Prisons As A Cost Center

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In the American criminal justice system, people are Currency to be passed around the business circle as fast as possible, like that Twenty dollar bill mentioned before.

Prison inmates create a revenue stream even though it is tax money that funds the system. As long as the total expenditures remain only a small fraction of the total governmental budget, it remains a very good part of the economy. Just a few of the economic benefits are:

1. Contractors who build prisons are paid
2. Guards are paid their salaries
3. There is the prison food service
4. There is laundry, uniforms and facility upkeep.
5. There are bail bonds to be bought

Just recently in California (1999) it was disclosed that MCI had a contract with the county detention facilities to provide all its prisoner phone call services. Prisoners were allowed to only make collect calls at premium prices. The government received a 44% commission on the proceeds that were charged to inmate families. A $3.00 per call surcharge was collected in additional to the highest per minute rates charges to any customers. The funds were paid into the state general fund to the tune of about $16 million annually.

In the United States we have about 2,000,000 annual inmates. Being housed at $20,000 per year generate a $40 billion revenue stream that fuels the economy. Some of the convicts are violent and dangerous people who have murdered, raped, molested children and other such heinous crimes. There are those who got caught up in the minimum sentencing laws for less than worthy reasons. All of these people have been made into revenue generating cost centers at the expense of their freedoms. They are part of the $40 billion penitentiary enterprise that has become a growth industry in US. We seek to incarcerate everyone who disagrees with a legislative majority opinion of what is okay and what is not. Although there is no single company or jurisdiction to whom the benefits of this industry accrue, a great many people build their lives around holding and housing inmates irrespective of what it is that landed them in a cell in the first place. They, like the Economy, do not care. A person is committed and it is the penal system's job to hold that person as long as specified. They, like the Executioner, are not judging the condemned. They are merely doing their job.

Police officers also benefit from the petty crimes committed to pay high prices for smuggled narcotics that result in those addicts being incarcerated for their drug addictions. With only 1 million police officers and a salary of $20,000 the benefit to the mindless emotionless economy is $20 billion annually.

Every large business enterprise lobbies Congress to pass legislation that will benefit that business. Loggers lobby for access to National Forests. Oil companies lobby for access to artic wildlife preserves. Pharmaceutical companies lobby to get their drugs on the market and to limit the liabilities of undesirable effects of those drugs. Even insurance companies want relief from huge damage awards or having to cover high risk or merely overly frequent occurrences of loss. So the beneficiary enterprises that earn revenues from the high levels of crime also lobby to create a "better environment" for their goods and services, too.

What better way to garner support for their industries than to whip up a frenzy of negative public sentiment against Crime! and Criminals! Without regard to who they are or what they have done? Now remember, whether we spend our millions of tax dollars on warehousing people or on fixing the problems that create the need for warehousing, the economy benefits by the total dollars spent, not on what it was spent on or who received the money. The only variables are, which people get a paycheck - the social worker or the prison guard, the drug clinic doctor or the warden.

In Baltimore, MD, alone there are an estimated 60,000 heroin and cocaine addicts either using the white powdered type or the rock version called Crack. Minorities and urban dwellers are more likely to be addicted to the Crack version while the Caucasian and suburban dwellers are more likely to be addicted to the powder. Penalties for possessing or selling the Crack version holds prison terms that are two to ten times longer than for the powdered stuff.

A typical daily consumption costs $100 per addict. That becomes $6,000,000 per day in total consumption. Let us assign half of that cost to the people who can still hold gainful employment and pay for their habits with legally obtained funds. The other $3,000,000 per day has to be raised through crime. At 10 cents on the dollar for fencing stolen goods and pawn shop loans, the amount of stolen property is $30,000,000 per day. Annualizing that number it becomes $10.95 Billion to support the habits of Baltimore's cocaine addicts. Now apply that number to the 50 largest cities in America and that's $547.5 Billion annually.

If I were a retailer selling electronic devices and other portable things like watches, rings and gold chains, I would love the trade that drug addicts create for my business. If I were a manufacturer of such things, I would likewise appreciate the market that the drugs create for me. In neither case would I have to have any connection to the production, transport, import, sale or buying of controlled substances in order to realize this benefit.