Quit Wasting People

We are wasting our greatest national resource. Throwing it away. And it’s costing us money to do it.W

I’m talking about people. The United States has thrown more people away — locked into the prison complex — than any other country in the world.

Let that sink in for a moment. Think of the worst country you can. Think of the biggest despot. The cruelest regime. We put more people in prison than they do.

But this isn’t even the biggest travesty. What’s worse is, we’ve turned this into a for-profit business model.

Yes. That means there are companies who make their profits purely by keeping people in prison.
A recent Mother Jones article (bit.ly/PrisonProfits) cited a University of Wisonsin study that revealed privatized prisons were keeping inmates incarcerated longer purely to boost profits.

Let that sink in for another minute or two. There’s an entire industry built around keeping people in prison (and we could even take that another step and examine how many are there based on mandatory minimum drug offender sentencing that far outweighs the nature of the crimes committed).
“Yeah, fine,” you might be saying. “But these people are criminals. Why should I care about them? It’s not like they’re going to contribute anything to society if we let them out, right?”
Not so fast. As it turns out, there are some pretty decent minds behind those bars. Need proof? Let’s take a look at the maximum security Eastern New York Correctional Facility in Ulster County.

That’s where three men currently reside who make up the whole of a debate team — sponsored by Bard College — that beat the pants off a team from a university you may be familiar with. Harvard. As in “National Debate Champions” Harvard. Ivy League. (Read more about it here: bit.ly/PrisonDebate)

The debate was about whether or not U.S. public schools should be able to deny education to undocumented immigrants. And our inmate friends from Ulster County had to argue for the point of view they abhorred — that the U.S. should be allowed to deny education in these cases.
And they won. In a convincing fashion, by all accounts.

I love this story. Sure, the obvious reason is it’s an underdog story, and we all love one of those. But even more than that — it’s a story about how even those our court systems has deemed the least of us, the dropouts, the dregs, the undesirables, well, it turns out they may have some worth after all.

If we’re truly “the greatest nation on Earth,” why wouldn’t we want to lead the way through enlightenment, instead of incarceration? Only in the U.S. would we find a way to turn the prison complex into a profit-generating machine. And maybe that’s a great example of capitalism at work, but I think it’s more of a capital offense than the ones committed by many locked up today.

Isn’t it time we focused on rehabilitation instead of recidivism?