My Own Private Hell

I like a story that most people ignore. These are usually the stories that are “boring” because they’re filled with all kinds of “depressing” things, like “facts.”

“But knowing who Lady Gaga is fucking is a fact!”

*sigh* Of course it is. Now go back to your pacifier, and please do us all a favor and stop breathing.

So while the world obsesses over the breeding habits of celebrities, Montana almost made incarceration a for-profit industry.

In case I haven’t driven off the “privatize everything” crowd from my blog yet, I’ll explain why private prisons being filled by a private police force is a bad thing:

Private organizations can do things like place security cameras, search without a warrant, detain without cause, and confiscate property without compensation. It won’t be long before every street and sidewalk is technically “private property” in which private security forces operate with complete impunity.

Once a private company has a big, empty prison, they’re going to set about filling it. They will literally scour the area, collecting people for the most pedestrian of offenses. Private prisons are paid by the government for each prisoner incarcerated, and any cost they can save by providing sup-bar conditions is pure profit. Plus, they’ll have a nice supply of forced-labor.

Welcome to Slavery 2.0!

This has already happened in my home state of Pennsylvania, original home of the prison. Most people don’t realize this, but Quakers invented the modern prison. They created it to be a place of rehabilitation, where people could be removed from the stimuli of their normal life and placed in a safe environment. There they can work towards bettering themselves through education while simultaneously being seperated from the problems outside the prison which caused them to need help.

Today, judges take bribes from private prisons to sentence people to longer and longer sentences. Thieves, drugs users, and even drunk drivers are forced to mingle with murderers and rapists.

We think “dropping the soap” is hilarious, even though the spread of AIDS in our prisons should wipe the smile off any face. Most people leave prison psychologically scarred and unable to find a decent job with a criminal record in their past. Prisons were supposed to be a second chance, but they have become the battlefront of class warfare, with all the profiteering of any military campaign.

The company that was slated to run the prison in Montana was also in the works to run prisons in New Mexico, as well. That is, until it was discovered that the people running these prisons were criminals...

Perhaps the most chilling thing about the whole fiasco is that nothing was learned.

“I can't say it was a mistake,” he said. “We make the best decision we can based on the information we have on hand. I don't think we did anything we couldn't or wouldn't do in the future.”

Look for private tyranny to appear in your local town soon.