Lew, America's bloated prison-industrial super-complex never ceases to disgust me. And I am always stunned by how little outrage we see about this. Given that at least half of the people in there shouldn't even be punished, and the rest are being treated as worse than animals in this system that appears designed to encourage crime, you'd think libertarians, especially, would attack this institution relentlessly.
Every once in a while, a new ghastly statistic about the US correctional system gets its fifteen minutes. And people express some unhappiness with it, then forget about it entirely. The US has one of the highest per-capita prison populations in the world, and the highest among countries worth comparing it to for America's supposed liberalism. Hundreds of thousands of these prisoners are peaceful, yet are subjected to abuse, rape and beatings by their moral inferiors in the system. Inter-gang violence is encouraged. Guards look the other way, or even participate, as unspeakable brutality is inflicted on prisoners.
When the Abu Ghraib scandal hit the news, the establishment response was that the photos showed an anomalous enormity. Supposedly, most pirsoners of war were treated much better, and we were also told that the abuse photographed wasn't anything too terrible. In truth, it wasn't nearly as bad as what many Iraqis have endured, but it was still horrible. What got to me was how shocked everyone claimed to be at the abuse seen at Abu Ghraib, when such abuses happen in the domestic prisons not infrequently.
America still has some freedoms that much of the world doesn't, but the prisons alone should disabuse us of the notion that this is a free society. In a free society, taxpayers wouldn't be forced to fund such an exorbitant, disgusting and criminal institution that dehumanizes millions and treats hundreds of thousands of innocent people as worse than trash, all while doing virtually nothing to make the victims of private crime whole.
