How Does the American Business Culture Relate to the Penal System?
             The costly casualties that hit hospitals by way of taxpayer wallets, the big business of Wall Street floating high-profit construction bonds and an increasingly viewed prison population as a pool of cheap labor, are some of the many ways in which relations exist between the American Business Culture and the penal system. The shift has gone from jails, to correctional facilities, to places of profit, has forever changed the way in which the American Business Culture views the Penal System. The American Penal System has the fastest growing population of any "industry" in the world today. The Survey of Inmates of State Correctional Facilities, 1986 states that "The number of people in the criminal justice system will surpass the number in higher education". These facts in turn create negative and positive results. These facts in themselves relate to the American Business Culture.
             In the United States, the concept of prison privatization was first proposed early in the 1980s. By the middle of that decade a number of firms were established, eager to take over prison and jail facilities and to build new prisons to exploit the needs of states that were struggling with rapidly expanding prison populations and deteriorating conditions in their existing facilities. In 1997 the private prison industry was estimated to yield revenues of around $1 billion, with about 64,000 adults confined in approximately 140 privately operated secure facilities in the U.S. By 1998 the estimate of prisoners confined in private facilities had swelled to 85,000.
             State and County, funded hospitals bear the enormous brunt of shouldering victims of crimes and the assailants. By themselves, bills that they attain using these facilities run into the millions of dollars. 40% of gunshot victims are listed as paying their bills out of their own pockets. However hospital ...