AlterNet: Rights and Liberties: Jailing Nation: How Did Our Prison System Become Such a Nightmare?

AlterNet: Rights and Liberties: Jailing Nation: How Did Our Prison System Become Such a Nightmare?: "How can you tell when a democracy is dead? When concentration camps spring up and everyone shivers in fear? Or is it when concentration camps spring up and no one shivers in fear because everyone knows they're not for 'people like us' (in Woody Allen's marvelous phrase) but for the others, the troublemakers, the ones you can tell are guilty merely by the color of their skin, the shape of their nose or their social class?

Questions like these are unavoidable in the face of America's homegrown gulag archipelago, a vast network of jails, prisons and 'supermax' tombs for the living dead that, without anyone quite noticing, has metastasized into the largest detention system in the advanced industrial world. The proportion of the US population languishing in such facilities now stands at 737 per 100,000, the highest rate on earth and some five to twelve times that of Britain, France and other Western European countries or Japan. With 5 percent of the world's population, the United States has close to a quarter of the world's prisoners, which, curiously enough, is the same as its annual contribution to global warming."

Prison is a big business now. In the south, private corporations build and run some some of the largest prisons in the country, and the communities that have lost wealth from dried oil wells, empty mines, and shuttered factories now actively court these facilities. These new jails must be then filled with prisoners in order to make a profit, and they find ingenious new ways to do this, well beyond the old favorite farce of the war on drugs.

I am sure the corporations that own these prisons spend a large amount of lobbying dollars on new, stricter laws that will help them to turn a profit. Is this the future of America? Imprisonment for profit?