Morgan wrote:
That 's the ideology of it, not the reality, and why we have the largest number of incarcerated people in the world. Arresting people has turned into another profit-making enterprise.
I've been to prison twice. Got extradited from CA to FL the first time. Did three years parole, 1 year house arrest, more years on probation and more times in jail than I can remember. I know
exactly how the system works. I went to college after I got out of CA state prison Norco. I did two papers on the prison industrial complex and how people get sucked into it. I also happened to be in prison when Grey Davis was recalled for letting the state go bankrupt (
). The irony was that at that time, when they were laying off
teachers, the CCPOA had landed a 30% pay raise over three years. Who gets a deal like that? The most powerful (yes
the most powerful) union in the state, that's who.
My experience has given me a perspective most folks don't have. I became a certified adult tutor in the educational section and found out I was pretty good at it. The guys from other races tended to trust me which helped a lot. Some things I couldn't help notice were:
1) Only about half of the people in the prison I was at had a HS diploma and a bout half of
them were functionally illiterate.
2) A surprisingly large percentage of these guys were ADHD, dyslexic or
tactile learners (who the schools in CA had no idea what to do with). Big surprise, eh?
3) The
real deal is how they end up there to begin with and why they keep going back. Florida state prison in the 80s...again, while I was there is a great example of how crazy the prison system gets.
(Short story: at that time they were under a court order to reduce the prison population so what they did, since prisoners in transport are not part of the
count, at count time every prison would load a school bus or two of prisoners and drive them around until count time was over...no kidding!
)
I'm a good boy now! All I do is smoke weed!