Are Punishments Really Idealistic?

[sethnintendo]

IIIIITHE1IIIII said:

sethnintendo said:

Legalize all drugs and give the addicts that want help treatment rather than jail time. It would free up a lot of prisons to actually contain criminals that hurt people like rapist, murders, and child molesters.  Private prisons are a big business and it should have never gotten to this point.  Private companies should not own prisons.

Yeah, making people profit from having more criminals in their jail is disastrous. (Because that's how they profit, right?)

America seems to have a great pile of things that they shouldn't have done in the first place but have to keep since it's already there: Private prisons, the two major parties and guns, to name a few.

Yea, they profit with more prisoners.  This also usually means more workers (I believe some put them to work for cheap labor with the prison company probably getting decent compensation while throwing chump change to the prisoner).  So it is almost like a form of slavery.

"Federal and state government has a long history of contracting out specific services to private firms, including medical services, food preparation, vocational training, and inmate transportation. The 1980s, though, ushered in a new era of prison privatization. With a burgeoning prison population resulting from the War on Drugs and increased use of incarceration, prison overcrowding and rising costs became increasingly problematic for local, state, and federal governments. In response to this expanding criminal justice system, private business interests saw an opportunity for expansion, and consequently, private-sector involvement in prisons moved from the simple contracting of services to contracting for the complete management and operation of entire prisons"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison

You can thank Reagan and the war on drugs for driving this "job growth".  I honestly don't see why Republicans look up to Reagan so much.