U.S. prison population soars in 2003, ‘04

While the crime rate has fallen over the past decade, the number of people in prison and jail is outpacing the number of inmates released.

Politicians get elected by screaming “let’s git tough on crime.” Plus there’s big money to be made in building and maintaining prisons - and let’s not forget that construction is notorious for being a swell way to make clean money vanish and dirty money get laundered. That’s at least one reason politicians are always howling for big construction projects to happen.

The convicts. Oh yeah, them. Well, let’s pass some barbaric sentencing laws, then lock them up and keep them there. We got a sweet little gravy train going on, and we need lots of convicts to keep it happening.

The prison-industrial system is rotten to the core, corrupt too.

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That’s what Ike first called it.

The penultimate draft of the address in which Republican President of the United States (and former General of the Army) Dwight D. Eisenhower coined the term referred to the military-industrial-congressional complex, but it is said that Eisenhower chose to strike the word congressional in order to avoid offending members of legislative branch of the federal government.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

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On Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code podcast a few days back, Curry, a political conservative who rarely mentions politics, he said he grew up in the States where police and military are respected and has found the opposite to be true in the ‘mostly socialist’ European countries that he’s lived in for years. He says the military and police in these countries are seen as being part of the war machine and mistrusted. My reaction upon hearing this was, I didn’t know such wondrous countries existed.

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US Teenagers abuse prescription drugs, OTC medications to get high

18 percent of teenagers abused Vicodin and 10 percent OxyContin - both are prescription painkillers. 10 percent tried the prescription stimulants Ritalin or Adderall without a doctor’s prescription. 9 percent of the teens abused OTC cough medications containing the active component dextromethorphan solely to get high.

Um, so why is so much OxyContin and Ritalin making it onto the black market? Must have fallen off the back of a truck or something.

Taking cough medicine to get high has been around since at least the 60’s, as is taking prescription drugs - back then it was amphetamines and barbituates - without a prescription. These drug alerts pop up every few years in the mainstream media as they “discover” a new menace that never went away in the first place.

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