"It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one."~Voltaire
Why do we believe the court system become an infallible judge of wrong doing?
We live in an age of politics. Where the guilty are freed because of their money, where the innocent are jailed because lack of proper representation. We are living in a time where cocaine and methamphetamine addicts are being arrested for admitting to their drug use when they try to get help, while Wall Street Swindler's get minimal or no punishment for their dishonesty.
There seems to be an increase in mandatory sentencing of victimless crimes. There are many examples of this:
A man in Tennessee was arrested on his own farm for drunk and disorderly conduct. His nearest neighbor was 3 miles away.
Another man in Tennessee was arrested for Possession of Marijuana, he was smoking a joint on his property. The joint was the evidence of possession he had.
There is a difference between victim and victimless crime, we need to recognize this. We also need to recognize that there is revenue form the federal government for our arrest, incarceration, and probation over a month.
In this day and age, the prison system has become a source of capital to states. We hear all the banter about the cost of prisoners, federal subsidies going to states to house criminals. The federal government does pay states $42 a day per prisoner in federal and state prisons. In response to this, local laws seem to be growing stricter in some regard.
Depending on the level of security needed by the prisoner, many of them work for private companies, in prison, for pennies on the dollar. Whoever runs these prisoner work farms makes a profit on the companies that contract them for their workforce.
I am talking about telemarketers, mechanics, Technical Support Representatives, electronics repair technicians. All of them not necessarily guilty, but none of them not making a wage worthwhile.
While the prisoner make anywhere from $.50 to $2.00 an hour, the prison keeps as much as $5 to $20 an hour paid for by the company contracting them.
If our legal system is now designed to keep the flow of indentured servants in the prison system, do we, as citizens, actually have a chance at getting a fair trial or receiving the justice for the innocent as well?
There is a very unpublicized catch to this. Federal and States are contracting out prison management to private corporations. These private corporations do not declare publicly where the subsidy money is going. The federal government is paying state governments millions of dollars, and the state government are then handing that money over to private contractors, keeping a portion in the states coffers. If there is any corruption in the incarceration process, it can be blamed on the contractor and not any political official.
More importantly, these "Private Prison Corporations" are influencing the political system at an alarming rate. The politicians are claiming that private prison corporations are a boon to a desperate situation in the prison system. These companies receive state and federal funding to manage the prison system, accepting the responsibility of any political flak for abuse and neglect. They also get to legally enslave the prison population in a state of endentured servitude. They receive money for each prisoners hard work from private corporations, while the prisoner get little or nothing in return. Then the "Private Prison Corporations" in turn donate millions of dollars to the politicians that supported their bids for the contracts. This is enslavement and nepotism at its worst.
How many innocents or those guilty of victimless crimes are being imprisoned in the name of the Almighty Dollar?
"The injustice of defeat lies in the fact that its most innocent victims are made to look like heartless accomplices. It is impossible to see behind defeat, the sacrifices, the austere performance of duty, the self-discipline and the vigilance that are there -- those things the god of battle does not take account of."~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery
To find out more, Check out
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2797/follow_the_prison_money_trail/
