Let me describe my nightmare scenario for you.

Private corporations lobby to purchase state run jail systems from the state wherein they would be paid $$$ by the state every time there was a person that needed to be imprisoned.  These private corporations donate large sums of money to various politicians and judges.  The politicians pass a law effectively selling these state resources to private corporations wherein taxpayers would pay these corporations any time they need to incarcerate a citizen.

Owning these jail systems – private corporations pay and donate to sympathetic judges helping to increase the rate of incarceration and now there is a financial incentive to keep prisons full.  These private corporations make more money directly from the state and taxpayers pay more money out of pocket because private corporations cost more.  Now these private prison corporations SELL slave labor to Fortune 500 companies where these prisoners make $1.00 a day and these private prison corporations make even more money off the backs of their legally captive slave labor.  Well…that’s what’s happening, and it should scare the shit out of you.

You can see some facts HERE.  Mother Jones has the story:

Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S (formerly Wackenhut), two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.

These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside. All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.

You can read more about this HERE – chart inside the link:

And for those of you who weren’t aware – a private prison company offered to buy 48 states’ prison systems for $250 million.  Read about that HERE.  And all of this reminds me of this scene in Shawshank Redemption.

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