image Would you believe, one out of 100 American adults lives behind bars—the prison variety? "On the average," reports the New York Times, "states spend almost 7 percent on their budgets on corrections, trailing only healthcare, education and transportation."

The world’s highest incarceration rate is right here in the "land of the free." Even with less than five percent of the world’s people, the U.S. has locked up at least one quarter of Planet Earth’s prisoners. We’re talking about 2.3 million people, or about the same as the 2.2 million residents of Houston, America’s fourth-largest city. Look at the Houston photo to the left. Imagine nothing but people in jump suits and other prison garb residing within the city limits.

Profiteers are salivating over the America’s prison boom. Just what’s ahead? Debtor’s prisons, even? Washington has made wonderful progress toward this goal with anti-consumer bankruptcy legislation.

The E and P angle

imageMeanwhile some booksellers want to climb aboard the prison bandwagon, and I wonder if some TeleBlog readers might share my slightly mixed feelings.

On one hand, with book sales hardly sky-rocketing on the whole, I’m wildly in favor of growing the market, and, yes, in the place of the booksellers, I’d be pursuing sales where I could find them. Books for prisoners are A Good Thing. I want to see them not only be able to buy books but also borrow them through a free library model. If nothing else, books could help prisons improve vocational skills and be more likely to succeed on the outside and avoid returns to crime. Multimedia e-books could be especially good in time for educating prisoners in, say, areas such as auto mechanics. And, yes, E could vastly increase the variety of titles and drive down costs.

Whatever the media, I’m happy to see vendors, including Amazon and Barnes and Noble, go after the prison market, the topic of a Publishers Weekly article. It’s not as if Amazon and the rest are part of the prison lobby.

Scary just the same

Still, isn’t it a little scary? A society adjusting to the permanent condition of so many of its people being imprisoned, especially members of minorities? Mightn’t some nonviolent crimes, such as illegal drug use, be dealt with in other ways? Keep in mind that states are spending around $50 billion on prisons, according to a Pew Report, and the book Prison Profiteers reports the amount at $185 billion with local and federal budgets included. That could buy a lot of books, both E and P.

1 COMMENT

  1. David, you’ll never be elected president. Politicians get votes by pandering to those who fear–and locking up ever-more people is a wonderful pander.

    We do know that prisons often become schools for crime. How cool it would be if we could turn them into schools for productivity–and books for prisoners could certainly be a part of that. Perhaps prisons are one area where paper makes sense for longer, though, given the risks of destruction and theft of expensive devices within the prisons.

    Of course, I absolutely agree that locking up someone who got caught smoking dope or whatever along with violent criminals is not an especially useful way to spend public dollars.

    Rob Preece
    Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com

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