Sharp Thoughts: Corporate-Driven Greed and Private Operated Prisons

Raise your hand if you believe a corporation with shareholders should ever shoulder responsibility for holding custody of people adjudicated guilty in a court of law instead of the state whose courts rendered the sentence.

Explain yourself.

No private company whose guideposts are the outer seams of a shareholder's pockets should ever be in control over the absolute horizontal and vertical, the continued existence, of a person who is incarcerated. This is a duty that belongs to the state or the country which convicted them.
Shareholders want what's right for them, not us. What's right for shareholders are fat returns on their investments -- they plunked down $50,000 for our suffering, and want $100,000 back ASAP. They only care about Roy-- What's that? I have a typo? Oh, yes!
They only care about ROI.

. o ( Le ROI est mort. Vivre les personnages. )

This is why old men silently die in prison, killed not by another resident, but by negligence on behalf of a Medical department that is as likely to tell you to take mustard for a heartburn as they are to just ghost you on your sick calls, or pointedly ignoring the head-sized bed sore on your back.
This is why people have dental abscesses and caries, gum disease, and other treatable dental issues, as the Dental department manages to see maybe fifteen to thirty people a week out of the eighteen hundred eighty four on the compound.
This is why there is always a run on toilet paper, pun woefully unintended as people fetch another dose of food poisoning from trays covered in brown-orange gunk, black mold, and Sunday's artificially flavored banana pudding ON A TUESDAY.

Now, I'll note that we in Blessington Correctional are getting better treatment in this developing nation's prison system than some others do in other developing nations, but I will continue to rail against and rally forth attention to what really does happen here. Why? Because this is supposed to be a place where repairs happen. This time we spend here, away from you of the real world, the free world is meant for self-reflection. It's meant for us who live in these involuntary bed and breakfasts in these secured, gated communities across the state to take the time to contemplate what we did that was not acceptable by the rules of the society we live in, and how to follow those rules in the future.

It's not meant for us to be half-starved on spoiling food, or on portions we would consider giving a toddler, fighting off Helicobacter pylori infections through sheer force of will alone, begging for permission to have access to footwear that actually fits our feet.

It's not meant for milking cash from you of the free world to fatten the pockets of private enterprises, one $3.15 iced honey bun and $1.03 packet of peanut butter at a time because we are fed poorly.

We should not be worried about whether our next meal will come in an edible format. We should be able to spend our time enriching our minds so that for those of us who have a release date, we might actually make suitable neighbors for you.

That's being stolen. From you, and from us, one private vendor at a time.

This needs to change.