Why putting you in jail is profitable

In “the land of the free”, putting you in jail is profitable.  Private prison companies in the United States like the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and The Geo Group profit by incarcerating more and more people. It’s that simple: more people behind bars mean more revenues for these companies. The CCA and the Geo Group made annual revenues of 1.7 billion dollars and 1.6 billion dollars respectively in 2011.

The United States imprisons more people than any other nation in the world, including China, Russia and Iran. In a recent study, 716 prison inmates were recorded for one hundred thousand people in the US, higher than anywhere else in the world. Over the last four decades, incarceration rates have skyrocketed, goaded by a shoddy immigration law, a so-called ”war on drugs” and rigid criminal laws that apparently forbid the chance of obtaining probation and parole. Now some might think: why is that a bad thing? They’re taking bad guys off the street, right? But the reality is quite unlike what meets the eye.

A majority of the prison population are “non-violent” inmates. According to the federal government’s Bureau of Prisons (BOP), 50.1 percent of inmates in BOP prisons are on charges of drug use and 10.9 percent of immigrants are on charges of “illegal immigration”.

Meanwhile, the cost of imprisoning more and more Americans burdens the government budgets, and taxpayers have to pay more money. That’s right, more the number of inmates, more the amount of tax hardworking Americans pay, and more the amount of revenues companies like CCA and the Geo Group make. While supporters of the private prison system tout the idea that these private prisons save the government money, there is enough evidence to challenge that myth.

The government or the taxpayers – nobody wins from this situation, except a handful of corporations – for-profit companies like CCA and The Geo Group. These companies are responsible for holding approximately 6 percent of states’ prisoners, 16 percent federal prisoners, and according to a Huffington Post report, nearly half of all immigrant detainees.