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ArnoldRimmer on 16 August 2011
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Seece said:
vlad321 said:
Seece said:
ArnoldRimmer said:
There are two major reasons:

1. The main reason is that american jails are filled with harmless drug users, not real criminals who harm others.

2. Locking people up is a business in the USA. So there are many people who will earn more money if more people are locked up, so these influential people have an interest to have as many people in jail as possible.

I've never understood how America makes money out of prisoners? Here it's the opposite so we try to keep people out of prisons and reduce their sentances.

America doesn't, but here some prisons are run by corporations which make money out of having prisoners.

lol how?! Do they send them to work or something?

Many do. They get money for every prisoner from the government, and by selling the prisoner's manpower they earn even more (because the prisoners get little to no money for the work of course), so they acually earn twice per prisoner.

In 2009, it was revealed that two(!!!) american judges had received millions of dollars of bribe money from private jails for simply sentencing as many people as possible to jail for a long time. So it's easy to see how profitable this business must be for the corporations running private jails. By buying stocks from these corporations, actually anyone can profit from the practice of jailing as many people as possible.

Nowadays most big companies use prisoner work, for example: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northerm Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom, Revon, Macy's, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores. Callcenter agent for example is a very typical prisoner work as far as I know.

I just remember that the topic was for example portrayed in the great movie Shawshank Redemption that was set back in the 1950s. The prison warden was secretly making a fortune selling prisoner manpower, and the public even applauded him because he pretended that the real reason was that this way the anti-social criminals would give something back to society.