For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
–Adam Gopnick, “The Caging of America,” The New Yorker, 30 January 2012.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
U.S. prisons are turning into geriatric facilities. The prison population of those over 65 is increasing at 94 times the increase in the general prison population and there has been a 63% increase in this cohort between 2007 and 2009.
http://www.hrw.org/node/104762
Yes, there’s that, too. Although another nice trick is to release people at 65. Too old to start a career, and without having worked at a regular job long enough to qualify for social security. It is all so problematic.
“a growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible” (The New Yorker)
YES, this is sadly very true. I saw it with my own eyes and felt it in my own body. In the winter, cells were very cold and if you told the Officer Inspector who visited once a week to please have the temperature raised because you felt the cold in your bones he would look at you and say: “ It is much colder outside you know” and he would turn around and do nothing. This is just one of the mildest examples.
And companies with subcontracts (e.g. telephone, food sold in the cantina or supermarket for inmates) charging indecent amounts of money on the most disadvantaged and/or their families putting money into inmates’ account to alleviate their pain. Among inmates there were “rich” and very poor inmates. The poor ones could never use the phone or buy food or any other personal item.
State prisons reproduce and elevate almost to the infinite the worst and most inhuman aspects of our American society.
Conrad Black a.k.a. Lord Black of Crossharbour arranged for a fellow inmate to act as his personal butler during his incarceration at Club Fed (FloridaCubicle 30, Unit B-1 at the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex) in central Florida.. One of his complaints was that the prison cappuccino machine wasn’t working. So wealth speaks even in prison.
http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/482704
He wrote a book called “A Matter of Principle” in which he talks about his prison experiences.
“Once a cultural elitist, Mr. Black now prefers the company of jailbirds to the hypocritical “habitués of the boxes at the Metropolitan Opera House and the most exalted socioeconomic echelons of the Style section of the Sunday New York Times.” Once an unabashed defender of laissez-faire capitalism, he now depicts the U.S. financial sector as a late-stage Rome plagued by massively overpaid pin-striped parasites siphoning off the nation’s wealth through money-churning schemes and outright fraud. Once a “rabid” cheerleader of American democracy, he now denounces the cruelties of the country’s legal “prosecutocracy” and prison-industrial complex”
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/09/03/jonathan-kay-on-conrad-black-and-his-new-book-a-man-in-full-pay-back-mode/
Yes – private prisons are yet worse as a phenomenon and in other ways, and wealth speaks a great deal.
That article in the National Post is fascinating.