Corrections: There has to be a better way

To the editor:

In response to your front-page article “State targets offensive problem,” I would like to share a few words from this piece that arrived via email the same day.

According to “The Business of Mass Incarceration” by Chris Hedges and published in the Nation Of Change, “Poor people, especially those of color, are worth nothing to corporations and private contractors if they are on the street. In jails and prisons, however, they each can generate corporate revenues of $30,000 to $40,000 a year. This use of the bodies of the poor to make money for corporations fuels the system of neoslavery that defines our prison system. … The United States has spent $300 billion since 1980 to expand its prison system. We imprison 2.2 million people, 25 percent of the world’s prison population. For every 100,000 adults in this country there are 742 behind bars. Five million are on parole. Only 30 percent to 40 percent are white.

“Incarceration has become a very lucrative business for an array of private contractors, most of whom send lobbyists to Washington to make sure the laws and legislation continue to funnel a steady supply of poor people into the prison complex. These private contractors, taking public money, build the prisons, provide food service, hire guards and run and administer detention facilities. It is imperative to their profits that there be a steady supply of new bodies.”

Read Hedges story online at, bit.ly/1cqlZ9x.

There has to be a better way.

Patricia Wade

Palmer