Altimont owns Carmen’s Corner Store in Hagerstown, Maryland, a community where around 20 percent of people rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to buy their groceries. But a federal agency decided that Altimont can never accept SNAP as a form of payment at Carmen’s.
That decision isn’t because Altimont has done anything wrong as a business owner, but rather because of unrelated crimes from 2004, for which he’s already served his time.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) permanently bans anyone with drug, alcohol, tobacco, or firearms convictions from participating in the SNAP program—a harsher punishment than the agency dishes out to those who have actually defrauded the program. That’s not just irrational, it’s also unconstitutional, which is why Altimont teamed up with our organization, the Institute for Justice (IJ), to file a federal lawsuit against the agency on Tuesday.
Your penal system is focussed on punishment whereas the European system is focussed on rehabilitation as prisoners at some point have to come back into society and you want them to behave.
On the other hand, US prisons are for profit so they have an incentive to make sure people stay longer and return faster so…
The US really is a fucked up place because of its economic incentives. I mean, the people aren’t the problem, policies are.
The US definitely has a large for-profit prison industry but it’s still a minority of prisons. About 8%, to be exact.
Of course even the prisons that aren’t private entities still use prisoner labor. I think the for profit prison isn’t the real problem with the US. Obviously it creates messed up incentives. Private prisons fund special interest groups who for example lobby against federal legalization of marijuana. They know it would reduce the number of prisoners and therefore less reason for them to exist. But in terms of influence, they aren’t the largest players.
There’s a lot of jobs in prisons, courts, law enforcement, etc. And they all depend on the massive prison industrial complex. So at this point it’s hard to decouple because those groups have a lot of influence, even though they aren’t private for-profit entities.
The cynic in my believes that the US prison system, the system that imprisons more people both in absolute terms and per capita than almost any country in history - comparable to the USSR during their peak gulag era - is meant to keep down potentially rebellious young men. These are the primary movers of revolts and dissent. Turn them into perpetual criminals so you have justification to lock them away forever.
The passives ones don’t end up in prison and are also less likely to revolt, join a radical group, etc.
That’s not really true. Our penal system is focussed on profit.