Survival – by MichaelWhen the SHTF, then a lot of things are going to have to change in a hurry. We will have governments with no way to pay their bills. The chances are they are going to release a lot of people from the jails because they cannot afford to keep them.
One of those things that is going to have to change is our justice system or lack thereof.
Does anyone question why we have the most people in jail of any country in the world? I do. China has only 1/4 the number of people in jail as we do, and they are considered tyrants.
At roughly $42,000 a prisoner this amounts to a very large expense for the U.S. Governments. I refer to Federal, State, and City governments. I sort of question how they got there. The prisoners I mean.
I am not saying any one of these prisoners didn’t do something wrong, or did they?
I would like to know how much of this prison population is drug-related crime?
How much is prostitutes taken off the streets. Sometimes with fatal diseases like HIV and AIDS..
How much of this population is redeemable?
This population is not completely any one class of people in America. Though statistically, your poverty stricken population is represented by at least 60% of the people in jail. There are also doctors in this group. Doctors are human too. They make criminal mistakes and are put in jail.
Cannot make a living, on government subsistence, sometimes desperate people in need of mental health help, con artists, druggies, professional criminals (housebreakers), the list goes on and on.
That is just the people that are legitimately in jail. There is a large group of people put there by prosecutors. Some of which used very questionable legal tactics and really didn’t give a hoot whether or not the people were actually guilty. The justice system turns a blind eye to improper behavior on the part of prosectors a lot of the time. That is well documented. The question: Who watches the policemen? Deserves a much better answer than the one given by the American Justice System.
Science has come to the rescue of a few of these people with DNA testing. Over 200 people have been discovered innocent because of DNA testing and the list is growing daily. The state tries to shift away from having to pay for its mistakes by intimidation and threats of keeping these innocent people in jail. Maybe we have put the wrong group of people in jail . . .
The government loves data bases. I suggest we need a data base of all the criminals we have in our jails. I really want to know a lot more about them and why I am housing them, giving them medical care, and feeding the largest population of criminals in the world to the tune of $42,000 a year per prisoner. One clue to their behavior is their religious beliefs or lack there of.
I think a lot of these people are there to avoid working for a living. With the competition of a really bad economy, a lot of these people have given up. They deliberately get into a crime and get caught. End of responsible behavior. Everything is taken care of for them in jail.
Before we parole any one of them, I want a strict accounting of if they are likely to return to the prisons of our country once they are free. The statistics on this are not nice.
I question the way our schools prepare children to be adults. Why does a large segment of a minority group end up in jail? Could it be that they landed there because they could not cope with the living conditions on the outside. Or why does one group of teenagers think their lifespan will end before they are 25? These are kids in big cities. These kids think crime is the only way to make a living.
Then you have the lure of gangs. How many of those gang members are alive today because they were put in jail before someone killed them?
I speak here of our record of failure. The failure is we are not preparing these children to live life in the real world. The real world often doesn’t want them. They are ill prepared to cope with it. So we end up with an expensive prisoner instead.
The problem is when the SHTF the government is going to take a very hard look at the people we are supporting in prisons. How many are going to get out? No one knows. But the numbers do not look good.
When the SHTF the entire welfare system is going to have to change as well. We are going to have to support a lot more prisoners not less. When the system breaks down a lot of people are going to be caught with no way to survive. The temptation to go to jail and wait it out is very great for some of those welfare people. Maybe that is why entire prisons in our remote districts of the west have recently been built. These places are currently empty. We, as citizens, are not supposed to know about these places. A former governor and man living in Mexico recently exposed the existence of those places. I guess I would live where they could not reach me too if I exposed these prisons.
The other problem is Veterans. A lot of these veterans have been in intense combat situations over 2 or even 3 tours of duty in places that are known for harsh and cruel environments both in society and the harsh living conditions of the country. The suicide rate in this group is very high. A lot of them are dumped on society back in our world. A lot of these people are mentally bankrupt. They are not fit to return to society. So the system puts them away in jail instead of helping them to cope with life back in America. I know of people that fit this class of prisoner. These people are permanent residents of our jails. Shame on the military and shame on us for allowing this treatment of veterans! They are mentally incapable because of their service to this country. A lot of them are hopeless alcoholics. They found a way to temporarily escape. It is called alcoholic comas.
I know of one Vietnam Veteran that learned to cope. He became a devout Christian. He still has nightmares of his time in Vietnam.
We have a large group of people that really need help for one reason or another. None of them are really fit to return to society. So we put them away in prisons and hope they stay there. But the bill is coming due. The bill is $42,000 per prisoner per year. I think that number is fudged. I think it is more not less than that number. I am sure any warden in this country could tell you the real numbers.
The problem is the number of prisoners in bad times dramatically increase. With that increase, comes the problem of how to house them with less and less tax revenues to work with.
The economy will not support housing them much longer. That is the problem our government has to come up with a better solution for. I have no real solution. I am afraid. Very afraid they will simply turn them loose.
http://disasterandemergencysurvival.com/archives/when-all-hell-breaks-loose
My husband is currently being held hostage in a federal prison. He is there because he found out there is no law that compels him to file or pay income taxes. The judge even said at sentencing that he had to “make an example of him”. He did not harm another person or their property. He is serving time for a victimless crime.
The food that is provided is sub par, and at or beyond expiration. He pays for every single one of his needs: razors, toothpaste, soap, clothing, etc. It is costing our family more money each month, just to have him there. Not to mention the cost of going to visit, which is a 41/2 hour drive, gas and hotels gets very expensive. We pay for the phone calls so we may communicate with each other, and the phone system is so bad, we can barely hear each other. If I wish to communicate through email, it costs him 5 cents per email, and it takes 2 hours for him to receive it, and another 2 hours for me to get a response.
A couple of weeks after he reported to the prison, he became ill. They accused him of faking it, and it took 2 months before he saw a doctor.
I guess my point is, that even if we are paying $42,000.00 per year, it certainly is not going to the prisoner, in my opinion is going to pay for the guards salary and perhaps the cost of the housing units. Hard to say, considering the prisoners do all the property maintenance, cooking, cleaning etc., and from what I’ve witnessed, the guards sit on their butts, reading the newspaper, or on the occasions when I have been out to visit with my children, harassing the families, for not bowing down to their holiness by stopping and waiting for them to “let us through” a parking lot with no posted rules or regulations.
My husband is in a “camp”, and from what I understand, 99% of the men that are there, do not belong. A lot of money could be saved if they really had to serve a sentence, by sentencing them to home confinement. Something that does not cost the taxpayers untold sums of money.
That is just my story, but I have heard that some people that have been in prison for a substantial amount of time and have served their time and have been released, have robbed a bank for a dollar, just to go back. Why? Because they could not cope in the real world. In prison they had a roof over their head, and 3 meals a day and yes, access to a doctor.
Our system as a whole has to be scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up.
Peace. Thank you for allowing me to add my 2 cents. 🙂
Why are so many in prison? I’d suggest Lockdown America Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis by Michael Parenti. You won’t ask that question again. Ever. Take the time to research the numbers as you read.
Maybe I should go into the prison business. I’ll take two prisoners here for the bargain price of $30,000 per year each, and I’ll finally get these floors mopped.
What the author fails to acknowledge is the fact that these prisons actually turn a profit. They provide dirt cheap labor, prisoners are forced to work for pennies per hour, they dole out lucrative contracts in exchange for kickbacks or percentages. If they actually ARE paying 42,000 a year to house these prisoners, you can pretty much bet the farm that they’re making at least 5,000 or more off each one, in reality.
These scum do NOTHING that isn’t ultimately profitable.
#1,
Private prisons (and juvenile detention and boot camps) are huge profit centers. They make alot more than 5k/ human/year. Slave labor in other countries? Check out the profits garnered from prisoner’s families, prisoner’s labors, and guvmint handouts (welfare), to the cronies, the operators of these gravy trains. Makes me sick. Thanks for posting the article. Be well, Rob
The US has an exceptionally large prison population because it has an exceptionally large number of stupid laws with stiff penalties along with no independent oversight so as to protect the oligarchs’ monopolies, their ill-gotten funds, their control fetishes and to feed their prison (slave) industry.
Nixon’s drug war is a good example of “stupid laws with stiff penalties”. Prohibition didn’t work that well in the 1920s against alcohol and it isn’t working that well today against other such drugs. The number of people imprisoned over drugs probably far outnumbers those convicted of other offenses.
Look at California for example, where they reduced the youth crime rate by 20% in one year just by partially legalizing marijuana. Even if it were only legalized because the laws against it were negatively impacting people that the state actually had to care about, it’s still a significant drop. You could solve a lot of the economic, social and political problems by reducing the number stupid laws with stiff penalties, like drug laws that violate people’s property and privacy rights.
To my best understanding prisons had already become the most profitable industry in the USA. Similarly when prisons were privatized in England, the prison population started to mushroom, and the private subcontractors have made a killing.
Most of the people who are in jail these days especially federal are malum prohibitum prisoners,not malum en see! 90%of them are prisoners for profit and present no danger to the people on the street!
Whom ever wrote this article does not have a clue about this subject!!!!
I beg to differ. Slave labor does pose a threat to working folk.
Most of these so called prisoners are illegal immigrants. How are they not a danger? They are sucking us dry like a blood sucking parasite.
I don’t understand the author’s point in this article. He seems to think that Americans are statistically less likely to fit into their own society than Swiss, Swedes, Ecuadorans, Syrians, Iraqis, or Icelanders, Canadians, or even Mexicans! But then he claims that these Americans are usually unfairly imprisoned. First he expresses grave concern that so many Americans are put into prison. Then he goes on to express grave concern that these Americans will then be released from prison. It appears that the author will be unhappy no matter what happens!