CONSERVATIVES GEARING UP TO PUSH FOR PRIVATE PRISONS

Ed Garvey- Capital Times, The (WI)

Tue, 16 Apr 2002

Saturday morning would not be complete without listening to Scott Simon on National Public Radio - even while on vacation. Last Saturday he dealt with the prison industrial complex, and Wisconsin had a star role. Simon exposed those behind the "tough on crime" policies that have filled our prisons.

Audiences are amazed when told that we are spending more on prisons than we are on our university system while tuition caroms out of control. How did it happen? Simon took us by the hand and revealed the quiet but effective corporate effort to promote the "tough on crime" hysteria that helped create our budgetary problem.

It turns out that legislators and governors have been receiving lots of help, research, and campaign contributions from profit-oriented corporations in defining how we should deal with those who break the law, and, indeed, which laws to enact.

Once we believed that loss of freedom was not only a significant punishment but also an opportunity to reform the prisoner. We called it rehabilitation. And we believed that if prisoners behaved themselves, they should be released early for good behavior. We had prisons where inmates built furniture, made license plates, learned to read, farmed and were told that they could regain their precious freedom if they demonstrated that they were ready to return to society.

Prison was a means to an end, not an end in itself. And profit was not in the equation.

A couple of decades ago, Wisconsin was a leader in innovative efforts to effectively rehabilitate prisoners. But that was then and this is now.

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