Profits: Louisiana is the World’s Prison Capital

May 14th, 2012
Via: Times Picayune:

Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran’s, seven times China’s and 10 times Germany’s.

The hidden engine behind the state’s well-oiled prison machine is cold, hard cash. A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt.

Hah !  I am not at all surprised, having quite a bit of personal experience of Louisiana.  First of all, there are a lot of violent criminals to incarcerate.  Second, the politics are so incredibly corrupt, it's no surprise at all that the mandarins have found a way to profit from the chaos they themselves have helped to create.  A similar thing is actually happening to the land itself.  Every thirty-eight minutes, the equivalent of a football field is lost to the Gulf of Mexico.  This is because of the locks and dams above Bâton Rouge that essentially straitjacket the Mississippi; the Great River wants to switch channels within its delta and has been tending towards the Atchafalaya River for many decades now.  In order for WASP-US cultural hegemony to be maintained, however, industry and its captains' interests needed to be protected through an elaborate system forcing all of the water into the more familiar Mississippi channel that passes through Bâton Rouge, the State capital, and New Orleans, the largest and wealthiest city.  The delta, however, relies upon annual silt depositions that come from spring flooding.  No more silt means loose ground, which the nutria infestation and the extreme weather tear up to be thrown around or else float away into the Gulf.

It's rather tragically poetic, I think :  The lust for money and power is so strong that the US and Louisiana State governments are actually destroying the source of their wealth, destroying the land itself and the communities that thrived on it.  Now that is criminal.

I'm sure Louisiana having the largest black population percentage and lowest education has nothing to do with anything.

It's a lot easier to blame it all on the WASP's.

Yeah really I guess all of the "anti-racists" forget blacks are 100 times more likely to rape a white woman than the other way around. Or I guess everyone forgets that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common during the first three years of this last decade as the reverse?