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Thom discussed our prison system, especially for juveniles, and how it compares with other countries. They have a much stronger focus on rehabilitation and education is a big part of that.
Thom reminded us that the brains of adolescents are still growing and their ability to make serious judgments and control their impulses is not fully developed yet. Should they be given adult sentences like life in prison as a result of what they've done before they're even able to think like adults? Could such harsh sentences meted out to teenagers be cruel and unusual punishment?
We have far less rehabilitation than other countries do. It was interesting to hear about what they have been doing and their results. His guest sneered at the idea of education, saying the prisoners weren't exactly the brightest people-- and I thought-- well, they've sure got a lot of time to make up for what they missed in school. Thom pointed out that some young offenders were running complex businesses, just dealing with illegal products, so they have a lot of potential for rehabilitation as entrepreneurs. We toss far too many bright, promising kids into jail these days, while our prison system has gotten more brutal and cut back so much on rehabilitation, and they end up damaged, rather than redirected, retrained for legal career options.
Yes, sure. There are some that we don't want ever set free. But why do we have the largest number of prisoners in the world? And how has our prison system been working for us all? We have cut costs and increased quarterly profits, but at what cost to our society? And is there no better, more socially productive way? We may have them here but have had their budgets slashed while billions were diverted to Bush's wars.
Thom reminds me to analyze which of our business practices might be crossing the line into predatory capitalism, and I appreciate that. Monopoly capitalism in our country has accelerated over the past couple of decades. The basic corporate goals of cutting costs, making more and getting bigger have become national dogma, but they are counter-productive in the Greening Century. Accumulating and increasing private profits and power can no longer remain our country's overriding goal. We need complex international cooperation to clean up the cruel & unusual punishment that reckless business practices have inflicted on our planetary ecosystems.
His show got me thinking about this one more entry onto the Top Ten Failures of Privatization-- our prison industry. Prisons are being privatized mainly to save money, but business is business-- does allowing our prison systems to be driven by the profit motive really benefit our society? Do we want the somber incarceration of our fellow citizens to be administered by companies that are driven to cut costs, expand their branches, and lobby for laws that will increase their profitability (whether by increasing the supply of their commodity, prisoners; or loosening the restrictive minimum-standard of care regulations)?
We have privatized a lot of our prison system and they get paid by prisoner. High recidivism rates provide better job security for the prison industry. If we had more effective rehabilitation and more sensible laws that didn't imprison more of our citizens than any other country on earth, including the communist dictatorship of The People's Republic of China, prison industry profits might decline. The "wisdom of the free market" drives businesses toward ever-increasing quarterly profits-- do we want expansion as the business model for prison system administration?
Prisons are initially privatized to save money-- and if the industry can get us to think of prisoners as hardened criminals beyond all rehabilitation, they can cut that "wasteful" social spending out of their budgets. And gee, what a coincidence, as more prison systems are privatized, we have a whole slew of testosterone-specials on TV like MSNBC's "Lockup"-- reinforcing the idea of Inmates as vicious people beyond rehabilitation, so dangerous that they need to be confined and monitored for years to come. Vicious criminals lurk everywhere on TV-- scary, tough, no-hopers-- so who needs to waste money on rehabilitation and education? Hey, gang, don't get too soft on those guys, seems to be the message of those TV shows, so I haven't watched many of them.
This segment of Thom's reminded me of the part in Michael Moore's latest movie, showing the sudden jump in convictions and confinement of juveniles meted out by the judge in whose town a new prison for juveniles, built with his encouragement, had just opened. I think some appeals of the extra cases were recently dismissed.
Later on last night, Rachel Maddow had a segment on about a trade organization lobbying to get the U.S. to loosen its restrictions on importing products into the U.S. that have been made with child, prison, or "forced" labor. How low are we willing to go? Didn't we outlaw slavery, she asked?
So I thank Thom for asking us to think about how we'd define predatory capitalism, and what remedies might redress the balance at a thoughtful pace that wouldn't tank the most brutal corporate conglomerates all at once. That's when I hope the Democrats in Charge will go ahead and get all FDR on us. Waves of nationwide green jobs would help a great deal at this time. That could be done on the side, under the radar, as an emergency jobs effort-- emergency assistance of the most effective kind-- paying jobs. Productive jobs, retrofitting and repairing our national infrastructure, preparing us to add more alternative energy sources into our power grids, and decentralize them for better national security. Response to the inevitable-- "are those just make-work projects?"-- Sure! Work is great. Americans need work in every state, right now; Stimulus 2 needs to be a major green jobs program for all different skill sets. Towns and cities that have lost lots of jobs need new ones. Coal producing states need to have those jobs replaced by alternative energy jobs. We need programmers as well as construction, design and engineering.
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