Prohibitive cost of prisons
Name(s):
Social cost of incarceration
Incidence
The USA has the world's highest rate of incarceration and the prison population is rising by 13% a year. This means building new prisons at the rate of $100 million a week in construction costs alone. It costs over $40,000 a year to keep a convict in a federal high-security prison.
Claim
Prisons are the largest growth industry in the USA. Prisons are literally becoming the concentration camps of the neoliberal regime, places to isolate those redundant to corporate needs. But never wanting to waste an exploitable resource, the elite are also developing an extensive prison-labour system, renting out inmates to fill lower-rung labour needs. This growing network of slave-labour concentration camps has so far escaped public notice. So, too, has its racial and ethnic bias.
Aggravates
Aggravated by
Value(s)
Type
(E) Emanations of other problems