by TChris

A new book by Reuters correspondent Alan Elsner, Gates of Injustice, is reviewed here. The book paints an ugly portrait of America's prison system.

To get a sense of the magnitude of this problem, according to Elsner's calculations, the U.S., with five percent of the world's population, has 25% of the world's prisoners.

As Elsner points out, the cost of running the U.S. prison system is now more than $57 billion per year. This compares with the entire federal Department of Education budget of only $42 billion. ... California, it appears, spends $6000 per year per student attending university, while spending $34,000 per year for every prisoner it holds behind bars.

The "corrections industry" has become a big business, but it's often the kind of business the begs the firing of the CEO.

According to Elsner, "hundreds of thousands of men are raped each year. . . Racist and neo-Nazi gangs run drugs, gambling and prostitution rings from inside their prison cells, buying and selling weak and vulnerable fellow inmates as sex slaves, while authorities turn a blind eye." As a result, individual prisoners once released are often more violent, more addicted, angrier and less able to function in society than they were when they entered the system.