The United States has more people in prison and spends more money on criminal justice than any other country in the world.

It is only one of 11 countries that has a privatized prison system where corporations profit from managing and maintaining prisons and rely on high incarceration rates.

Private prisons gain traction by boasting low cost and high quality solutions to the problems associated with the explosion of incarceration rates in the 1980s.

But instead they have been a high cost and low quality aspect of criminal justice in the United

States ever since. Hello everyone and welcome to a new episode of the Corporate Casket.

I'm the Illuminati and today we're going to be discussing private prisons.

This episode contains general stories of abuse and mentioned suicide.

So if these topics are too difficult for you to hear about right now, I recommend skipping this episode.

So let's start as always with some background.

How did private prisons get their start in the United States?

Let's get into it.

The history of the private prison industry starts long before the criminal justice

systems boom in the 1980s.

In the 18th century local jails were contracted to for-profit companies by local governments

to house people who were awaiting trials.

The shift from for-profit jails to government-run facilities did not occur until

1790 when Philadelphia established the first U.S. state prison.

However, in 1844, Louisiana privatized its penitentiary by leasing the prison and its prisoners to a private company.

The prison, operated by the company Mac Hat and Pratt and Ward, ran the prison as a factory,

and people who were incarcerated were forced to work unpaid labor and produce cheap clothing to be worn by slaves.

Later, privatized prisons and incarceration rates saw massive growth after the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865.

While the 13th Amendment effectively abolished slavery,

...