Bernie Sanders On Prisons

We Must End For-Profit Prisons:

The United States is experiencing a major human tragedy. We have more people in jail than any other country on earth, including Communist China, an authoritarian country four times our size.  The U.S. has less than five percent of the world’s population, yet we incarcerate about a quarter of its prisoners – some 2.2 million people.

There are many ways that we must go forward to address this tragedy.  One of them is to end the existence of the private for-profit prison industry which now makes millions from the incarceration of Americans.  These private prisons interfere with the administration of justice. And they’re driving inmate populations skyward by corrupting the political process.

No one, in my view, should be allowed to profit from putting more people behind bars – whether they’re inmates in jail or immigrants held in detention centers. In fact, I believe that private prisons shouldn’t be allowed to exist at all, which is why I’ve introduced legislation to eliminate them.

It’s wrong to profit from the imprisonment of human beings and the suffering of their friends and families. It’s time to end this morally repugnant practice, and along with it, the era of mass incarceration.