For-Profit Prisons and The Reversal In Phasing Them Out.

The United States imprisons more people per capita than any other country. With more mandatory minimum sentencing laws and more economic and social policy changes in favor of a higher wage population, privatization of public resources has become any easy moneymaker. This also includes charter schools and for-profit higher education institutes.

The idea that a company can relieve the government of the responsibility of managing the incarceration of people by also getting paid by the government shows how much disregard there is for the rehabilitative purposes of incarceration.

Recently, the Department of Corrections was on a path to phase out for-profit prisons realizing full well that making money off the incarceration of people has no ethical basis. With Trump’s new attorney general Jeff Sessions in his new capacity of power, he reversed the DOC’s phasing out process. I wonder why? Below is a great article about the reversal of phasing out private prisons. When you think about the over 22,000 prisoners Wisconsin houses and consider that Illinois has statutes that have banned private prisons. Last week’s post was about Cook County Jail. In a state that holds the motto of ‘Forward’, it does not look like our previously purple state minds to disregard a lot of these issues.

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1622NN