Human Life to the Highest Bidder

Since the mass incarceration of the past decades, there has been an auction going on in many state and federal prisons that resemble those days of slavery and the misery that goes along with such practices. Today's prisons are filled with masses of human beings auctioned and sold to the highest bidder on the profit margin determined by Wall Street and stockholders of private prison contractors. People must become aware that human lives have become a commodity and that not humans are equal in value or importance. It appears that many in society are either oblivious to the concept or are joining in the profitability of selling mankind.

One main reason for concern on this current trend is with stockholders there is only one priority; money and money means greed, corruption and the need for more power to make more money. Selling a human being would appear to be immoral in the past but today's stock market has placed a higher value on some and a lesser value on others. The food chain has been altered to indicate that people can be sold according to their societal value and purpose in how they fit in the economy. Greed and corruption, along with the inequalities and inequities of such goods makes it important to sort mankind out according to class or ability to make money for others. You might even say that because of the commodity market, morals have been devalued in order to conduct the business at hand.

Not all goods are valuable thus not all people have value. One must sort this out and determine which have the most value and which carry the lesser value of the trade and transformation that turns people into goods. Therefore, the economists must use a political continuum of significance to determine those that are worthy to sell and worthy to buy. The trade is not new. Human trafficking is common in most foreign countries and it has finally arrived in the United States in a perfectly legal concept. Politicians have transformed the need for goods to the needs for people and the prison industrial complex has been most accommodating by selling its prisoners for less than a dollar a head.

Everything is for sale these days. It has been said if you have the means to buy you have the means to possess. The use of human trafficking in our economy has reached its peak and society has not winked an eye while it is happening. Directly or indirectly, they all profit from selling human beings on the market under the prison tag. It is fair to say that public interest has turned into private interest as public value has changed into private values. Judges, law enforcement and the criminal justice system has been accommodating to the private prison industries as they turn over their incarcerated masses to those that promise to feed them, put a roof over their heads and keep them for prolonged periods of time in order to receive maximum returns on their investments.

One must not fool themselves if they are not incarcerated as the chances of them becoming a victim of a crime and charged as a criminal has increased blindly. Prosecutors re focusing on those low on the food chain and unable to defend themselves with an attorney or worst, unable to comprehend or understand what is happening because they are severely mentally ill and taken for granted as another commodity sold to the prison industrial complex to fill a bed regardless of what their treatment needs are. Once can easily see that these type of people are expendable and deserve no second thought about placing them in jails or prisons for a long term so profits are high and acquired to the fullest extend of the law.

The irony is that there are people between the mentally ill and those that have skills and an education that makes them more valuable than others. Skilled workers and intellectuals do well in prison and are well taken care of in sense of housing, medical care and employment. They are exactly what the prison contractors are looking for as they can make money from their fruits of labor that resemble slavery wages and confined living conditions that stifle independence and freedom. They are however, more fortunate that those illiterate and physically or mentally disabled. The prison complex is much kinder to those that can walk, think, use their hands and stay of sound body and mind. It reduces their overhead and custodial costs to keep them and all they have to do is keep them longer and uses quantity as a guide to profitability.

The rest are discarded and devalued and at the same time their existence has no urgency for treatment or other expensive overhead costs thus largely neglected or ignored for their routine, chronic or acute needs of food, medical and mental health treatment, dental and other commodities now identified within the proper definition of the environment. One can be proud of supporting those politicians that have managed to guide state and federal laws to accommodate such a prison industrial complex and ensure their growth has been successful and profitable for everybody that is a stockholders in the business of selling human beings to the highest bidder.