$25,000 for a $2.95 Hot Dog! Let's Reflect on Our Prisons on this Independence Day
Prisons are Hallmark of Imbalance in Human's Denatured Evolutionary Path
On this 4th of July holiday in the U.S., when families symbolically celebrate freedom and independence by spending laid-back relaxing time in nature (backyards, parks, beaches), even thinking about prisons makes me depressed and think of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.”
I do not mean to be a killjoy and soil our quintessential American holiday but prisons are not good indicators of freedom and “independence” for a species that keeps talking about freedom and independence.
The news yesterday of numerous deaths in yet another prison incident in South America reminds us that even those we condemn to cages for committing injustice to others will seek justice in their own way.
I am not advocating for abolishing our judicial and prison systems but no other species on this planet uses so much resources to cage its members and take away their freedom and independence to achieve a state of balance (justice). So it appears that our species has a hard time achieving both freedom and balance (justice) at the same time. So how does our species define justice? and what’s justice in wild nature?
In my book, I try to simplify concepts in neuroscience, biochemistry, psychology and economics to identify the roots of imbalance and injustice among humans. I try to define how nature administers its own justice through self-balancing feedback loops and what we (humans) call “conservation laws” (mass, energy, momentum) and thermodynamics laws.
For humans, on the other hand, I draw a parallel timeline between human history and our brain evolution to show when and how we embarked on a denatured evolutionary path, which relies on self-reinforcing (as opposed to nature’s self-correcting) feedback loops that constantly lead to imbalance, disease, disorder, disparity and discord.
The following are excerpts from Chapter 1 of the book “$25,000 for a $2.95 Hot Dog”:
Our Prisons: $25,000 for a $2.95 Hot Dog!
As a species, our ability to ignore or bypass natural balancing mechanisms and feedback loops has helped us achieve economic growth in terms of GDP (gross domestic products). But in the long term, imbalance yields to a complex and unwieldy system, which is costly to the poor and rich alike because it means constant strain, socioeconomically and biologically. I provide real stories to reflect on the grotesque and cost-prohibitive system we have built and how imbalanced we have become as a species…
The roads to prison start years earlier from traumatized childhoods. Yet the resources we allocate to healing childhood trauma is not in balance with the money we spend on prisons.
The tragic story of Joe Ligon is one testimony to the bizarre, costly and ineffective system we have built. Joe was recently released from a Pennsylvania state prison 68 years after he was imprisoned at the age of 15. Eastern State Penitentiary, where he was once imprisoned, is now a museum and Halloween attraction. He abandoned school in the third grade and was illiterate when he was first arrested at age 15. His detention plus the legal court processes cost the human society an estimated $3.5 million (in today’s dollar value), a lot more than it would have cost to help his family raise him with a balanced lifestyle and good education.
Prisons across the world are packed and costly to maintain so in many places, despite the public outrage, prisons are handed over to private prison corporations that count prisoners as profitable labor and assets. Fifteen states in the US are now spending $27,000 more per person in prison than they spend per student in school. Some US states such as New York are now spending nearly $70,000 per year on each prisoner. That is more than twice the median income of an average American citizen outside the prison!
To see how imbalanced our priorities are, consider the recent arrest of a young, hungry man in the city of Nashville, Tennessee for snatching a $2.95 package of sausage from a local Walmart store. Interestingly, it costs the state around $25,000 a year (in addition to court costs) to keep him inside the prison if he is convicted. That is about the same amount of money that could feed and house him outside the prison and in dignity.
Another tragic story is of Ricky Jackson who once held the ignominious record for the person who served the longest time in the US penal system before he was proven innocent and released. He was convicted in 1975 for the murder of a white businessman in Cleveland, Ohio, based on the false testimony of a 12 year old boy. He spent 39 long years on death row before he was released in 2014 with the help of lawyers and law students from the Ohio Innocence Project. His detention plus legal fees cost the society an estimated $1.5 million (in today’s dollar value). When released from prison, Ricky Jackson said: “Prison in America is a business, inmates are just commodities. People are being exploited by the thousands, hundreds of thousands."
As we will see in chapter 7, there are now 36 million lawsuits filed in the United States each year and $650 billion spent on our civil, criminal and military justice systems. Prisons alone in the U.S. now generate about $10 billion a year in revenues. Private prisons alone are now an estimated $5 billion industry. According to Business Review at Berkeley, aside from the federal prison industry, state-run prisons generate millions in profits, making prison labor an industrial complex worth over $1 billion.
This is what an imbalanced (traumatized) society looks like. We spend way more resources on fighting and containing disorder than preventing imbalance. Imbalance is costly and ineffective yet as I will explain in chapter 7, we have evolved not only our bodies but also our economic systems based on deficits and imbalances and not on maintaining a balance.
In the rest of my book and my blogs, I connect our biology to our psychology and brain’s neurochemistry to show why our denatured evolutionary path has led to widespread imbalances both at the individual and social levels, which we respectively call disease and injustice.
I did not have the support of Big House publishers so as an independent scientist/author, I feel proud when I receive great reviews by independent readers like you. The following is an introduction to the book on Amazon, ranked as Hot New Release:
Why do humans walk a tightrope between depression and addiction (habituation), anxiety and recklessness? Why is it so hard to kick bad habits? Who do several countries now have Ministries of Loneliness to keep the social fabrics from falling apart? Why are humans so prone to self-delusion, self-deception, and forming mobs and cults?
Most of us know more about sports, politics, games, apps, and our jobs than about how our own brain and body work or get burned out together. For less than the cost of a family dinner, this is one of the few books in the market that can help us understand in simple language the complex nature of body-brain feedback loops as the common denominator of disorders and diseases (such as diabetes, depression, hypertension, weight gain, dementia, sleep disorders, constipation, infertility), and discords (fights, divorces, lawsuits, riots, wars). The author has spent two years to ingeniously draw from the latest discoveries in a wide range of disciplines: Neuroscience, evolution, biochemistry, psychology, economics, physics, philosophy, nutrition, and even mysticism to help us understand the cerebral root of fatigue and imbalance that plague human lives, rich and poor alike. This book is an essential simplified scientific “user manual” for our brain and body.
The world’s largest battles are fought inside human minds and today most of us suffer from abuse not by others but by our own brain. In this book, we learn about the neurochemical soup that makes our "economic" brain prone to "metabolic" imbalance and leads us to pursue unfettered growth. "The sky is the limit" thinking has constructed a world of winners, losers and barely anyone in between.
Prisons are a business - there is money to be made and when that is so, homo economicus will be ready.