The Rant Institute

     The prison industry is the second fastest growing sector of the American economy.   This remarkable growth is the result of an increasing number of contracts being awarded to an increasing number of private companies.   Those companies discovered just how profitable it was to be in the business of building and running prisons and, as a result, a growing number of America’s prisons have steadily been handed over to private interests by the panhandling of a political lie.   That lie is the claim that the privatization of prisons is the only way to save money for John and Jane Q. Taxpayer.   The problem is - it doesn’t. In fact, in both the long and the short run, many private prisons end up costing taxpayers more money than they save.  Nevertheless, the responsibility for an increasing number of America's inmates has simply been transferred to private interests in order to create private profits at public expense.   T...

Nothing makes people redefine addiction as a crime faster than the profit motive, largely because there is no better way to maximize profits than through slave labor.   In fact, maximizing increased returns from the one can only be assured through a substantial investment in redefining the other.   And those who stand to make the most understand how much their profits hinge on their ability to use, and in many instances even abuse, both.  Generally speaking, a disease is as much a danger to the person who has it as it is to the society to which that person belongs.   It doesn’t matter if the person is suffering from sickle cell disease or addiction.   Yet one is treated with penicillin and the other with punishment.   Both methods are used to ‘protect society,’ per se, only one seeks to cure patients in a society while the other simply removes them.   While the different methods used to treat both diseases were instituted largely out of an ign...