- USA has the most prisoners of any country.
- USA has the highest incarceration rate of any country.
- (Note: would be interesting to find out where are North Korean numbers are coming from and whether El Salvador has now topped USA).
- USA has for profit prisons that are publicly traded.
- The people who run those companies have a duty to the share holders to increase the value of the stocks. One of the main levers to increase the value of such stock is to increase the number of prisoners…
- USA allows lobbyists representing prisons influence our laws.
Imprisonment data (Sorted by incarceration rate)
-Incentives Matter. The goal of corporations is to seek profits and increase stock value. Currently in USA there are prisons that are publicly traded companies (Eg. CoreCivic Stock). Hence, from their perspective the longer they hold prisoners and the more prisoners they have the more they achieve their goal of appeasing shareholders, and therefore receiving hefty bonuses in return. Rehabilitation and sensible punishments for non-violent crime come at complete odds with driving the stock price up. In this case we can see how legalized lobbying is quite problematic, when the interested party’s goal is to maximize the amount of people behind bars at the cost of tax payers dollars.
In California a single prisoner costs over 100k a year. Which is a mind boggling number considering we have over 2 million prisoners/jailed folk in USA. And a very small percentage of that goes to rehabilitation programs.
“It costs an average of about $106,000 per year to incarcerate an inmate in prison in California.” - la.gov
California's annual cost to incarcerate a prisoner
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Even if we count that others states are much more frugal. Lets say we spend 50k on average per prisoner, per year across USA. That means are spending 100 Billion dollars a year on throwing people behind bars into a system that is designed to more corrupt rather than rehabilitate.
This is a glaring problem that appears we like to decouple ourselves from. Part of it must be driven from fear as being afraid of not being tough on crime. Part of it momentum. Whatever got us into this mess, what we should strive for is a system that is designed for rehabilitation, rather than designed for recidivism and retention. And it largely starts with having the right incentives in place. Which as previously discussed for profit prisons currently have completely twisted incentives.