Abolish Private Prisons

In theory, jail and cops kinda make sense. If somebody’s being naughty, you put them in time out for a bit.

In practice, shit’s fucked sideways.

The American prison system does not exist to hold bad people accountable. It exists to source free labor. The game is simple. Rich people can buy their way out of trouble, poor people get locked up for being at the wrong place in the wrong time.

Private prisons make money by performing manual labor and paying the laborers in ghost pennies. The more laborers they can avoid paying, the more money they can make. They have a profit motive to lock up as many people as possible. If someone changes for the better and doesn’t offend again, they lose money. They are incentivized to NOT rehabilitate.

How do they get more people? More arrests. How do they get get more arrests? They give cops quotas. What happens when cops get quotas? They arrest people that aren’t guilty.

Here in Massachusetts, we’re fortunate to have state run prisons focused on keeping citizens safe instead of keeping pockets stuffed. but elsewhere in America folks don’t have it so lucky. This is yet another instance where the rest of the country needs to be held to the massachusetts standard.

On a federal level we need to make private profit first prisons Illegal.

And to tackle the root cause of the issue, the 13th amendment must be rewritten to ban slavery permanently with no exceptions. Not even as punishment for a crime.