The US police state, the "best" in the world

[porphyrian]

81. Yep, it's real.

1. Use media and election campaign propaganda to demonize a minority (not necessarily racial, but that works) group within the population with which the greatest block of voters do not particularly identify or of which they do not particularly approve. Scare them - what these people are doing will kill children and destroy America! Get hardliners elected to office.

2. Make laws that criminalize the large segment of the population you have just demonized. Make the penalties harsh - mandatory minimums, zero tolerance, whatever. Remove a judge's ability to soften the sentence in those laws with these mandatory penalties, so that there is a guaranteed influx of prisoners into the system.

3. Allow prisons to get overcrowded to generate demand for more prisons. Release criminals without mandatory minimums early to accomodate this, even if their charges are rape or murder, further scaring the public into supporting building more prisons, even though the money is not there to do so. As a solution, privatize priisons, allowing for-profit corporate prisons to take the extra prisoner load.

4. Now that there is a profit motive for keeping people imprisoned, lobby for more criminalization, harsher mandatory penalties, tough-on-crime candidates, etc.

5. Repeat.