About

These pages are maintained by volunteers who are interested in ending the wasted money and wasted lives created by over incarcerating our citizens. Our intent is to inform and educate the general public about the waste brought about by bad policy, unnecessary and overly restrictive laws that infringe on our personal freedoms as well as the hand that greed driven corporations and politicians play in influencing the ever growing business of incarceration for profit.

We do not believe in abolishing prisons and do believe those who commit violent or harmful criminal acts should be held accountable for their actions. For the safety of society we believe it is wrong to abuse prisoners in ways not prescribed by their original sentence; in other words, zero tolerance for prisons and officers who act unprofessionally and abuse their power over prisoners. More is to be gained by officers setting positive examples than for them to act in the manner of the criminals they are paid to oversee. To abuse prisoners is to make them more hostile and angry before releasing them back onto the streets and not only wastes money with a revolving door system of re-offending but places the greater part of society more at risk.

Tax dollars spent on prisons and rehabilitation should not be siphoned off into the pockets of corporations who cost an average of 33% higher rates than it costs for the state to maintain prisons themselves. Privatized prisons have a long and well established history of lawsuits, escapes, deaths and riots. Incarceration for profit is a breeding ground for unsavory cost cutting  techniques and lead to overall carelessness. We, the free citizens and taxpayers, deserve to have a system in place that costs less and is more effective means of rehabilitating prisoners. We do not need to have judges selling our juvenile offenders to private prisons for kickbacks as happened in PA. Remove the profit and much of the corruption will go with it.

The bottom line is, we believe that taxpaying citizens deserve to have a more streamlined, efficient and better functioning means of dealing with criminals. More money than most people would ever imagine is being spent solely to line the pockets of greedy lawmakers and prison executives and very little of it is being used for its intended purpose – to justly and humanely hold people accountable for their actions while protecting society from harm. The way our system is currently operating is not effective and is certainly not keeping us safe; quite the opposite. By over incarcerating people like low-level drug offenders and prostitutes, etc, and by allowing them to be warehoused and stripped of all dignity by abusive officers, we are only creating a more degenerate and potentially hostile caste of criminals.

And by allowing prison executives to buy influence with our legislators, we are allowing our freedoms to be stripped from us one by one. We cannot allow our rights to be sold out from under us by lawmakers to the highest campaign contributor. We waste millions of dollars paying private prisons to house immigrants for years on end instead of pushing for speedy deportation. Why? Simply so they can fill more beds and trade for higher value on Wall Street while our state coffers are squeezed to the bone by the ever inflating rates they charge for us housing prisoners.