Yeah. American prisons are overflowing with guys who got caught pulling $220k out of the bank in a structured fashion. This is the real source of our prison overcrowding.
That's true, but 8% of anything in the US is a lot. There's roughly 2.2 million prisoners so maybe 200k of them are held in private prisons. And as someone points out upthread, when you add in all that prison-building, the firms that deliver services tot he corrections market and so on, it adds up to a lot of economic activity.
"The United States has more people behind bars than any other nation, a total incarcerated population of nearly 2.3 million as of 2017 — nearly half of which is in state prisons. Smaller numbers are locked in federal prisons and local jails, which typically hold people for relatively short periods as they await trial."
More than N.Korea, Myanmar, Communist China, Russia, you name it. "LAND OF THE FREE !"
After watching the documentary "13th" on Netflix recently, I wondered about how the US prison population affected this. Something like 1 out of 100 people in the US are in prison, which must be close to 2 out of 100 men. And another chunk of people who's function in society is to monitor those in jail. Plus the difficulties of getting a job as a felon. Seemed like all put together must have a serious impact on productivity.
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