SSDI and commercial prisons

So, one of the problems that comes up a lot with capitalism is that the real, true interests of the human race, and individual humans, and the choices which will produce money in the short term are often not the same. Sometimes they are even at odds with each other.

I’ve got a couple of examples here. The first one is from my time with SSDI. Now, what the customers wanted was for their printers to work, but what SSDI wanted was to get as many calls as possible without getting caught not serving the customers. This led to things like the ‘bidirectional printer cable’ line. (feed ’em BS and get ’em off the phone, plus they’ll call back again and we can earn money for another call)

My second one is one of my major criticisms with commercial prisons. The very last thing these facilities want to do is turn people out who are healthy, well balanced, and unlikely to reoffend – because it’s only if there is recidivism that the prison makes a profit next year.

I can’t help but draw some comparisons between these two situations, and in both cases, what’s happening is not in the interest of the human race or (most) individual humans – a very few humans do well at the cost of all of us.

In general, I rather doubt if the current criminal justice system is in the interest of the race or individuals. It seems to be all about hurting people. The hope is, if people hurt people, and then you hurt the people who are hurting people, somehow there will be less hurt people in the world. Can we discuss the insanity of this, please?

Now, I understand the need to isolate those who would otherwise rape, murder, and pillage. I just think that it might be worth helping them to understand why we all lose when they do those things, and understand what some of the alternatives might look like if we all worked together, and why it might be worth doing so.

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