Prisons as Money-makers & Other Questions

I didn't know that most US prisons are owned by corporations and many are on the stock market. When I heard that (ironically enough on this Mexican podcast), it immediately brought up a few concerns that, sure enough, were addressed in this article. One, when your bottom line is money, you're going to cut out as much as possible to keep your bottom line low, and when that means people who are depending on you, it's not going to end up being humane. The other one that was nebulous to me, but clearly stated in the article, is that the purpose of prisons is mostly to rehabilitate. But if a prison is a business depending on the people inside it, then less people means less money. If prisons were actually functioning the way they should be, there would be less and less prisoners, but because prisons are businesses making money from the government for each head housed there, they're not going to try to do that. Both of these issues point to a huge problem in the US justice system. To me, it brings up the fact that there are good reasons for having publicly owned entities in order to maintain fairness and quality. An advanced society needs to fund its infrastructure in such a way that the infrastructure creates a safety net for society so that's society can move forward in a fluid way. It's one reason I liked living in Japan so much. Although Japan has it's fair share of issues, there were many social infrastructure aspects of it that I felt are necessary in the US. The power of local government, so that bureaucratic systems are not federal as much as they are, creates an intimacy between the people and the government so that when you need something from the government you can just go to your local government office and get it. It's extremely frustrating to go to California and have to go all over the state in order to get certain paperwork done. 

In Japan teachers are given pay that they deserve, even if their hours are horrendous. The latter is a mark against Japan, but the former is a mark against the U.S. 

Who wants to teach when teaching doesn't pay enough? The education system is a fundamental necessity for society to move forward. Children should be treated with the same respect as adults, and they are valuable. Teachers provide a service that is essential to healthy growth in society, but if they are not paid properly, good teachers will end up taking jobs that will pay better, jobs that probably don't involve the next generation. In the realm of government services, I was amazed to go to the tax office and get in line with about 20 other people in order to be called to two windows an hour later and be told that they would only be open for another hour. That's insane to me. Isn't the government supposed to provide services to the people so that they don't waste their time standing in line? It can only be blamed on the misallocation of funds by the federal government, but I think this ridiculous situation is driven by the polarization within the populace. Libraries, roads, government offices, and other important parts of infrastructure are not quite as good in the US as they are in Japan. Despite the fact that the US has the most money of any country on Earth, it's amazing to me that the system doesn't function as well, and that they would go so far as to try to save money by doing things like what's happening with the prisons, that borderline on the immoral, when they have so much money to begin with. To me, it's a clear lack of critical thinking leading to breakdowns in the system. As I've taught my students, the intellectual standards must be applied to the elements of reasoning in order to lead to the intellectual traits (I posted a picture of this below). We must apply logic, clarity, accuracy and all of the other intellectual standards to the elements of reasoning, which are our questions, assumptions, conclusions, logic, and the others. Then, we can obtain a better understanding that is more clear, logical, fair and humble, etc., and will result in a better world because we have honed our intellectual traits.

(This is the Critical Thinking model I give my college students. There are a few others, but they are all similar.)