Prisons are being built in the United States at a rate never before seen. It has been said that because of the time it takes to fund, plan, and build a new prison, we are building prisons for today's fourth grader's. During childhood, most people are asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" If today's child's answer were a true representation of U.S. society, many would answer, "A corrections officer" or "A convict". With close to two million people behind bars across the nation, there is quite a bit of money to be made from the U.S. prison industry. In fact, the prison industry is the second fastest growing industry in the nation, second only to casinos. While it is easy for the average person to recognize why casino growth is so rapid ("the house always wins"), it isn't quite so apparent why prison growth is almost as tremendous. The answer in both cases is money. Wall Street is drooling over the prison industrial complex. The privatization of the prison industry is a relatively new issue that began to appear in the 1980's that has proliferated greatly in the United States. Many people are fundamentally opposed to the administration of justice by the private sector and believe that it should stay in the public domain as with the police and the courts. The concept of private prisons has appealed to state legislators and other governmental bodies on the grounds that they are less expensive to operate than public prisons. Critics of private prisons believe that they actually create an incentive for legislators to promote prison expansion because private corporations building facilities at their own expense legislators can bypass having to go to voters for the approval of bond issues to obtain the needed construction funds. Once these prisons are built, states pay the firms a certain amount for each prisoner. It is therefore to the private companies" advantage to keep the beds filled which brings us to legislation being passed to put more and more people in jail for less and less violent crimes.
