No Holiday for Some

I’m going to ruin your day.
On this Christmas Day, I’d like to ask one small gift of you. Take just a moment to think about the private prison industry in California. I’ll make it simple: Virtually every human in that system who isn’t a prisoner is easily more evil than any prisoner they hold. They all know what’s going on. Most of us do not. It’s torture, demons, and the whole mess.
I don’t doubt some of the inmates have no business on the streets. That’s not the point. Do you not realize the drug war as we know it was born at the same time, carefully designed by the same people who gave birth to the private prison industry? That we imprison the highest raw number of people, and the highest proportion of our population of all countries on the earth says more about our national cultural rot than anything else. The system is entirely run for profit, so the whole thing is dedicated to artificially forcing every body possible into the most expensive status — solitary confinement — while flagrantly violating every law and rule regarding prisoner maintenance. Not just uncomfortable, but it crosses the line into downright torture.
It’s so bad, the prisoners all got together and went on hunger strike to force the state government to pay attention. These prisoners uniformly agreed it would be better to starve to death than face the horror of what this system was doing. They’ve been in and out of this protest several times, because the state kept ignoring them, and the private prison corporations are unspeakably truculent about ratcheting up the torture for those who dared to get involved in anything that smacks of protesting the torture. Prisoners faced torture if one of their relatives so much as signed a petition.
And realize, at least some of this goes on in all private prisons, and a great many government run prisons, and all the lies about “coddling criminals” grant demons the right to live in those who say such things. Before God Almighty, it would be more humane to execute most criminals than what we do to them now. But there’s no profit in that.
This is what’s in store for a lot of folks, not just those unlucky enough to make a policeman angry, as the government system becomes less and less accountable to the people. It’s not just police, but judges and juries, and every bureaucrat involved in this system. We only just barely stand in a place where we dare to criticize the government of North Korea. Soon, they may be more godly than the US.
Merry Christmas; if the earth were to open up and swallow us alive, it would be less than we deserve as a nation.