Are There No Prisons?

 The modern-day Scrooges of the American oligarchy need not worry, because the United States prison industry is booming like never before, or least since the Covid public health emergency was prematurely declared over and done with by Joe Biden. In fact, there is more prison housing available than there are people to fill it all. So what's all this talk about a homeless crisis in the greatest country in the history of history?   

I  myself have sometimes half-joked that if I ever become so destitute that I end up on the streets, I'll just go out and rob a bank. It would be a deliberately unsuccessful robbery, because my goal would not be to get rich, but to get thrown in prison It's a surefire way for the destitute and desperate  to score three hots and a cot.  Even with policies that effectively charge inmates for room and board by making them virtual slaves it sure beats working two or three jobs on the outside and still not being able to afford rent and food.

 Yes, Virginia, there are indeed Dickensian workhouses operating at full throttle in a neighborhood near you. Pay no attention to the doom and gloom crowd moaning about all the jobless people subsisting in all the depressing abandoned industrial towns dotting the landscape. 

It's never been a better time for private equity vultures to invest in the gleaming new United States prisons the same way they've invested in residential real estate, gobbling up all those distressed homes for cash and then renting them out at unaffordable rates to the previous, foreclosed owners.

 And what with the construction of boring single family homes grinding to a halt, and public housing stock going private at the speed of blight and rents that keep going up, the rate of homelessness in America is now the highest it's been in decades. 

At the same time that Congress and state legislatures have failed to increase housing assistance for the needy, politicians are pouring billions of dollars into the construction of new prisons. I't must be their way of efficiently putting a roof over people's heads. It's the least they can do, given that only one out of every five needy families that qualify for housing vouchers actually get one. 

But much to the chagrin of the  latter-day Scrooges who own and run this country, there are all these annoying do-gooders around who persist calling their nifty prison-housing solution "wrong headed."

From The Guardian:

Any money spent on caging human beings is not money well spent, period,” said Carmen Gutierrez, an assistant professor in the department of public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose research specializes in the connection between punishment and health.

“We have decades of research showing that incarceration does not improve public safety, and that it in fact harms individuals who themselves are incarcerated. It also harms their families and it harms the communities that they come from. So the damage outweighs any potential benefit.”

The US has an incarceration rate of 664 people in every 100,000, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, far higher than other founding Nato countries. (The next highest is the UK, where 129 out of every 100,000 people are behind bars.)

That amounts to 1.8 million people incarcerated across the country, but the numbers are not spread evenly. In Alabama, Georgia and other southern states about one in every 100 people is incarcerated in prisons, jails, immigration detention and juvenile justice facilities.

When Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843, the British Empire was in its own genocidal orgy of colonizing both India and Africa and charging the destitute and the working class back home for the enrichment of the monarchy and its assorted businesses. Ebenezer Scrooge, who made a career and a fortune out of exploiting and demonizing the poor, underwent a series of nightmares to scare the greed right out of him.

 Not so for the American breed of hyper-capitalists, who have learned how to use self-serving  minimal philanthropy as a public relations gimmick. These godzillionaires are not only pathological predators - they  are pathological polluters. A recent Oxfam report revealed that richest one percent, with their outsized multiple homes, their private jets and their super-yachts, burn more dangerous fossil fuels  than the whole bottom half of the global population.

Novelist Margaret Atwood coined the word "consilience" as both the name of her own imaginary dystopian prison/ housing development and the mindset of a citizenry terrorized into a state of numb acceptance after decades of indoctrination by the ideologues of neoliberal capitalism. People consent to their maltreatment because they're flattered about how virtuously resilient they are. They live in a Sharing Economy brought to a whole new grotesque level, as they voluntarily cycle from nice suburban home to prison to home to prison. They don't even question the ultimate step in the process.  I won't give away the ending of Atwood's satiric novel, in case you want to read it. But "The Heart Goes Last"  should give you a hint.

Meanwhile, back in reality, White House, Congress , and the oligarchs and their corporate media publicists certainly want you to get with their own not-dissimilar program. They want you to know that not only is your resistance ifutile, they truly do not care about you. They say so right out loud, in the pages of  The New York Times, one of their very favorite stenographers.

"Amid Dismal Polling and Some Voter Anger, Don't Expect Biden To Shift His Strategy" chides the headline. Right off the bat, it implies that if you are mad as hell about the State of Israel's genocide of Palestinians as well as about your own  economic lot in life, then you are in the distinct minority. Your resistance is also annoyiingly "cacophonous" according to the Times.

Several officials in the Biden campaign and the White House are adamant that unflattering polls and vocal criticism from key constituents over Gaza, immigration and other issues simply have not been enough to shift a strategy that is centered on comparing the Biden agenda with policies favored by Republicans...

“They’re not freaking out,” Ted Kaufman, a longtime confidant to Mr. Biden, said in an interview about the president and his team. “When you signed up for this thing, you didn’t sign up to be at 80 percent in the polls. These are genuine veterans, and they’re picked because of their ability to be calm in difficult times.”.

Any day now, I half expect Biden to start croaking out "Lock Him Up" in the vain expectation that thronging hordes will show up like magic at hs rallies to join right in the refrain. But for now, he admits that he and his claque are relying solely on the "lawfare" approach to vanquishing Trump. Biden is reduced to simply schmoozing with Democratic donors and carefully selected business types whom he urges to "invest" in stuff. If Trump does end up getting convicted, but wins anyway, maybe they can invest in converting Mar-a-Lago into a luxury prison at billions of dollars in taxpayer expense. That would be so quintessentially American, and not much of a surprise.

What gives me hope in this cruel new rules-based Dickensian Order is that people are not nearly so "consilient" as I feared they were even a year ago. 

This recovering consilient class are being presented, as Cornel West explains it, with  an impossble choice between a guy who wants to start World War III and a guy who wants to start  a second  civil war. If both Biden and Trump physically survive until Election Day, it may well turn out to be the lowest voter turnout debacle in modern history. And without the votes of even a slim majority of the people, whoever is chosen will govern without even a pretense of a popular mandate.  He or she will not enjoy the consent of the governed. Not by a long shot.

How long will they nevertheless persist? How long will we let them?