and if the homeless problem was "solved," they'd just look for more behavior to criminalize. we'll never get better as a society while for-profit prisons are a thing.
Housing Bubble 2: Return of the Ugly
A community for discussing and documenting the second great housing bubble.
The sad thing is that, infrastructure wise, it would be trivial to convert prisons to high volume homeless shelters. Take down the barbed wire and remove the locks on the doors, give them the same subsidies.
Forced labor is not exclusive to private prisons. Federal and many state prisons force inmates to work for little or no compensation as well.
Today, more than 76 percent of incarcerated workers surveyed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics say that they are required to work or face additional punishment such as solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation. They have no right to choose what type of work they do and are subject to arbitrary, discriminatory, and punitive decisions by the prison administrators who select their work assignments.
https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploitation-of-incarcerated-workers
Regular crime is way down. Is that true?
Yes
Violent crime peaked around 1990 and it's been trending down since.
... I can't seem to paste the link (thanks jerboa) but see the "crime in United States" Wikipedia Page.
But the number of incarcerated people doesn't seem to be decreasing. So I think OP is full of crap.
It's much more reasonable that they're criminalizing homelessness as a way to grow the cheap labor force.
Line needs to go up. It's not enough to have the same amount of prisoners as last year, you need more.
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