Grave news out of Carson City, Nevada. A 220-year-old prison in the city, the oldest in the nation and also older than the state of Nevada, may be closing in order to save the state $18 million per year. This is part of disturbing trend across the country where both prisons and parole programs are coming under scrutiny for excessive cost. If we keep this up, we may lose our worldwide lead on incarceration per capita, and that cannot be allowed to happen.
Currently, one of every 31 people in the United States is either in prison, on parole, or under probation. It’s been a long road, but we’ve managed as a country to turn over three percent of our population into criminals, and I’ll be damned if these yellow-bellied accountants let these dangerous people out of prison. After all, it’s not like the majority of prison inmates are non-violent drug offenders or people who violated ridiculously arcane technicalities of their parole (disclosure: in California the largest percentage of inmates are those who violated ridiculously arcane technicalities of their parole).
We even sent Martha Stewart to jail. Why? Well, that's just what we do here.
I don’t think that the people considering closing these prisons take into account what will happen to the job market. First of all, running prisons costs states about $48 billion a year and employs a lot of people. What happens to all those Corrections Officers when prisons get shut down? And what about all the released inmates who will then want to find jobs? There are only so many positions open at local fast food restaurants and the market for authentic prison tattoos has dried up since gangsta rap stopped being relevant.
When Asian girls wearing berets get "Thug Life" tattoos, you know the gesture has lost all meaning.
This cash crunch isn’t just affecting the prison systems of liberal states, though. Even capital punishment stalwarts like Kentucky and Kansas are starting to redraft their incarceration and parole regulations in order to cut costs. I never thought I’d live to see the day when Kentucky showed any sort of pity or leniency to inmates, regardless of the motivating factors. Hell has certainly frozen over.
Don’t get too discouraged, though. If we follow trends, things are looking good. For example:
This graph shows that around 1980 the rate of prisoners sky-rocketed. Some say this is because of anti-drug laws that mandated harsh prison sentences for non-violent offenders. I say it was because all the criminals who had ever gotten away realized that nobody messes with Reagan and turned themselves in.
If we can manage to continue this trend, we could have a full ten percent of the population locked up within a few decades. That would not only secure our lead in the incarceration per capita race, but also ease our image in the Middle East. After all, if we lock up one in ten of our own people, then abducting and secretly holding a few Afghani cab drivers for 8 years doesn’t seem all that bad.
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I’ve been worried about the economy lately. If we ( I mean you stupid Yanks ) ended Drug prohibition the world would be a better place, however you fire millions of prison guards, cops, court-stenograghers… and the private sector sector would suffer because all your scummy lawyers would put their houses up for sale.
The best solution is to make more things illegal.
In France it is now illegal for a woman to cover her face. Why not make it illegal for a woman to cover other parts of her body?
Why not make coffee illegal, again? It used to be thought of as the homosexual drink.
Homophobia is usually popular in democracies. Let’s test France.