在线国产一区二区_成人黄色片在线观看_国产成人免费_日韩精品免费在线视频_亚洲精品美女久久_欧美一级免费在线观看

Global EditionASIA 中文雙語Fran?ais
Opinion
Home / Opinion / To the Point

Preacher of freedom imprisons people for profit

By Zhao Manfeng | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2022-02-11 10:36
Share
Share - WeChat
Luo Jie / China Daily

Private prisons in the US can be a living hell for the powerless yet a booming business for some other. It is no secret that the US government and private prison systems profit hugely under the guise of justice – just another proof of US’ decaying system and hypocrisy of the its style of democracy.

Incarceration cannot be more common in the US. The transformation of slavery, colonialism, classism, and other things across time all have contributed to the high incarceration rate, a business booming so much that in 2018, the Sentencing Project reported that the US had the world's largest private prison population.

According to the Sentencing Project, the war on drugs and harsher sentencing policies, including mandatory minimum sentences, fueled a rapid expansion in the nation’s prison population beginning in the 1980s. The resulting burden on the public sector led to the modern emergence of for-profit private prisons in many states and at the federal level.

Modern slavery

In prison, it is easy to feel forgotten — by friends, by family and by the elected officials who so rarely set foot inside the razor wire. It is no exaggeration to say the private prison is a modern version of slavery.

Boasting huge investment, these private-owned facilities even then fail to meet necessary levels of safety and security for detainees. Forced labor, sex abuse, racial discrimination and other kind of human rights violation happen all the time in those private prisons.

For instance, prison labor, or penal labor, is performed by incarcerated and detained people all the time. Due to its inherent power imbalance, labor by those incarcerated behind bars becomes exploitative when there are elements of coercion, force, and threat of punishment against detainees.

According to the Center for American Progress, a think tank, due to negligence from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, detainees, especially women and immigrants, continue to face risk of sexual violence. And as for-profit prisons continue to play an outsize role in immigration detention while providing substandard care, the health and safety of vulnerable populations such as women and migrants remain especially at risk.

Things got worse inside the prison in the age of COVID-19. According to UCLA Law COVID Behind Bars Data Project, which tracks COVID-19 outbreaks in prisons, since the start of the pandemic, prisons and ICE detention centers across the US have reported 572,962 total cumulative cases among incarcerated people and 3,013 deaths. The Star News said in a recent report that people in prison are roughly three times more likely to die of COVID-19 than the general population, even after adjusting for the fact that the prison population skews younger.

Many detention centers are extremely overcrowded. Isolation, the key to stopping the spread of COVID, is simply not an option for detainees. Ever since the outbreak of COVID in the US, private prison operator CoreCivic has been accused of ignoring a COVID-19 outbreak, putting inmates and the community at risk. Other prisons have been blamed for shortage of mask supplies and vaccination for their detainees.

Business and politics behind the system

Although private prisons have been ineffective at providing quality detention services, they have been effective at supporting political allies. According to the USA Today, in the 2016 presidential election, for example, two of largest private prison companies, the GEO Group and CoreCivic donated $250,000 each to Trump’s inaugural committee.

Though the use of private prisons has long been contentious and the Obama administration sought to phase out their use on the federal level, the Trump Administration reversed the ban to robustly support private prisons in 2017, as reported by the New York Times. With Trump’s stricter immigration policy, number of migrants in detention increased to a record-high. Such policies around detention practices have led to an increase in the demand for detention space, which has resulted in record-high profits for private detention facilities. The expansion of prisons, in return, directly contributed to the rise in the migrant detainee population.

A waste of tax dollars

Another sad truth is that when US citizen pay taxes, some of their hard-earned dollars might be bundled into a massive payout to a private prison company that cares more about profits than public safety.

Private prison companies like CCA get contracts all over US by promising it can run prisons better and more cheaply. But time and time again, they've broken that promise as those private prisons turned criminal justice into big business. In 2017, the Prison Policy Initiative reported that the government pays private companies about $3.9 billion per year to operate prisons.

Actually, those mass incarceration waste tax dollars and cannot make US any safer. As the Executive Director of Fair and Just Prosecution and a former federal prosecutor Miriam Aroni Krinsky puts it, churning people through jail and prison often leads to more crime. Keeping someone who has not been convicted of a crime in jail solely because they are poor cannot make the US any safer. Instead, it puts people at risk of losing employment, housing and other supports that may keep them from engaging in future criminal activity.

Hope the US could keep an eye on the truth inside those private prisons, and could create a justice system that truly lives up to its name. Otherwise, it would be a big joke for a country advocating freedom and democracy.

Most Viewed in 24 Hours
Top
BACK TO THE TOP
English
Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site.
License for publishing multimedia online 0108263

Registration Number: 130349
FOLLOW US
主站蜘蛛池模板: 欧美一区二区成人 | 亚洲不卡 | 高清视频一区二区三区 | 特级丰满少妇一级aaaa爱毛片 | 日韩综合网 | 日本不卡免费新一二三区 | 色婷婷亚洲| 久久久精品一区 | 精品国产第一国产综合精品 | 开心激情站 | a级在线观看免费 | 中文字幕在线看第二 | 久久久不卡| 手机看片国产精品 | 一级做a| 成人h精品动漫一区二区三区 | 国产亚洲精品精品国产亚洲综合 | 国模精品视频一区二区 | 美日韩一区| 中国特黄视频 | 中文字幕精品一区久久久久 | 成人欧美一区二区三区黑人孕妇 | 久久精品视频免费观看 | 91精品国产综合久久久久久软件 | 成人福利视频 | 亚洲免费视频一区 | 亚洲一区中文字幕在线观看 | av综合在线观看 | 日韩一区二区在线观看 | 欧美一级片在线看 | 天堂影院一区二区 | 在线日本看片免费人成视久网 | 草草浮力影院 | 精品亚洲一区二区三区四区五区 | 欧美电影一区 | 国产午夜精品美女视频明星a级 | 国产午夜手机精彩视频 | 九九99热 | 久久久久久成人 | 黑人精品视频 | 日韩久久一区 |