A Contract for Americans (6/10)

From January 2014 to July 2017, Colorado surpassed over a billion dollars in tax revenue from legalized marijuana.  Washington was looking at over a quarter of a billion dollars per year back then and is now at over a half-billion collected in 2021 and California is over a billion and a quarter!  Canada started to legalized it in 2018 and the citizens there want the tax revenues to go towards their national health care system instead of anti-drug campaigns. They got more than they asked for – in a good way. In the 3+ years since legalization, cannabis has added $43B to GDP, $15B in federal tax revenues and $3B just in Ontario. British Columbia is collecting $8M per month in excise taxes alone! (Note: $1 CDN = $0.78 USD as of this writing)

Now look at the fact that whites and blacks use drugs in almost the same percentages, yet blacks are arrested FAR more often.  This mass incerceration is expensive and racist.  Drug offenses make up 46% of the federal inmate population.  We could save a lot of money (and ruin far fewer lives) with legalization.  After all, alcohol is legal..

Which brings up the second part of this subject – the prisons themselves.  Private prisons are an abomination.  What started out as a way to save money has become a horror.  Private prisons contract with the government and have minimum quotas on the number of prisoners.  This means the state is guaranteeing a certain number of prisoners to the private company.  This means the state has a vested interest in keeping people in prison – regardless of crime or guilt.

And they’re not even saving money.  In Arizona,  for FY 2010, the average per diem cost was $48.42 in public prisons vs. $53.02 per day in privately operated facilities. In 2019, Georgia’s private prisons cost $5.01 per inmate per day more than public prisons. That’s over $1,800/day more.  In 2013, the nation’s largest private prison operator had a profit of $300M on revenues of $1.6B (about a 19% profit margin).  This money went from taxpayers paying for the prisons to the CCA shareholders.  Is that something we want to be doing? Keep in mind that private prisons pay their employees far less with fewer benefits than public employees. Oh, and not for nothing, I find it strange that prisoners, on average, spend more time in private prisons than in public ones. Adjusting to compare similar crimes, sentencing alone in private prisons averages 23 days more incarceration. On top of that, once in a private prison, inmates end up with more than twice as many infractions resulting in additional prison time (60 to 90 days), compared to public prisons.

This is unconscionable. Keeping people in prison longer so that companies can make more money. That’s not what I was taught about “The American Way”.

If I were emperor, private prisons would be banned.