Rural American here. Mostly I fight for people, but I’ve been fighting against prison expansion for 30 years. People talk about systemic racism and fail to give solid examples. Let’s change that. Let’s talk about something real.

From 1925 to 1980, the American population more than doubled, but the prison population barely changed. So far so good, we absorbed more people, without more crime. Yeah America!

115.8 Million - U.S. population in 1925

226.5 Million - U.S. population in 1980

331 Million - U.S. population in 2020

Suddenly, something changed.

In 1980, 338,000 Americans were in prisons

By 2020, 2.3-million Americans were in prisons

WTF happened?

The Conservative Movement is the answer, but that’s another story. Right now, we have to deal with the fallout.

The father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith once wrote "The extraction of surplus cannot be squeezed out of labor by violence only…” In addition to the use of police violence to squash resistance, Smith advocated “pacification.”

And that’s exactly what Corporate America started doing when Reagan was elected.

Corporate America was shutting down factories all across rural America – and sending the work overseas where cheap labor was abundant. To keep rural American workers from rising up in protest, they started selling prisons to the leaders of rural communities.

Prisons offered new jobs. No high school diploma needed. After three weeks of training, unemployed factory workers would have guaranteed employment, good salaries, benefits, pensions and early retirements. Unions were welcome. Not only workers would benefit. Local government would get more tax dollars. What said little town councils and county supervisors? More money, for us?

Here’s how that works. Cities and counties get a share of state and federal tax dollars based on their populations. Losing factories, meant losing population as people moved elsewhere for work. Corporate Captains eased the pain.

You see, the land determines residency, not your home address. For example, 8,000 residents live in my town, but our town gets state and federal tax dollars for 13,500 residents. How? Well, the 5,500 inmates in our local prison are counted as “our residents”. I’ll give you a minute to chew on the ramifications of that. Putting quotations around “our residents” is all the hint you need.

None of the inmates have ever lived in my town. 90% of them lived in big cities hundreds of miles away from here. Their wives and children still live in those big cities. But when inmate Joe was sent to prison in my town, his tax dollars came with him.

No one asked inmate Joe his home address. The state and federal government just took his residency tax dollars away from the city where his family lives and sent them to us. Inmate Joe’s community got poorer and my community got richer.

That is systemic racism and it’s done with surgical precision. My rural town put a 500 mile long straw straight into inmate Joe’s bad city neighborhood and sucked – up money.

Trouble was, Corporate America was sending millions of factory jobs to China et.al. To prevent an uprising, Corporate America needed to “produce” more and more inmates to fill more and more rural prisons. No worries, no one “important” misses or complains when black folk and poor folk disappear.

Tough on Crime had nothing to do with crime, and everything to do with keeping white, rural Americans from rising up in protest against globalization.

The sucking never ends.

See charts here. https://www.vox.com/2015/7/13/8913297/mass-incarceration-maps-charts