Dear Editor: Matthew Lowen’s book review of Prison Profiteers (May/June 2014) was a good and disturbing reminder. The Prison Industrial Complex is all about financial profiting; and nothing about crime reduction, intervention, and rehabilitation. It is about building more and larger prisons, and longer sentencing; and nothing about justice in sentencing.
The book’s subtitle is a question that is, of course, a rhetorical one: Who makes money from mass incarceration? The for-profit companies make the profit. The public pays for that profit through a tax system that is retrogressive and inequitable. These companies, excuse me, these “persons,” probably pay little or no taxes at all!
– Henry Organ, Menlo Park, CA