PRISONS   They have always said we needed them to put the bad guys away throughout history. But now for many, prison has become home. For many a prison has been the place they have lived for more time than anywhere else.  How did society allow that to happen? There have been reported that there was even a case where a convict escaped from prison in the winter and after just one day turned himself in to go back to the comforts of his life in prison where he had heat , three meals a day, friends and plenty of down time playing cards, working out and watching TV. Why do I have to work and pay for the same things he gets for free?  Do these prisoners even make license plates anymore? No

There is no longer a punishment for a crime it is just a holding place and a new occupation for bored uneducated people who do not know what to do with their lives and simply cannot cope with our entire purpose here on earth. We are here to support ourselves and if we can the people we claim to love that we live with or choose to donate our hard earned money to. Nothing on this earth is free.  Everything has a price put to it now including the fresh air we breathe. It costs money to control the places that even pollute our air. Water costs money food, clothes everything has a price for each and every one of us unless you are incarcerated.  Then they strip you down, give you clothes and everything is free.

It happened about 20 years ago on October 27, 1994 when the Justice Department reported for the first time that the number of inmates in Federal and State prisons has exceeded 1 Million. That number didn’t even include inmates at local jails. American prisoners have been soaring since   the   1970’s .  It has become a kind of welfare. Long gone are the days of the chain gangs working hard performing   manual   labor in the hot sun. That would be taking jobs away from citizens who are willing to work under those conditions. Civil rights groups would yell about poor conditions for any human anyway. Not that I believe that any human should ever suffer but prisoners should be doing some kind of work for humanity.

Laws changed. Everyone was proponents on getting tough on crime. They invoked the three strikes you are in jail rule. Everyone was saying let them rot and throw away the key without thinking the costs of literally providing housing for an inmate over a long term. Now we have mental patients shooting up movie theaters, malls and schools because we cut out paying for all the mental   institutions .  In terms of crime stopping things were enforced. Things like mandatory sentencing and longer term sentencing.

For years the Federal and State prison population kept growing. Now the United States has about 5% per cent of the world’s population in prison. We also own the statistic that we own 25%   per cent of the entire world’s prisoners. Does that mean we are the safest place in the world to live? Hell no. We just put a lot of people in jail/ Crime never ends. Maybe because anyone who is fortunately enough   to get out of prison is not trained to do anything else but to be a better criminal. They just learn their wicked ways from others there who already been there and done it. No marketable trades are learned in prison. We also put back in jail more people than any other country on earth.

The American prison population peaked at just over 1.6 Million inmates in 2009.  Since then there has been a slight decline. California under a Supreme Court ruling reduced severe overcrowding decreased it’s   State inmate population by about 15,000 prisoners. All the states got so overcrowded that they were privatizing   prisons .   Yes you can change your old family farm into a profitable rent paying prison getting government money. Moe than two dozen other states reduced prison populations in many cases   because of the high cost of incarceration. On average the cost to house one person in a prison is about $31,000 dollars.

Make them earn their 30 grand to house themselves. Make them work and earn trades so that when they leave jail they leave with a job and not just with the clothes they went in with on their back and shoes without shoelaces. Yes, jail should be a rehab not a country club with nothing at all for these people to do but gamble each other for an extra free bar of soap.