A few excerpts:
The enormous rate of growth of the prison population has been mostly drug related. The last figures I saw showed that over half the federal prison population, and maybe a quarter in state prisons, are drug offenders. In New York State, for example, a twenty-dollar street sale or possession of an ounce of cocaine will get you the same sentence as arson with intent to murder. The three-strikes legislation is going to blow it right through the sky. The third arrest can be for some minor drug offense, and you’ll go to jail forever.
But the crime-control industry, as it’s called by criminologists, is becoming the fastest-growing industry in America. And it’s state industry, publicly funded. It’s the construction industry, the real estate industry, and also high tech firms. It’s gotten to a sufficient scale that high technology and military contractors are looking to it as a market for techniques of high-tech control and surveillance, so you can monitor what people do in their private activities with complicated electronic devices and supercomputers: monitoring their telephone calls and urinalyses and so forth. In fact, the time will probably come when this superfluous population can be locked up in private apartments, not jails, and just monitored to track when they do something wrong, say the wrong thing, go the wrong direction.
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