We honor our guardians of liberty, keeping us safe from dangerous terrorists:
Noemi Romero, who came to the U.S. illegally at age 3, was arrested in January working at a Phoenix grocery store, where she used someone else’s name to get the job.Romero, a 21-year-old who likes to draw and dance, spent the next four months behind bars, almost half of it in a cramped cell at a 1,596-bed detention center in Eloy, Arizona, run by Corrections Corp. of America. The company, with Geo Group Inc. (GEO) and other for-profit prison operators, holds almost two-thirds of all immigrants detained each day in federally funded prisons as they face deportation, U.S. data show.
Under law, taxpayers must pay to keep 34,000 people like Romero in jail, at a cost of about $120 each per day, even as the number of immigrants caught sneaking across the border has fallen by more than half since the past recession began.
In other words, policy. Which yields the following outcome:
Prisons are one of the few institutions that states and the federal government have moved to privatize, creating a booming business for Corrections Corp. and Geo, the two publicly traded companies that dominate the market. Both actively lobby Congress. Serving as government jailer has been a hit on Wall Street, as Corrections Corp. and Geo have each about doubled in value since mid-2010.
A deranged Trotskyite might insinuate that our peculiar system of free enterprise deliberately extracts profits by imposing misery and suffering on others, and that our government only exists to provide the money and the muscle for it. But I'm not a deranged Trotskyite, so you didn't read it here.
---Baron V
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