a problem that politicians need to be tough on, and to demonise politicians who aren't (which right-wing media is all too happy to help with).
Even if private prisons only have a small slice of the prison pie, they still work hard to make the pie as big as possible.
My understanding is that about 8% of US prisons are privately owned. Perhaps that's not a good thing, but I don't think it is at all correct to say that "prisons in the USA are for-profit enterprise" when the actual number is so low.
I have also heard this narrative for a long time that the prisons were filled mostly with non-violent drug offenders, only to learn that this description only applies to about 3.5% of the prison population. Maybe that's not a good thing either, but again I feel like I have been intentionally deceived after reading supposedly high-minded journalism into believing a fundamentally false understanding of what is going on.
To be clear, I said "prisons...are for-profit enterprises", not "all prisons are privately owned". Even state-owned prisons are cash cows for the prison industry. I'm not interested in what narrative you identify with, I'm stating a fact.
Actually prisons and schools have quite a lot in common so maybe you're onto something.
The other issue is more in general about having incarceration rates that are "four to six times that of its high-income peers in Europe and Asia". So you might recognize that as an issue too and think perhaps its the privatized prison system, the root causes for crime like inequality, disenfranchisement, homelessness, the reasons for drug use in the first place, or even just perhaps switching to an evidence-based rehabilitation system.
But now imagine you are a liberal, you need a way to acknowledge and talk about these problems without ever actually having to change anything. So that's why liberal journalists are talking about non-violent drug offenders and the 8.41% private prison population and so Biden stopped the justice department from renewing contracts for federal private prisons and he pardoned all prisoners of federal non-violent marijuana possession charges. Of course it doesn't actually do anything, but that was the point. And that's what liberalism is.
About 7-8% of US jail and prisoners inmates are in for-profit correctional institutions, most are in public institutions which are not operated for profit.
Private, for profit prisons are an issue, but they are very much not the norm in the US.
Of where?
I, as a lawful citizen of the United States of America, am not embarrassed by the prison system.
I am embarrassed, however, by folks who use hyperbole without merit to try and appease the masses without having the courage to go against the grain for fear of getting "downvoted" and losing faked internet points.
The fact that you believe the USA has the worst prison system in the world, compared to somewhere like, I dunno, Venezuela, supports my prior point.
You chastise those that "appease the masses" but mention Venezuela's prison system. How much firsthand experience do you have with Venezuela's prison system? My wager is that your concept of their prison system is based on articles specifically designed to "appease the masses".