Overcrowded prisons in the United States are not only a big problem, but also a big business. In his article "The Prison State of America," American journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges, writes that about a million people are trapped behind bars, working for corporations and state-owned enterprises, sometimes for a dollar per day.
The total number in US prisons is about 2.3 million people, that is, a quarter of the total number of prisoners on the planet.
Today, corporations have privatized many of the functions in the penitentiary system, which used to be under state control.
At the end of the article the author draws a parallel between the way the labor of the workers is exploited in prison and the way large corporations employ ordinary workers. According to Hedges, if large corporations continue to do business as they do now, then soon free life will be little different from life in prison.
