PRI$ON NATION
GUE$$ WHO IS NEXT?
YOU!
Guess what? The system needs you. It’s huge. It’s no small chore keeping the jails filled; government employees at work; and those tax dollars, fines, and court costs rolling in.
The problem nowadays is that, in many cities, serious crime is way down. The cops are great at arresting the really bad guys, and state legislatures have passed stiff sentencing guidelines that put felons away for decades. What you’ll never see, however, is a headline like this:
“Crime Down—Judges Laid Off, Cops Furloughed, Jails to Close.”
IT IS THE EXACT OPPOSITE IN 2009.
The criminal justice system needs inmates to survive. This bureaucratic imperative to make ever more arrests is never absent from the decisions of cops and judges, and it’s never discussed.
"The total prison population in the U.S. has increased more than sevenfold in the past generation
and the federal system has grown faster than the states.
The largely discretionary federal prisons had
always been a less than 10% share of total prison population, but the 2009 federal prison numbers are
very close to the total number of prisoners in all systems in 1972." ~Testimony of Franklin E. Zimring before the U.S. Sentencing Commission
(regional hearings) May 28, 2009
So what to do? If murderers, armed robbers, rapists, and drug dealers are in short supply, the system fills itself with graffiti writers, jaywalkers, petty drug users, drivers with suspended licenses.
You’re worth real money when you’re busted. For example, if you’re arrested for a petty federal offense like making phony IDs (yes, computer buying moms and dads, Junior can be arrested on a federal charge, by the Homeland Security Agency and the Secret Service for using the ’puter to make phony IDs to buy beer), the state gets paid more than $150 per day by the federal government for every day you’re in custody, since the federal government does not have pretrial detention facilities, i.e., jails. One of my friends was tossed into a cell with 10 other federal inmates. That’s 11 inmates at $150 per day, or $1,650 per cell per day. That’s as much as the toniest resorts get for presidential suites.
Understandably, officials think of jails as hotels that can be profitably filled. All the people around you—cops, guards, clerks, bailiffs, judges, attorneys, probation officers, social workers—are making a good living off you.
