I just saw a very upsetting report on TV about the Cook County jail. Crowds of people are jailed there for petty misdemeanors, such as possession of small amounts of drugs, prostitution, loitering, etc. It costs enormous amounts of money to keep them there. No actual purpose is being served by all this.
Cook County is located in my state of Illinois, by the way. The same state that is refusing to fund its public universities. There is money to keep poor people in jail, yet no money to maintain the higher ed system that helps limit the number of hopeless, discarded human beings.
Let nobody even try to approach me with the idiotic chant of there being no money in Illinois. There’s more money we know what to do with if we are wasting it on locking up everybody in sight.
Clarissa's Blog 
The US has a larger percent of its population locked up than any other country for which reliable data is available. According to a study published in 2012 and covering 40 US states, the average annual cost to taxpayers is $31,286 per inmate. The amount spent is staggering. Part of the cost driver is privatization — turning prisons over to private companies and their political allies to operate. The political element ensures that costs always increase and populations increase, regardless of value or how inmates are treated.
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It’s like people that have money for booze but not for food. They have a real problem. Diseased set of priorities. This is the purpose of spending money, then — to do harm.
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Cook County Jail is famous for its torture chambers, as well.
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I didn’t know about the torture chambers. But I heard that an enormous percentage of inmates has mental illness, so I don’t doubt the existence of torture chambers.
This is the price we are all paying for Reagan ‘ s dismantling of services for the mentally ill. Which I consider to be a crime against humanity.
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I’m just a little skeptical regarding “torture chambers.” Jails can be inhumanitarian without evoking images of the Gestapo.
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Here we go again. Follow the money. I read the proposed Illinois budget and it’s basically fewer professors and more prisons. I mentioned previously that GTCR, Rauner’s company, owns the infrastructure in south west Illinois that will carry the internet traffic which is required by on-line courses in the new higher education paradigm.
“HPL is a good example of the rapidly expanding private corrections industry. Founded in 1995, today HPL has contracts with more than 100 jails and prisons. In 2007, HPL was purchased by Correctional Healthcare Companies (CHC). According to the firm’s website, two of CHC’s top executives, Don Houston and Wendy Dunegan, came from The GEO Group, one of the largest private prison corporations in the world.
In December 2012, CHC was subsumed by GTCR, a multi-billion dollar private equity firm in Chicago. Today, mass incarceration is big business.”
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2013/sep/15/how-privatization-destroyed-an-illinois-jails-award-winning-suicide-prevention-program/
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