The United States is built upon exploitation, and if I really wanted to get into the long sordid history of it, I could. I won’t today, because I’m not sure I could do it justice in a single post, or even a series of posts. I’m no professional writer, I just like to krabble my keys with the thoughts and emotions that rouse and rattle me.
Of course, every civilization is built upon some form of exploitation. To get to where we are, you either need many people, or many years. The more people you have, the fewer years you require to build your civilization into something influential, something that is stable and can grow.
Being the impatient shoe loving monkeys that we are, however, we usually just steal a bunch of people and consign them to building our civilization for us while we profit from their labors.
We’ve done it to men, women, children, women, did I say women twice? Yes, I did. Find me an enterprising individual who sits on a vast fountain of wealth he claims to have built himself, and I will show you a man who doesn’t mind if children run the molding machines in the mill, and that can be taken either figuratively or literally, because history has given us both.
It’s easy when all you have to do is dehumanize someone. Take away their individuality, label them undesirable, or deficient, and use them till your heart’s content and your wallet’s bursting. Here in the U.S., we’ve done it to people of color, particularly black people, we’ve done it to immigrants, we’ve done it to children, especially orphans, we’ve done it to women (and still do), and of course we’ve done it to prisoners, and boy do we make bank off of that one.
The latter will be the one I’m focusing on here this time around, because it is endemic to our society’s problem with legislating morality. We equate legality with morality: if you’re law abiding, you’re a moral, upstanding citizen. If you break the law, you’re a bad person, and deserve every harsh punishment you receive.
We tend to do so on a sliding scale, but our country really likes to punish people. It may be our national pastime. We find them guilty, they go to jail or prison, and their status is changed from “good, upstanding citizen” to “evil, law breaking criminal.” You can see it in how we speak, in how we refer to people who are incarcerated.
We use them as the worst option in our moral equivocations. We have collectively decided that they’re not people, they’re criminals, and not to be trusted. It doesn’t matter that we have the highest incarceration rate in the world, it doesn’t matter that our laws are so complex and convoluted that people break the law every day without even realizing it. Nor does it matter that we actually have a for-profit prison system in this country that encourages prosecution and maximum sentencing.
All of this creates a recipe for exploitation. Did you know that in California, where currently there are wildfires raging throughout the state, there is a team of female prison inmates who have been tasked with fighting some of those fires? They receive $2 a day in pay for risking their lives. When they are released from prison, do you think they could use that experience to become firefighters? No, because the U.S. does not believe in rehabilitation. Once a criminal, always a criminal. Anyone who has been incarcerated cannot apply to be a police officer or firefighter.
That goes for many other jobs as well. Plus, as I said, the longer they are in prison, the more money they make for the state and private corporations. We have a built in system for the exploitation of millions. Yes, millions, because the United States has more than 3,000,000 prisoners. Our incarceration rate over the past 40 years has climbed 500%, while crime itself has gone down. We have more jails than colleges.
If that doesn’t sit right with you, now you know how I feel. When we can dehumanize someone on such a level that they are worth more as indentured servants than as human beings, we have no moral ground upon which to stand. Of course, our country tends to take a simplistic view of things, as indicated by the ability for law enforcement officers to plant evidence on a suspect (with proof of that act), and walk away from a trial as not guilty. We have prosecutors with 100% conviction rates, which cannot be good, since the legal system is deeply flawed, and innocent people are sent to prison without proper evidence, or with “evidence” cobbled together from assumption and circumstance alone. That’s because prosecutors without strong conviction rates don’t get elected because they’re seen as “soft on crime.”
There is no room for nuance in our system, no room for innocence. Everyone is either guilty or not guilty, and that guilt gets more and more presumptuous every day. So when we start dehumanizing people who break the law, we make their exploitation seem fitting, as if it’s part of the punishment. That is something that concerns me greatly. Regardless of what a human being has done, we must be better than petty revenge, we must set the standard of human decency, to recognize that every person should have basic human rights.
Just because someone breaks the law doesn’t mean they lose their status as a thinking, feeling human being. There are some people who are criminals because of nonsense laws like our drug laws. Our drug laws in this country are absurd, and not to mention costly, but it brings in money to the states and county law enforcement agencies, who use that money to buy bigger, military grade weapons for their 20,000 person cities. We arrest people on trumped up charges (no pun intended), fudge the truth where we need to, and give them mandatory minimum sentences (meaning that regardless of the severity of the crime, you are automatically forced to serve ‘X’ number of years in prison).
Our system is a hammer desperately in search of a nail. Our penchant for nationalism has only risen with this new presidency, and I expect it to continue rising. We flirt with fascism, and have been for some time, but now we’re trying to take it to the next level. That means more laws broken, more zero tolerance, more prosecutions, more incarcerations, more prisoners. More people to exploit in order for us to make America great again.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate
https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=11
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/The-Female-Inmates-Fighting-Fires-in-California-450438783.html