Resignation letter of Nowata County, Oklahoma sheriff Terry Barnett, after a judge ordered her to reopen an unsafe jail with near-lethal carbon monoxide and exposed wiring.

submitted by magnora7 from i.imgur.com

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[–]Hobo 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

I'm surprised there isn't more anger about it. Just look at how the private prisons use their inmates as a source of essentially unpaid slave labor. If you don't work for 5 cents an hour than you're often punished by having restricted access during the day.

[–]magnora7[S] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It's a "frog in boiling water" situation, it's gotten worse so slowly that there's no one incident to cause a mass outrage. But things like the letter in the original post might come close.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/US_incarceration_timeline-clean.svg/1200px-US_incarceration_timeline-clean.svg.png

You can see how much the "Drug War" from the 1980s and Reagan caused the prison population to explode.

Another part is that private prisons are only about 5%, yet there are many public prisons that are basically for-profit in practice, but they're still called "public" prisons. No one really talks about those. That's where they're basically working them as slaves to produce products they can sell, like furniture. All furniture in public schools in iowa was made by prisoners, I've heard. They even have a website where you can shop products! https://www.unicor.gov/index.aspx

Furthermore the public prisons get paid by the gov't on a per-prisoner basis, meaning they have a huge incentive to cram as many prisoners as they can in to their prison, without building more infrastructure. So almost every prison is over-crowded.

This situation is an absolute joke. The US is currently setting the world record for number of prisoners, both in raw numbers and per-capita.

I don't know how anyone can objectively look at this and see it as acceptable.

[–]Farseli 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It's the just-world phenomenon. People tend to believe that the world is just and people get what they deserve. They want to believe it is fair, because a world that isn't fair is scary.

In that mindset, poor conditions for inmates are what they deserve because if they were good people they wouldn't be in prison. It doesn't matter if what they did (if anything) actually deserves prison time. They were sent to prison so they deserve it.

Another example: for a culture that almost universally considers rape to be bad, people are more than willing to joke or make light of prison rape. Bad people go to prison, so if they experience prison rape it is okay. Good people won't ever experience that because good people never end up in prison.

[–]JasonCarswell 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Constitutionally slavery is forbidden - except in prisons.