By Carl H. Harrison | Susanville, CA
In the 1980s, California began a prison- and jail-building boom. Concrete jails and prisons popped up all over the state, while laws were quickly changed to make it easier to lock people up. These facilities quickly filled up and people had to join gangs within the facilities in order to keep from being killed, assaulted, raped, and terrorized. These facilities began to overflow onto the streets, and as a result of this environment there are so many gangs in California that special task forces have been created just to identify them. At one time, California had only a few “real gangs,” but today they are all powerful and smart and organized. Who created this problem and continues to feed on it? Our criminal justice system.
Any fool can see that when you create a massive organized crime system, these jails and prisons are nothing more than criminal training camps where prisoners are forced into this lifestyle of survival. In truth, every law that has ever been made in America has been changed only after inflicting terrible abuses upon society at large. The fact is that only a small fraction of all crime is detected in America, and if everyone were caught and locked up there would be nobody left to pay taxes and run the government. Really!
Capitalism has gone crazy in California, because prison employees are not paid to “rehabilitate and release” prisoners, and are only paid if prisons are full. Have you not wondered why all of a sudden the federal government is forcing California prisons to release prisoners? What you don’t see is that these institutions are only letting go of the prisoners they have trained to come back, like pigeons. How do you fix the problem? Stop building prisons, and build better America instead. ■