It is a lumbering goliath that employs millions upon millions and "serves" many millions more... arguably the entire country indirectly. As of 2006, there were 2.2 million people incarcerated in prisons and jails in the country, representing the highest number of any country and also the highest rate. What has been hammered home to me in the last, well, few years, is how hilariously this number misrepresents how many people are REALLY in state custody. If you throw in people on probation or parole the number goes up to 7 M... something like 2% of the population.
I work with kids who are in state custody - not in prison or jail, but in a residential treatment facility, a placement that is essentially confinement but which counts as a school. All are on parole. There are a lot of places like this, that force a structured and limited lifestyle on people either in response to crimes or merely to the inability of their families to care for and protect them. There are a LOT of people in this country who, if left to their own devices, are deemed to represent a threat to themselves and/or to others. And this deeming is not arbitrary or, I think, wrong. Spending tens of thousands of dollars a year to house, observe, and... well... control one kid who has a very high likelihood (according to doctors utilizing our body of psychological learning) of offending sexually against other kids if released is, I would venture to say, a good expenditure on the part of the state - at least compared to a lot of the other things the state spends its money on.
In lockup, the staff is not attempting to rehabilitate inmates. I'm just going to go out on a limb and say that. They are not, and, really, cannot (because they are so heavily outnumbered), pay particularly close attention to the interactions that are going on between inmates and certainly cannot stop crimes from occurring in their facilities. About the best they can hope for is to avoid full-scale riots and to keep murders very low.
This "good", the control and incarceration of past offenders, is something that is in demand. The citizens of this country want their criminals locked up. Violent crimes are viewed individually as tragedies - evoking sympathy for the victims and anger towards the offenders. It is demanded that District Attorneys seek and judges hand out strict punishments and sentences. It's not like this system is imprisoning so many people because it wants to. It is merely selling a good. People are buying it. They are buying it by reading newspapers about and listening to news reports about crimes more thoroughly than on any other subject and by talking to their legislative representatives about how important it is to them that the rapists and murderers and arsonists be off the streets so that they can feel safe.
Safety is the good. More money is spent on "safety" in this country than almost anything else. I can't articulate all of the expenditures... this should really be a doctoral thesis in sociology or something that then leads to a lifetime's worth of research. Cameras and recording equipment, the training of bomb-smelling dogs, police, military, weapons from the average gun to spy satellites and stealth bombers... we pay a lot to compensate for our fear of being violated by others.
Which makes sense. We have a lot to lose. Those of us in this country who are free, particularly free and with money to spend on the things we want, live a lifestyle that very few human beings have had the opportunity to live. Seeing nothing else makes us take it for granted and makes us sublimate and forget our fear, forget how much we as a nation pay for it.
It shouldn't be too hard to understand how people in other countries around the world would resent our lifestyle, resent all that we have, want to take it away from us and redistribute it. I for one do not want that to happen. I want my friends and family and self to be able to drive around in our cars and eat and drink what we want and wear what we want and say what we want. If nothing else, I want to be able to sit at my expensive computer and type out what I think and have it be available for others to read and think about and talk about with their friends without being persecuted. I am free and I value that above... anything else. I want it for everyone but not everyone can have it. Maybe this isn't just and lord knows it makes me feel guilty.
This guilt, and this fear, is bought and paid for. I am happy to keep paying.
This is disorganized.
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