The next time you’re moving about your city, town, county, or state, do the mental check list of the civil infrastructure around you; town hall, police headquarters, power station, sewer plant, prison for profit, water department……”whoa, whoa………go back a minute; what was that?” Oh Water department? “No, before that one.” Prison for profit? “Yea; what the hell is that?”

It’s a place that doesn’t make license plates, furniture, or clothing….only profit. It’s owned by corporations like the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) who were willing to spend $100 million in California to build a corrections facility even before they had a contract from the state to run it. When questioned about the “risky” preemptive move, a CCA official was quoted as saying “If we build it, they will come!” It must be the California version of Field of Dreams. Thank God for the war on Drugs…….the gift that keeps on giving.

In 2008, the “Kids for Cash” scandal broke in Pennsylvania. It was a case that had two judges’ sentence 2000 children to a private detention facility in exchange for $2.6 million in payments. 3 of the heinous crimes were; mocking a principal on Myspace, trespassing in a vacant building, and shoplifting DVDs from Wal-mart. Could those teenagers get any more brazen!!

Society needs prisons, but getting more people to come to jail is not like getting more people to come to Pizza Hut. If your bonus is paid on volume, most people would be doing “something” to drum up business. On top of that, how much incentive is there to “rehabilitate” anyone when your failure is rewarded with more profit? It sounds like some crazy scheme from the novel Catch-22.

I will leave you with two notes on day 16 / letter “P” of the A-Z challenge;

I know prisons for profit sounds like an odd title and subject, but I only recently learned about them, and figured; this can’t be any more bizarre than the other nonsense I’ve been writing.

Sorry “Bob” for not using “P” to write about the “Power of Perfume.”