This is Prison , This is the Prison Industrial Complex on Neoliberalism

[Ocean Seal]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/US_incarceration_timeline-clean.svg/693px-US_incarceration_timeline-clean.svg.png


So I was on wikipedia, and I couldn't help but notice that the prison population was increasing steadily for about sixty years and then suddenly there was a change in slope. Realistically this couldn't be a crime wave that lasted for thirty years. But at the start of the 1980's we see neoliberalism assume control over the United States government. So one would assume that a government which promotes less government control and more freedom wouldn't have such a massive spike in the incarceration rate, unless it were motivated by those who are free to make money over things that the government was losing control over. How is it that capitalists were able to accomplish these things so easily, how is it that we now have for-profit jails? After 1 term of Regan how could people not notice this trend? And how could it continue through Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II?

[Widerstand]

Large parts of the US workforce are infact prisoners.

How come no one noticed? Idk. You'd guess it's not something they announce openly.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Interesting when compared to this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6b/Ncsucr2.gif

[psgchisolm]

I would think most of this had to do with the expansion of American gangs. The timeline roughly corresponds with the same time gangs started spreading across the United States. It is interesting compared to the second graph. You see from about 1980 that the number of violent crimes rose to it's highest in 1993 and drops slightly to 1995/6 and then dropped dramatically. I would have expected it to rise to the end of the decade or atleast borderlined. Everything else seems to be correct, especially the vicitimizations reported. That's about when intimidation came into effect with those gangs and no one wanted(and still don't want) to report anything to the cops because their afraid that when the cops leave they'll get assaulted or killed.

[el_chavista]

As could be seen on the movie capitalism: a love story, prisons are a business where entrepreneurs and judicial authorities confabulate to make profit.

[~Spectre]

Most of it is due to the "drug war". Still, the overall picture is even more depressing than that. As a society, the United States has pretty much come to accept prison-rape. People barely know that the U.S. houses domestic psychological torture centers (google SuperMax prisons). People do know, but some approve of, the external physical torture centers run by the United States (GITMO and Bagram, as well as the countries we outsource the practice to in renditions). The U.S. still practices capital punishment, and the FBI is still used as a political police.

Quite literally this trend is making more and more people less free.