This chapter begins by delineating who resides in prisons and what brought them there. We will see (again) how the lives of disproportionate numbers of African-American men and women are affected by new mandatory minimum prison terms, sometimes for relatively minor crimes. Today, fewer convicts are paroled and more convicts are spending more time behind bars, thanks to federal legislation that rewards states for being punitive.
We then take a look at the perception and the reality of prison conditions to answer the question: Are prisoners being coddled at taxpayers' expense?
Next we look at the high costs associated with imprisoning so many people and some of the solutions we have tried. Today we spend more money on corrections than we spend on higher education. We've built and filled new prisons but we can't keep up with the demand. So we privatized prisons, and by the mid-1990s private prisons were one of the nation's leading growth industries. We've contracted convict labor to private companies and used the proceeds to offset prison costs. These decisions raise troubling questions. Is punishment the proper realm of big business? What are the implications of handing over responsibility for punishment to people who have an interest in keeping people locked up? Is convict labor exploitation? Have we created a slave labor force for corporate America? Or is it true that meaningful jobs created by private companies can turn a convict's life around?
Studies show that prison work programs reduce recidivism rates. So do rehabilitation programs. Have we given up on rehabilitation in favor of punishment? What happens to the "graduates" of our penal institutions? Our last panels look at these issues.
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