Manufacturing a Society of Criminals for Profit

Copyright 2013       Aleasa M. Word       All Rights Reserved
I was fortunate to speak with a woman who had been incarcerated,
sexually abused and pushed into a life that was less than what she was brought up to engage in.  You may ask why I say fortunate.  This woman had been through so much yet stood triumphant and had dedicated her efforts to helping people take their lives back. Her strength of character far surpassed that of any one I spoken with in the past year. 

Many people in the US and Canada are incarcerated every day. We often judge and say it is through their own misdoings that they ended up on the wrong side of the law. But is it really their own misdoings, or instead a society set up to allow for a percentage of manufactured losers? Have we become so money hungry that we make it a point to create almost impossible odds that force the weaker minded, lonely, attention seeking, confused, mentally challenged or poverty stricken individuals to break laws and subsequently profit from governments or private agencies that serve the incarcerated? 
  
It’s no secret that we are allowing privatized prisons in the US. There are also companies that specialize in items for commissary for prisoners. There are even telephone services that are set up to provide collect   calls to family members at higher rates than traditional phone companies? Or how about the free to cheap labor we get from inmates by forcing them to work behind bars making things sold for 100 times the cost of their pay? These same inmates can be penalized if they don’t work for this wage that is often less than a dollar per hour without any of money going towards paying off their own debt to society. 
 
Isn’t it strange that with a country that makes up approximately 5% of the world population that we account for 25% of the incarceration rate worldwide?  Once again, we then judge these people who are incarcerated and write them off as degenerates without even knowing their story. In speaking with this woman, we discussed the parents in some states who are put in jail because they can’t afford to pay truancy fines assessed  because of teenage children who cut school.  Why is this acceptable? And, how about the mother who will be brought up on neglect charges if she doesn’t feed her child, doesn’t make enough to pay rent and buy food, can’t qualify for public assistance and makes the poor choice ONE time to skip out on a meal at a restaurant landing her in jail? 
  
I would never indicate that committing crimes are the right thing to do but sadly for some it ends up being the only thing they feel they can do at the time to survive.  Putting aside crimes of violence against others there are certainly many cases where desperation and basic need of survival was the catalyst for committing a crime.  So I ask: 
      
* Why aren’t there enough programs to feed the hungry? 
* Why aren’t there enough programs to help parents with co-pays when they do have insurance?
* Why aren’t there enough jobs available to work from or close to home thus cutting commute time allowing
   parents to spend necessary time with kids who could get into mischief? 
 
As intelligent as our leaders say they are how it is people who aren’t running the funding for programs are the only ones who know what is really needed? Don't get me wrong, loving the country we live in is one thing but disagreeing with some of our processes is completely different!  This does however lead me to ask the question -  do we care about reducing our crime rate and rehabilitating people or are we simply manufacturing a society of criminals for profit?