My significant other’s grandmother died last week. This meant attending a wake and funeral filled with his relatives. This isn’t a bad thing mind you, it just exposed me to some different people.  One of them is a correctional officer. That’s just a fancy way of saying she works in a prison.

When I asked her why she chose that line of work, I was told,”I’m a high school graduate and it pays $20 an hr. Where else am I going to work where I will make that kind of money?”

At first, I began thinking about how we have several prisons in this general area. They are a huge employer and whenever there’s any talk of a new one opening everyone in the area gets their panties tingling with excitement.

I personally could never figure this out. Think about it this way. Yes. Now there are jobs, BUT, we live in a quiet town in the middle of Pennsylvania. The majority of the crime we had was a drunk guy beating his wife, a guy in front of a bar, or passing out on the sidewalk.

In the last 10 yrs it’s gone from that to where we actually had a gang fight a few towns over on saturday. The paper claimed they were in the “bloods”. Now, why the hell would the “bloods” be out in redneckville? Oooooooooooooh yeah! They got put in jail out here. They brought out the wife and little childrens and realized, hey, it’s cheaper to live. It’s easy to get on public assistance, get a decent HUD home, ect. When I get out, I can deal drugs through my old connections and make a killing. If that doesn’t work out, I can just rob all these old people who don’t even lock there doors! This must be eutopia!

I see bad things for this area in 10 yrs it’s going to be a war zone out there. From mayberry to the inner city.

There used to be lots of industry around. Dress shops, factories, small businesses… but they’ve all closed. The dress shops are in india now, the factories are in china or mexico, walmart squashed the small businesses.  So all that’s left is prisons..

It also got me thinking about how I keep hearing how the US has the highest percentage of it’s people incarcerated. Something like 1 in 100 people are currently behind bars.  2.3 million people were in our prison system at the end of 2007.

It’s nothing new for non-violent prisoners to be used to do unpleasant tasks such as cleaning up the trash on the side of the road. In NJ as well as PA I’ve driven past the guys in the orange jumpsuits with gloves and a trash bag. It’s really awesome that someone who the tax payers are paying to house, clothe and feed can do something like tidy up the back roads and the highways. Right? For whatever reason, people are slobs and think the world is their garbage can. But that’s a blog for another day.

This brings me to the fact that the countries we’ve exploited for their cheap labor over the past few yrs, aren’t as cheap anymore. With our tanking dollar and the worldwide recession, it doesn’t save a company as much money to use outsourced labor as it used to.

Well, where else will you find people who are just sitting around idle to work cheap for you? Oh wait! I know where there are 2.3 million!

Our growing budget deficits will have people screaming about how we spend way to much money on housing prisoners and that they need to start “giving back”.

Unemployment brings more crime, so there will be even more people going to jail. Police will be screaming that they need better funding, more officers to deal with the growing crime problem. The people around here are mostly older. Living on SSI or whatever pensions they might happen to have. They can barely afford to pay all the taxes they pay now. There’s only so far you can stretch a rubber band before it snaps.

A new form of revenue must be found! Wait.. what about Corporate Prison Sponsorship??

Can you picture it? “Sneaker” correctional institution, “Pear” Penitentiary.. they’ll all wear orange jumpsuits with a company logo on it, sleep in a prison cell and during the day they’ll make cheap products for corporations that they’ll sell to rich and middle class people in china and india.

The entire thing will be subsidized by the corporate sponsor. They supply the money, you supply the labor and finished products. Correctional officers become your new “masters” and you become the new “slave”.

You BETTER make 50 pairs of shoes today!

How many tv specials have you seen about how “good” prisoners have it? They just sit around lifting weights, eating, reading and sleeping. It’s like a vacation for them on our dime! Now they can make your next gucci purse. Your new shower curtain!

Instead of made in china, everything you buy is going to say.. Made In Prison!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 7:20 am and is filed under Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.