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Originally Posted by Hilch

Agreed! Over half of all prisoners in the US are in there for drug related offences, with nearly 3/4 of them in there for small possessions. This is the problem for many reasons but mainly because jails are privatized and because the unions for law enforcement and corrections fight for it and put a ton of money in lobbying to keep punishment tough for mostly harmless crimes. It's disturbing watching the War on Drugs spending $10,000,000,000 a year but then they have to lay off teachers, nurses and other public employees. Not to mention they complain about the debt but continue to spend, spend, spend on something they will never, ever stop!

As discussed in the article:

Of course, not everyone has made out badly from the country’s prison-construction binge. Telephone companies run up impressive profits from prisoners forced to call collect. Defense contractors have signed lucrative contracts selling paramilitary equipment to local law enforcement agencies. Rural communities have benefited most of all. Not only does the criminal justice sector employ 2 million people, including more than 500,000 correctional officers, most of them in rural areas, it also helps to inflate the local population of prison zones for the purposes of congressional districting and social spending. Schoolchildren learn that in 1787, slave-holding states reached a compromise with free states that allowed nonvoting slaves to count as three-fifths of a human for the purposes of apportioning congressional seats. Counting a slave as a fraction of a man seems like a vivid manifestation of the way the United States dehumanized Africans. Today, thousands of people are removed from urban districts, where public money is urgently needed, and shipped upstate, where each counts for a full person. In this way, prisoners bolster the voting power of rural districts, while being unable to vote themselves. Perhaps this is the reason why, as criminal justice surveys indicate, rural whites form by far the most punitive demographic.