Alabama treats inmates like Victorian debtors at best, stray animals at worst

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

Alabama's horrific criminal justice system is getting a lot of bad press lately. There was an article about the modern-day debt peonage that revenue-hungry small town courts have instated with the help of the for-profit prison industry. And now there's this:

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Woods developed an infection in his foot that Madison County's ruthlessly cost-cutting jail opted not to provide him with treatment for.

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This isn't an aberration; it's happened in Madison County before...

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And in corrections facilities elsewhere in the state...

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...

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Given evidence that states with larger black populations impose harsher sentences on criminals, irrespective of crime rates, is it any surprise that this is happening in Alabama and that the state's two candidates for governor - Robert Bentley and Parker Griffith - have said nothing about it?

It would be too generous to attribute this to budget cuts or administrative failure. Alabama's elected officials and bureaucrats willingly allow this to happen because of a visceral race hatred that pervades the state. It is part of the pathology that continues to afflict the Deep South and is dressed up in appeals to "tradition" or "law and order."

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

Besides the "farming out" part, and the fairly condescending response to Carl (though I do agree with him in principle that claims about morality ought to met with a response with its own solid definition of where right and wrong derive from), I don’t see what was so controversial about Cassius’s post.

Prison should be about rehabilitation, but what is to be done with those who can’t be rehabilitated? Should they remain burdens of the state, wasting away? Why not put them, in some form, to work to compensate for their existence. Certainly a more humane form of dealing with middle tier criminals (IE, people who shouldn’t be put to death nor are capable of being rehabilitated) than just letting them rot. Work very well may be the last resort for rehabilitation efforts in a few cases.

Sanchez, if you read the articles, you'd see we're not talking about maximum security prisons housing serial killers and repeat violent offenders. We're talking about a guy who stole a Star Wars DVD from Wal-Mart - how much money do we need to spend punishing someone for stealing a $10 DVD? We're talking about a woman who was incarcerated because she couldn't afford to pay the fines for a ticket for driving with no insurance (which she probably couldn't afford to buy either). She doesn't need to be "rehabilitated." There's nothing wrong with her apart from the fact that she's poor.