Prison Industrial Complex

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Last week, I posted a blog on Prison Incarcerations: By the Numbers. Here is a follow-up on the same theme. In today's Chicago Sun Times, an opinion piece entitled Longer prison time won’t make city safer by John Maki also touched on this issue (to read the article, click the attached blue link above). Maki is the executive director of the John Howard Association,  a 'prison watchdog group'.

The opinion piece dealt with the consistent problem that is gun violence in Chicago and what Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to do to combat it. One of the proposed ideas presented in the piece is the lengthening of prison sentences in hopes of "deter[ing] people from unlawfully carrying guns and using them in shootings," While the author, Maki, completely disagrees with the idea because it is 'unlikely' to succeed, I do not completely disagree with Emanuel's proposed legislation. Maybe the harsher the consequence, the less likely someone is from breaking the law and the more they will be 'deterred' from 'unlawful' actions.

This directly connects to the topics discussed in my previous blog. According to the same article, the increasing of "long-term consequences" would "overwhelm the ever increasing Illinois prison population". The 'ever increasing' prison population is really a testament of a larger idea often referred today as the "Prison Industrial Complex". Taking offenders off the streets for 'a few extra years' really wouldn't make much of a difference because the prisons are already too crowded for their maximum intended capacity. According to Maki, one prison has "49,000 inmates in a system designed for 33,000".  The over-population of this prison presents a larger issue I am trying to get at: Why it is that the prison population keeps going up yet the amount of violence is remaining constant, if not increasing? Emanuel's legislation should attempt to make this connection an inverse, where one goes up and the other goes down and not a direct, where both steadily increase. How do you think Emanuel should combat gun violence and over-crowded prisons?