PRISON PREP SCHOOLS

I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal today, of all things for the WSJ to be reporting, about companies that will “prep” you to survive a sentence in a federal prison. Isn’t it interesting (and tragic) that such articles AND businesses are now commonplace? And by that I mean "necessary!"...because the US has become the leading force in encarceration on the planet, that we imprison more prisoners per capita than any industrialized nation in the world, with 2.3 million people behind bars, such services have sprung up. Some in earnest efforts to assist newcomers to survive the time they will spend in prison, and others more to profit from the exploding prison industry.

With the economic woes in the US, the loss of jobs, finding work for those with college degrees is difficult enough, let alone for the ex-con, with a “felony” on his record for life, and perhaps years of no work experience as he sat in prison. Perhaps a foray into prison counseling is something to consider, as they say to aspiring writers, write what you know. In this case, counsel and teach, what you know. Again, not surprising to find such an article in the WSJ, as it seems advising panicky white-collar criminals on what life is like behind bars has become a bull-market business, what with all the arrests on Wall Street for insider trading.

Many experts have suggested part of the reason for our not being able to recover more easily or quickly from the disasterous collapse of the financial sector caused by the unregulated practices of large Banks and Wall Street firms, resulting in a long, serious and frightening recession, is the fact that the US no longer manufactures hardly anything, that instead we’ve become a nation of consumers. Well seems there IS something we do manufacture, and that those who work for and ascribe to the massive American prison industrial complex, do profit from immensely.

To quote a NYTimes article from April 2008, “Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations. Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences … whatever the reason, the gap between American justice and that of the rest of the world is enormous and growing.”