Mass incarceration. Private, for-profit prisons. Laws that unfairly target minorities. Defendants being sentenced to decades for nonviolent and first-time offenses. Overcrowding. Corruption. The issues facing our correctional facilities are myriad. And, with over six million either incarcerated or on some form of community supervision, the United States has become the world's leading incarcerator. Despite recent media friendly reforms like the First Step Act, there’s still an long way to go.
In a new book, Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States, out last week, Tony Platt, a professor at University of California Berkeley's Department of Justice Studies, takes a deep dive into the state of incarceration in our country, looking at the historic barriers to criminal justice and prison reform and correlating them to today. VICE talked to Platt to find out what, if anything, we can do to fix our broken criminal justice system. Here’s what he had to say.
I did time mostly in the 1990s and 2000s. When I was in there most of the guys saw the criminal justice system and Bureau of Prisons as a business. How close were they to the truth, or not?
Tony Platt: I'm not sure that I'd say that the current criminal justice system or the federal system is a business. There's lots of people in criminal justice that make money, if you think about private prisons, if you think about the contractors that build prisons, the agencies that make money off phone calls for people doing time, the companies that monopolize the sale of inflated food prices to people inside and so on. There's people making money all over the place there. But it's not a business in the way that it's been in the past.
[For more on this story by Seth Ferranti, go to https://www.vice.com/en_us/art...he-reasons-you-think]
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