American Business Culture and the Penal System
How Does the American Business Culture Relate to the Penal System? The costly casualties that hit hospitals by way of taxpayer wallets, the big business of Wall Street floating high-profit construction bonds and an increasingly viewed prison population as a pool of cheap labor, are some of the many ways in which relations exist between the American Business Culture and the penal system. The shift has gone from jails, to correctional facilities, to places of profit, has forever changed the way in which the American Business Culture views the Penal System. The American Penal System has the fastest growing population of any "industry" in the world today. The Survey of Inmates of State Correctional Facilities, 1986 states that "The number of people in the criminal justice system will surpass the number in higher education". These facts in turn create negative and positive results. These facts in themselves relate to the American Business Culture. In the United States, the concept of prison privatization was first proposed early in the 1980s. By the middle of that decade a number of firms were established, eager to take over prison and jail facilities and to build new prisons to exploit the needs of states that were str
In conclusion, the Penal System will affect the American Business Culture. It is easy to see why the idea of privatizing the penal system in the United States and elsewhere has caused such controversy. Since 1984 more than twenty new prisons have opened in California, while only one new college campus was added to the California State University system. The emergence of a U.S. prison industrial movement within a context of conservatism marks a new historical moment, whose dangers are unprecedented and opportunities are evident. Considering the impressive number of grassroots projects that continue to resist the expansion of the punishment industry. The largest downfall to all of this is that because the U.S. penal system rakes in some $35 billion annually, according to the Atlantic Monthly. Correctional Building News, a trade magazine, predicts the inmate population will rise 5 to 10 percent annually. When corporations run prisons, humans become commodities. The task of punishment and rehabilitation, which should be a matter of public policy, is put into private hands. Because for-profit companies might be forced to cut corners to please investors, poor medical care, understaffing and lax security are among the problems facing private prisons Critics of the prison industrial complex focus a great deal of attention on prison labor. Many say that incarceration is increasingly driven by big corporations looking for profits. They point the finger at Microsoft, Starbucks, Victoria's Secret and TWA for using cheap, well disciplined prison labor. In reality, most corporations use subcontractors who on occasion use prison labor, but more often use cheaper, more productive overseas workers. Nationwide, only 2,600 convicts work for private firms. Corporations don't like the invasive, controlled environment of prisons, where guards often interrupt production to strip search the employees. Nor are many big firms willing to risk the bad press associated with exploiting convicts. Montgomery Ward, for example, has a charter pledging that the company will not use child, slave, or convict labor. Then there are state owned "prison industries." The federal government's Unicor employs 20,000 convict workers manufacturing everything from wire to office furniture. These are impressive numbers, and it might seem that there's a lot of money being made. In fact, Unicor - like other ventures owned by the state prison system - is heavily subsidi
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1650
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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