The Perpetual Prisoner Machine

From the publisher:

A critical look at the United States' criminal justice system, raising an obvious question: If crime rates aren't going up, why is the prison population?

In The Perpetual Prisoner Machine, author Joel Dyer takes a critical look at the United States' criminal justice system as we enter the new millennium. Dyer argues that it is a combination of violent media content, the push for privatization, and the increasing dependence of politicians upon public opinion polls and campaign finance that accounts for the unprecedented explosion in America's prison population, not the crime rates as we have been led to believe. America has more than tripled its prison population since 1980 even though crime rates have been either flat or declining. This raises an obvious question: If crime rates aren't going up, why is the prison population? The answer is "profit," and in the quest to please shareholders, America has turned millions of her citizens into a new, human commodity.