I agree with you Críostóir, this is a major driving force behind this statistic. Once prisons were called and industry, they became part of local economies, and harder to do without in local budgets the incarceration rates began to climb.
Additionally, as our public education systems fail, it leaves more and more poorly educated people struggling to survive in a society that only values money. When an individual can't get a job that will support him and his family, because the education system failed him, then he is more likely to turn to crime for survival.
This may sound like conspiracy theory, but there is too much evidence that this has been planned for a long time. It does two things.
1. It allows less money to be spent on educating the poor, and pretty much guarantees: A. a low paid worker force, and B. creates a criminal cast to fill the cells of the prison industry.
2. It feeds the local economy with a stimulus package of Federal and local funds to incarcerate people for less violent crimes, (a three strikes loser may only have been caught stealing food a third time to be sentenced to life).
The road out of this Law and Order mess, is via better education. Hopefully the next president will do something about getting rid of the "No Child Left Behind" Stupidity and get educators and education back on track. When I was teaching at the college level before retiring 4 years ago, I was astonished by how many of my students could not read or comprehend beyond the 2nd or 3rd grade. I count that as a failure of education. I saw these students given student loans to learn a skill that supposedly would land them well paying jobs, but then the school gave them less than was necessary to earn that job, but left them with massive loans to pay off after graduating. I deem this a failure of education, and a failure of government, but to hear the people running the school and the programs, it was not their fault the students were too ignorant to get work with their degrees.
We've allowed our higher educational systems to be taken over by frauds that promise good paying jobs, while assisting the government in signing them to student loans that cripple them for life. The students find themselves on a slippery slope at the beginning of their adult life, with no real skills that would allow them to get ahead. Some of those students will eventually turn to crime. Selling drugs is the usual easy way out for many of these people caught in this trap, and eventually they run afoul of law enforcement.
But if the Government was doing it's primary function of protecting our borders we would not have drug sellers and users to throw into prisons. If this is a conspiracy, it is a well planned one. It takes eager young Americans and puts them on a slide to ruin so they never really have a chance to be anything other than what the government has planned for them. What better way to remove unwanted people from the job market, and tax rolls for long periods of time, teach them better criminal skills, than survival skills and pretty much guarantee they will become recidivists and keep working like the cog in the wheel the government wants them to be.
After being out of the US for 4 years, I'm back right now, and I'm appalled with the amount of crime even in the local rural area in which I am staying currently. Bank robberies weekly, sometimes twice or three times a week. Murders in robberies of businesses, Murders from home invasions with guns, stolen cars, stolen identities, and on and on. In Colombia where I retired to, education is paramount, and within walking distance of my home there, you will find at least 12 universities, and more throughout the city, and almost every child aspires to a higher education. Crime is not rampant in Colombia as our government would have us believe. Not that it doesn't exist, but it is nowhere near the levels it is here in America. In four years, I have not heard of a single bank robbery, and only one business robbery, which took place in a rural village of a bar being run by two young women alone who were not very aware of security.
Until the people realize our problem stems from lack of serious education, and stop demanding more and tougher laws against crime, and begins to support more legitimate education reforms, this will only get worse. In reality, the way it is now, the real criminals are running the systems for higher education and our prisons. It is rampant criminal capitalism creating this mess.
So if this is a conspiracy, it has been well planned, and not a single politician including the Democrats have spoken out against it. Apparently, Americans like it the way it is, law and order and public safety. Unfortunately they have neither because of this situation, and a government too stupid to recognize the real problem causing it.
If even a quarter of the funds spent on prisons and the "Justice" industry, were earmarked for education reforms, we'd see a drop in crime very quickly. If half of what is spent on prisons and the "Justice" industry, was redirected to education, we would see America return to the foreground of leadership in the world. We'd become the country we think we are again.
